No one knows for sure what the abandoned and ruined monuments of ancient Rome looked like in the sixth through thirteenth centuries, as the once magnificent buildings of Rome at its zenith gradually deteriorated under the relentless toll of neglect, marauding barbarians, recurrent wars, weather, Tiber flooding, encroaching vegetation, major earthquakes, and—above all—demolition by the city’s remaining inhabitants. Although warring noble families of the Middle Ages gutted ancient monuments as they carved out their towers and fortresses, the despoliation of the city started many centuries earlier, ironically by the ancients themselves. For example, by the mid-fourth century, the portico of the Theater of Marcellus, built by Augustus and a major venue for plays for over 300 years, was being used as a stone quarry to repair the nearby Ponte Cestia, the ancient bridge connecting Tiber Island to the city. When imperial edicts finally closed the temples in the late 300s, the decline of the city’s pagan monuments began in earnest. However, the emperors issued ambiguous declarations as to how these empty marble edifices should be treated: on one hand the emperors commanded that they should be left intact and not violated, but on the other hand they said that under certain circumstances--for example, when they were “beyond repair” (exactly what this meant was never specified)--they could be used by the Church, which either set up places of worship in some of them or plundered columns, architraves, bricks, and marble facings for new churches.

 

By 500, when Rome was under the rule of the enlightened Gothic king Theodoric, his advisor Cassiodorus, one of the last of the ancient Romans, strived to preserve the last dying embers of late ancient Roman culture and civilization. A stateman, historian, and later in life a monk, Cassiodorus bemoaned the vandalism of Rome’s monuments by its inhabitants. The two bronze elephants on the Via Sacra were “falling into ruin…Their crumbling limbs should be strengthened by iron hooks and their drooping bellies supported by masonry.” Cassiodorus likewise lamented the looting of bronze statues throughout Rome, writing “…nor are [the statues] mute, the ringing sound they give forth under the blows of thieves wakes the dozing watchman.” The sadness in his words is palpable, and unable to halt the dismemberment of Rome’s marble monuments, he retired to his monastery on the Ionian Sea, where his monks systematically recorded and preserved precious ancient manuscripts, both pagan and Christian, setting the example for numerous other monastic communities across Europe, a legacy of incalculable value.

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As for how the landscape of Rome devolved over the centuries, we have only a few historical clues. For example, we know that in the early seventh century the Forum was still in use: in 610, what was left of the Senate erected in the Forum a memorial column to honor the Byzantine emperor Phocas who had given the Pantheon to the Bishop of Rome to use as a church. This column, which almost certainly was an ancient one that had been expropriated for the occasion, was based on the original floor of the Forum, the ground level over the ensuing centuries gradually rising to bury half of it—in the early nineteenth century, Lord Byron described it as “a nameless column with a buried base.” When in 667 the Byzantine emperor Constans II stopped by Rome on a military expedition—he was the last emperor to visit the city—he was put up in the Imperial Palace on the Palatine, and in 685 there was still a curator of the palace, named Plato, who was recorded as having repaired the monumental marble staircase of the imperial abode. In fact, Plato’s son, Pope John VII (705-707 A.D.), had planned to establish some sort of episcopal residence in part of the imperial palace, and perhaps he even intended to move his residence from the Lateran Palace to the Palatine, a plan which never came to fruition since he died after only two years in the papacy. So, it would appear that even in the early 700s, the Palace of the Caesars was still livable, or at least salvageable. After that, not much else is known about the once imposing residence on the Palatine Hill. We do know that by the turn of the new millennium, the Holy Roman Emperor Otto III (980-1002 A.D.), who dreamed of reviving the ancient Roman Empire, either built his palace on the Aventine or planned to build it on the Palatine, either possibility implying that by then the Palace of the Caesars had fallen on very hard times.

