Review of International American Studies FEATURES RIAS Vol. 11, Spring–Summer № 1/2018 ISSN 1991–2773 WALLS THAT BRIDGE Or, What We Can Learn from the Roman Walls The AureliAn WAlls As “AnchorAge” Giorgio Mariani RIAS Editor-in-Chief If you google the words “Aurelian walls,” right after the cus- Università “Sapienza” di Roma tomary Wikipedia entries in both Italian and English, and a third Italy reference to the A View on Cities website, you will find a fourth listing titled “Aurelian Walls Taxi Question” with a link to a TripAd- visor page.1 There you can read the following: Hi everyone, I am trying to find out which territory is considered to be within the Aurelian wall. According to the airports’ website adr.it/web/aero- porti-di-roma-en-/pax-fco-taxi and Comune di Roma www.comune. roma.it/wps/portal/pcr… if you take a taxi from the airports (Fiumicino and Ciampino) to any address within the Aurelian walls the fee is fixed. So, I am trying to understand which parts of Rome are currently within the walls. This may seem a trivial question, but in fact it discloses an inter- esting truth. Even though in their everyday life contemporary Romans are unlikely to devote much of their thinking to the majesty of a more-than-seventeen-centuries-old wall, two thirds of which are still intact, the Aurelian walls continue in many ways to be central to the identity of the Eternal City. In a fascinating study of what she describes as three nodes of the “Network of Global Cities”—Città e Limes: Roma—Beijing—New York—Italian architect Anna Irene Del Monaco argues that: 1. I wish to thank S. Masturah Alatas for her careful reading of a previous draft of this essay. 63 the historical borders [limes] of cities are among the founding physical elements of all subsequent urban transformations. And therefore, urban walls, whether natural or artificial, having defined in the past the physi- cal and symbolical shape of the city, and having sustained their identity, are the place of modern transformations that reverberate in any subse- quent decision (“Introduzione,” my translation). Del Monaco is referring primarily to the way the urban development of what she describes as “anchored” cities (as opposed to the unan- chored megalopolis of a more recent history) has been influenced by the shape designed by their original limes, but she also helps us make sense of such a “subsequent decision” as that of setting a fixed fee for taxis running between the airport and any loca- tion within the Aurelian walls. Regardless of the actual distance from the airport, if the address you are trying to reach is within the perimeter of the walls—within the old centro storico of Rome, that is—you will pay a set fee (at the time of this writing, 40 euros). The Aurelian walls may no longer defend Romans—if they ever did—from the barbarians’ invasions, but they now defend both locals and tourists from being overcharged when they take a taxi from the airport to the city.2 Before I say something more on the continuing importance of the Aurelian walls to Rome’s identity, let me offer some basic information about the history of the city’s perimetral fortifica- tions. The Roman walls that still stand today began to be built Walls, under Emperor Aurelian in 271 A.D., as he was concerned with Material and Rhetorical: the threat posed by Germanic tribes pushing along the borders Past, Present, and Future of the Empire. For centuries, the military might of Rome had been such that no one felt the need for a protective wall. Imperial Rome 2018 had long outgrown the older, fourth century B.C. Republican Wall, / 1 also known as Mura Serviane, after the king Servio Tullio, the one № who, according to tradition, erected the walls to replace the much older Mura Romulee, a quadrangular structure covering 285 hectars, named after Romulus, the mythical founder of Rome, in 753 B.C. As you can see from the map in fig. 1, though covering a much larger area, the Aurelian walls—the ones marked in black—are spring–summer , 11 2. Rome was sacked by the Visigoths in 410, by the Vandals in 455, ol. and by the Goths in 472. Then was again invaded by the Normans under v Robert Guiscard in 1084 and by the mutinous troops of Holy Roman Emperor rias Charles V in 1527. (“Sack of Rome”). 