"Trajan's Markets"

One item on my quite short list of Attractions that I wanted to see on this trip was the museum of ancient Roman archaeology known as “Trajan’s Market.” It was under construction in the 1990s when I passed by it a number of times, but since its opening in 2007 I have not previously had the opportunity to visit it.

It has become known that was not a market but, possibly, administrative offices for the Emperor Trajan. Where you enter, it looks like a single building, and the way that section displays some of the interesting finds from the excavations is in the mold of traditional museums. But it’s not just that one section, it’s a huge area where the ruins have been unearthed and reconstructed to varying degrees from a complex that was probably built in 100-110 A.D. by Trajan’s preferred architect, Apollodorus of Damascus. Wikipedia says, “During the Middle Ages the complex was transformed by adding floor levels, still visible today, and defensive elements such as the...’militia tower’ built in 1200.” That tower is visible in the photo above. A convent built in the same area in the 16th century was demolished early in the 20th century when the restoration of the area as Trajan’s Markets began.

There are a lot of areas that we walked through, and some that we didn’t get to, and we really wouldn’t be able to identify for sure which areas we saw were concert halls and which were taverns, but I had read a review that said that in one particular area of the ruins both sides of an ancient street had been reconstructed so well that one could imagine that a centurion or a senator might just pop out of a doorway at any moment. I wanted to see that street, and though we asked advice for finding it from several different museum staff people in different areas, and climbed and descended many quite long and steep staircases between the various levels, nobody knew what I was talking about or could help us achieve it. In retrospect, this picture, of the Via Biberatica, looks as though it might be what the reviewer was referring to; I didn’t get that feeling while I was there, but I think this must have been the place. Anyway, we tried, and in the process we saw a lot of quite interesting stuff.

Bronze sculptures are often interesting to me, so, for example, this little head of the Stoic philosopher Chrysippus (of whom, not having studied philosophy, I had never heard), I thought was quite lovely. It’s about six inches high. Chrysippus died in 206 B.C.E. at the age of 73.

Also, this larger-than-life-size foot has been identified to, I guess, everybody’s satisfaction, as belonging to a large sculpture of Nike, based on its similarity to the pose of Nike on a coin, photos of which accompany the foot, as well as this sketch of what the large sculpture may have looked like. It put me in mind of a section of the delightful 1932 spoof And Now All This, W.C. Sellar and R.J. Yeatman’s sequel to their first delightful spoof, 1066 and All That: A Memorable History of England, Comprising All the Parts You Can Remember (etc.--the subtitle goes on and on), originally published in 1930 and still in print. And Now All This covers all the other aspects of English learning besides History, which had been well covered by the first book, and in its section on Archaeology there are fanciful pictures showing how archaeologists had reconstructed a large and complex sculpture—multi-figure, I think—based solely upon two small fragments which were said to be a big toe and an elbow; next to that image is “Much Better Reconstruction by the Authors,” wherein the big-toe piece becomes a nose and the elbow goes somewhere else comical, I don’t remember where. I recommend both volumes, though the first is better overall.

I also want to mention that when we started out looking for this museum, on foot, as we had just lunched at a restaurant in Trastevere very near the Palatine Bridge over to the area of the various Fora and their excavations, we were not quite sure of its exact name or address. I had written them down earlier but failed to bring that particular piece of paper along with me. So at a certain point we began asking for directions. Outside an office building two men were talking, so I asked them, and they eventually decided where it was, but that it was not possible to walk that far. They said we must take a bus, and when I said we didn’t have bus tickets, they told us where the nearest shop was where we could buy tickets. We said we were sure we could walk, but they (looking at us and the color of our hair) were sure we couldn’t. Suffice it to say that we did, and reconstruction of the route (passing the Victor Emmanuel II Monument, also known as the Altar of the Fatherland) from online maps shows it to have been less than a mile.