Botticelli Blue Skies: An American in Florence

47. The Mosaics and Karaoke Bars of Ostia Antica

A day in the country (and out of the congestion of Rome) is a balm, a benediction, a blessing. The bus delivers us to the seaport town of Ostia Antica, about fifteen miles outside of Rome. Once a bustling city center, Ostia now lies in ruins among trees and tall grasses brushed by fragrant, fresh winds blowing inland from the Mediterranean Sea. The students burst from the bus singing. They remind me of zoo animals allowed outside on the first temperate spring day after being confined in their cages all winter. They whoop, they holler, they swing from the branches of the trees like monkeys, they do somersaults and headstands, they play leapfrog, they hug one another, they do wild, unrestrained dances of joy. The moment Nicoletta buys tickets for the group and we enter the grounds (still empty because of the early hour), the students disperse to the first visible ruin, originally an amphitheater, now a rubble of bricks, broken columns, cracked stones, and high jagged walls. They arrange themselves around it as if enacting a ballet. Some leap upon the edges of the walls, some jump upon the columns , others climb into what must have been a fountain. Two of them, Phil and Sara, the ones I am now sure are lovers, the ones who at Halloween sat talking on the bed in the light of the Duomo’s glow, take each 244 47 The Mosaics and Karaoke Bars of Ostia Antica other by the hand and climb up to the highest point of the wall around the arena. Nicoletta warns them to be careful. She has heard of students who have fallen from that height and have had to be airlifted home by ambulance . In silhouette, the lovers seem majestic and mythical to me, she tall and thin in a long black dress and he even taller, handsome as she is beautiful, a prince and a princess surveying their kingdom to come. They fling their arms toward the sky as if supplicating the gods, or thanking them that they are here, young, strong of limb, and free to court and adore each other under the sun in the Italian countryside. Or so it seems to me, who would also like to fly to the top of that wall and look far over this ancient creation, testimony to other souls who once walked here, laughed here, and lived here. There is something undeniably sad about the vast silence and absence of movement as far as we can see. More than anywhere else I have been in Italy, I feel the immediacy of time past here, of real lives lived and deaths died. Though Ostia is said to have been a city of poor people—laborers, sailors, fishermen, shopkeepers, and fishmongers, as well as those who transferred materials from seagoing vessels to smaller boats on their way to Rome via the Tiber River—it seems, as we begin to walk along its rocky paths, to reveal itself as a sun-drenched resort. The community boasted a lighthouse, a tavern, wine shops, a public forum, theaters, a synagogue, and temples of worship, not to mention the elegant and elaborate bath houses, each comprising the calidarium (the hot baths), the frigidarium (the cold baths), the laconicum (the steam baths), and the apodyterium (the dressing rooms in the thermae , the edifice containing the baths). Below the baths are elaborate mazes of channels and pipes, to bring water to the baths and then to drain it, as well as places for the furnaces and boilers required to heat the water. Our students spread out in all directions, now and then passing us on a path or calling to us from over the broken walls of a domus (a Roman villa) to say we must not miss seeing the latrines, those amazing rows of stones with holes in them. (They wonder whether the Romans Botticelli Blue Skies 245 used the bathrooms as a social meeting place!) Have we discovered the huge earthen pots that once held oil? And we must be sure to see the tombs and the columbaria where the ashes of the dead were stored in terra-cotta containers. Our students have suddenly become mini-anthropologists, creeping over and under mysterious structures, conjecturing about the uses of various artifacts, holes, and hiding places, musing on symbols and icons. They seem, finally, to be interested in Italian history, as if some...