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| Cobbled main street of Ostia Antica |
If the Coliseum is the Metropolitan Opera of ruins, Ostia
Antica is Minneapolis.
Ostia Antica is an ancient Roman city along the Tiber River
not far from Luciana’s home, and at one time Rome’s port on the Mediterranean
Sea. Unlike the Coliseum—or the Met—it wasn’t a special place where emperors and privileged citizens went to
see performances, it was a working city where people went about their everyday
business.
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| Ruins of houses and shops along the main drag in Ostia Antica |
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| Poppies among the ruins in Ostia Antica |
We pulled into a small parking lot where perhaps ten cars
were parked, paid a modest admission, and began wandering along a road paved
with smoothed basalt cobbles. On either side were the remaining walls of brick
homes and shops, and an occasional column or statue.
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| Mosaic floor in the bath complex |
In the middle of the town we came to a two-story building and climbed a restored flight of stairs to the upper level. Looking down upon the
surrounding structures, we could see elaborate black and white mosaics. These
had lined the pools and changing rooms of a public bath complex.
Shortly beyond that was an amphitheater, still very much
intact (and used for concerts yet today, Luciana told us.)
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| Ostia Antica's amphitheater, still in use |
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| Gauss and Luciana take a rest in the amphitheater |
We walked on past a wide plaza where civic buildings once
stood, to the ruins of a fish market. There, among the half-walls, was a mosaic
floor depicting fish and fisherman, a marble trough that would at one time have
contained water where live fish were kept, and a marble table. It didn’t take
much imagination to picture the proprietor pulling a fish from the trough,
filleting it on the table, and handing it to a customer. This would have
happened nearly 2000 years ago, but it could have happened yesterday.
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| The marble trough and table of the fish market |
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| Another view—the fish mosaics show up a little better here |
Ostia Antica isn’t on every traveler’s bucket list the way
the Sistine Chapel or the Roman Forum might be, but it was an intimate
connection to the eternal city, a wonderful way to finish our time in Rome.
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