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The Church was a major culprit in dismantling many ancient buildings—rare is a Roman church founded more than seven centuries ago that doesn’t have antique columns with accompanying capitals and marble paneling carted off from a nearby ancient edifice—but there were also several churches directly built into ancient temples, usually in the very early Middle Ages, thereby preserving these structures for us to marvel at today. Probably the most impressive of these buildings is the Pantheon, which was changed to a church with minimal alterations and is largely intact from the second century. The massive second century Temple of Antoninus and Faustina, with its gargantuan 56-foot columns crowned by Corinthian capitals, still towers over the Forum because it was converted to a church in the seventh or eighth century. Just a few steps away is a preserved circular temple from the early 300s—the bronze door is original (and the lock still works!), as are the two porphyry columns at the entrance; it avoided destruction when it became the atrium to the adjacent Basilica of Cosma and Damiano in the early 500s. Opposite Santa Maria in Cosmedin, in what was once the cattle market of ancient Rome, two small temples dating from the second or third century B.C. were also converted to churches in the early Middle Ages and appear today much as they did when the area was clogged with livestock and customers of all ranks. There are other instances in the city where transformation into churches saved ancient buildings from despoliation and decay.

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But what about the vast bulk of ancient Rome which, unlike the Imperial Palace and the few buildings that had churches built into them, had no ostensible use with the end of paganism and the depopulation of the city over the centuries—the mansions, the baths, the public buildings, the innumerable temples with their porticos, bronzes, and statues? The historical record is largely silent, primarily because people in the Middle Ages weren’t concerned with preserving, or even acknowledging, the architectural and artistic legacy of ancient Rome—just staying alive from plague, famine, and warfare, while tending to their immortal souls through the Church, was their priority. A few sketchy drawings by visitors to Rome in the fourteenth and  fifteenth centuries showed a landscape dotted by dozens of churches and defensive towers while showing only a few of the larger ancient structures such as the Colosseum, the Castel San Angelo (the mausoleum of Hadrian), and the Pantheon; it is safe to assume that in between the churches, towers, and remaining ancient monuments were huts and hovels that had been built into and around the ruins of once grand ancient edifices. The eighteenth-century artist and engraver Giovanni Piranesi popularized the romantic idealization of Rome in ruins, overgrown by vegetation, crumbling but still retaining classical authority and elegance. However, as lovely and evocative as his prints are, Piranesi took great liberty with his ancient subjects, adding embellishments and fabricating many details, and many tourists of the time who traveled to Rome with his renditions in mind were disappointed with the real thing. The Italian government’s fervor in uncovering and restoring Rome’s ruins in the early twentieth century—many private homes, churches, and businesses were torn down and swept away in the process—has given us greater appreciation of what ancient Rome once looked like.