64 anchored (in del Monaco’s terminology) to the older Servian walls american studies review of international (marked in red), and move the limes of the old Republican city a bit further, by and large following the physical features of the terrain, as for example, with the river Tiber, on the left of the map. Giorgio Mariani RIAS Editor-in-Chief Università “Sapienza” di Roma Italy Figure 1: The Aurelian walls As attested by Plutarch’s description of the mythical founding of Rome by Romulus, the tracing of the city’s limes—the borders that preceded the erection of walls or palisades—was a liturgical act. Here is a relevant passage from Plutarch’s Parallel Lives: the founder, having shod a plough with a brazen ploughshare, and having yoked to it a bull and a cow, himself drove a deep furrow round the bou- ndary lines, while those who followed after him had to turn the clods, which the plough threw up, inwards towards the city, and suffer no clod to lie turned outwards. With this line they mark out the course of the wall, and it is called, by contraction, “pomerium,” that is, “post murum,” behind or next the wall. And where they purposed to put in a gate, there they took the share out of the ground, lifted the plough over, and left a vacant space. And this is the reason why they regard all the wall as sacred except the gates; but if they held the gates sacred, it would not be possible, without religious scruples, to bring into and send out of the city things which are necessary, and yet unclean. The walls marked a sacred line that could not be crossed, as opposed to the gates, those openings where things both clean and “unclean” 65 could go through without bringing disgrace to the city. It was forbidden to climb over the walls. The penalty for such an act, according to the jurist Pomponius, was capital punishment. Indeed, some sources suggest that Rhemus was killed precisely because he had dared murum trascendere: he had crossed the border traced by his brother Romulus (Rosada 366–68). However, while the Republican walls initially drew “a bound- ary that separates different territories and designates the city as a completely distinct physical place, different from, or even inimical to, the space outside,” later, “under the empire, the whole concept of separation began to lose its meaning with the massive expansion along the consular roads with their imperial and senato- rial country estates” (Del Monaco, Abstract, English in the original). Even when the Aurelian walls were built and Rome had perhaps two million inhabitants, only a part lived within the circuit of the Aurelian walls; afterwards the city began to shrink until in the darkest days of the middle ages, the population numbered little more than fifteen thousand, clustered near the Tiber, at some distance from the imperial city walls, from which they were separated by ancient abandoned ruins, orchards and mea- dows (Del Monaco, Abstract, English in the original). Though they could not always keep invaders at bay, the walls retained their primary defensive and military purpose until the Uni- Walls, fication of Italy and the annexation of Rome, in 1870, to the newly Material and Rhetorical: Past, Present, founded Kingdom of Italy. Thus, over a brief period, the walls went and Future from being a still-functional military structure to being romantically 2018 isolated from the modern context of the city, and very often dese- / 1 crated as obstacles to the spread of the infrastructure of the modern № city. Despite this, however, the role performed by the Roman city walls in the formation of the modern city has been significant and clearly visi- ble …. In fact, during the urban development of Rome, the new road systems, such as the Great Outer Ring Road, the railways, the city bypasses, all re-echo the circuit of the original Aurelian walls; even when increasingly distant, their layout and routes follow the radiocentric pat- tern and geography of the territory of Rome. (Del Monaco, Abstract, spring–summer , English in the original) 11 ol. v Simply put, as Del Monaco insists, the city’s limites are a place rias of both continuity and change. The identity of the city depends 66 on them, but it also grows out of them, moving further on, just american studies review of international as the Roman consular roads, originating from the Milliarium aureum, a “monument, probably of marble or gilded bronze, erected by the Emperor Caesar Augustus near the Temple of Saturn in the central Forum of Ancient Rome” (“Milliarium”; see fig. 2), reached out to the provinces, thereby redefining the character of Roman civilization. Giorgio Mariani RIAS Editor-in-Chief Università “Sapienza” di Roma Italy Figure 2: Milliarum Aureum These roads were of course instrumental to the building of the empire, and made possible the erection of further walls, from Northern Italy all the way to Hadrian’s Wall, to which I would like to come back at the end, as its history seems to support the idea that walls—viewed in a historical perspective—are about separat- ing territories and peoples as much as they are about connecting them.