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But for areas such as the ancient Fora Boarium and Holitorium—the cattle and vegetable markets--where temples, porticos, and arches were packed next to one another, we must use our imaginations to visualize their gradual devolution from shining monuments of Hellenic aesthetics to heaps of Medieval rubble. Conjure up a late summer afternoon in the late ninth century in these Fora, which four centuries earlier were heaving with human activity but by the late 800s were eerily empty, baking in the hot summer sun, the ruins imbued with a deeply golden hue. There is an all-pervasive air of ennui, of terminal inertia, a sense that time has stood still, the sepulchral silence punctuated by the cries of seagulls lazily floating overhead. Depending upon recent rains, the roar of the nearby Tiber might be discernable, or there might even be areas of flooding. There is no human activity—the meager population remaining in Rome is cowering in mean shacks and fortresses built into ruins in the old Campus Martius area, in the bend of the Tiber where the Pantheon still stands. Most people—hungry, superstitious, lice-ridden--try to stay out of the way of periodic invaders picking at the bones of Rome, as well as the incessantly warring families carving out their fortifications in the larger ruins. Both rich and poor alike cling to the Church for succor and protection, despite the violent and convoluted papal politics frequently convulsing the city—the history of the papacy back then was far from inspiring as bickering families sought to put one of their own on the Chair of St. Peter. But the Fora Boarium and Holitorium lie at the beginning of the disabitato, the wide swath of Rome that had been abandoned centuries earlier, not to be reclaimed for another nine hundred years. The pavement of the Fora, or what is left of it after recurrent flooding from the Tiber, is cracked and broken, with parts of it already under the river's muddy sludge—as the countless centuries pass, the ground level will rise considerably, and any part of the original pavement still intact will be covered under many feet of dirt. The other parts of the pavement still remaining have large shrubs and small trees growing out of it, and here and there are small ponds of stagnant water, the malarial mosquitoes swarming over it. The roofs of the temples in the Fora have long since collapsed, and the once grand marble staircases are chipped, crumbling, and overgrown with grass and shrubs, which further accelerate their disintegration. The doors to the cella of the temples—the small inner sanctuary where the image of the god was kept—have been torn down centuries ago, both for any bronze and to strip away whatever else of value might have once been inside. Recurrent earthquakes—there were major ones in 801 and 847—have toppled many of the temples’ columns and collapsed the elegant porticos connecting the temples and arches, their architraves and capitals, many with elaborate ornamentations, having crashed to the ground, splintering into pieces. The columns that are still standing seem forlorn and vulnerable, waiting for the next earthquake to undo them or for a band of clerical scavengers to cart them off for this or that church. In the distance, high atop the nearby Capitoline Hill, the once majestic temples to Jupiter and Juno have been reduced to a few rows of standing columns, which in a few centuries will have all fallen into rubble—to an ancient Roman, the starkness of this scene at the once holy of holies of the empire would be akin to someday in the future seeing the dome of St. Peter’s, or the Capitol in Washington, D.C., semi-collapsed and overgrown with vegetation. Although a few elegant sculptures are standing here and there in the Fora, most of the marble statues of gods and emperors that once graced the temples—on their pediments or at the entranceways—lie strewn in pieces on the pavement or stairs, their muscular limbs, toga-clad torsos, and handsome heads crowned with laurels of victory now mute and fractured testimony to glory that has long ago passed. Soon, many of the statues still intact, along with the amputated body parts and fragments, will be hauled away to the lime kilns for mortar for housing. On the fronts of those temples, porticos, and arches that are still standing are grandiloquent inscriptions by the consuls, senators, and emperors who erected, renovated, and rebuilt them. Except for the names of the emperors, almost no one has heard of the other notables, the once great and mighty of Rome. Here and there, either still standing intact or strewn on the ground, are marble statues of these once important men, their august faces conveying a timeless serenity, a confident assurance of the eternity of Rome.

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Percy Shelly’s poem to the passing of glory, Ozymandias, could just as well been written about the abandoned Fora Boarium and Holitorium of the ninth century: 

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I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said—‘Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.’

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Indeed, “colossal wreck” would also describe Rome in the early Middle Ages, and the tableau of ruination we have imagined for the Fora Boarium and Holitorium stretched for many miles around, involving once gleaming imperial fora, immense thermal baths, numerous triumphal arches, scores of commemorative columns, thousands of abodes ranging from tenement apartment buildings for the poor to luxurious mansions, and, of course, almost too many temples to count. Hill after hill and valley after valley were carpeted with similarly rotting ruins, forlorn statues and their fragments, solitary columns, and on and on, all quietly baking in the hot Italian sun and most soon to be reduced to rubble and buried over the ensuing centuries.

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Constantinople, the “Second Rome” founded by Constantine the Great in 330, also eventually fell into ruination, and when Sultan Mehmed II entered the city in triumph in 1453 with his Ottoman army, he found the imperial palace ruined and abandoned, its once great pavilions, audience halls, and gardens crumbling. As he wandered through the colossal wreck of the palace, he allegedly whispered a quote from the Persian poet, Saadi:

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“The spider weaves the curtains in the palace of the Caesars,
The owl calls the watches in the towers of Afrasiab.”

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It was a doleful epitaph equally applicable to Rome in the early Middle Ages, but it is doubtful that any of the kings, barbarian chieftains, or other invaders who triumphantly entered Rome and passed through the gargantuan remains of the city mouthed such an eloquent sentiment.