Rome, Rome, Rome, immense Rome.
There is something that links me to this city. It can be dirty, degraded, inhospitable, polluted, muddled… but the colors that embrace you when you arrive are priceless.
I lived in Florence all my life, and Florence in the end is a medieval city. The narrow alleys, the dark, the dull colors. These ubiquitous browns. The gardens enclosed behind high walls. Lack of light in the old town, the muddy Arno river. I love my city, but the difference cannot be missed.
Rome is big, it is red and yellow, it's open, it's warm. And if you are lucky enough to visit in late summer or autumn, and this feeling amplifies thanks to its magical, golden light that sheds a warms up everything it finds.
Even the nights are different, here. There is another atmosphere. And sunsets, oh sunsets.
And what a sunset I saw when I was visiting the "secret" underground part of Caracalla. A special, really special trip, because this part it is not often open to the public. I could see it thanks to the very active Flumen association in Rome, which organized a two-hour guided evening tour.
Our guide, Barbara, very competent, took our group first to ride around the ancient walls, then we went down to the underground meanders and discovered another world ...
The first thing to know is that spa, for the Romans, was a cultural issue, besides being hygienic / sanitary.
Spas were the places where people meet, discuss, did business.. where power mingled with the mood of the common people: in fact many emperors used to go to the spa and mix with the rest of the population, even if they had private baths available. And the public baths were in the reach of everyone, even the least prosperous: they cost very little, the equivalent of half a loaf and a glass of wine.
The spa in question is the work of Emperor Caracalla, perhaps designed by his father Septimus Severo, and were built up to 215 dC. on Piccolo Aventino, one of the hills in the city. It was even necessary to shovel a large part of the hill to build the "base" of land on which the spas would rest. The Emperor also diverted a part of the Aqua Marcia aqueduct for the spa to have enough water.
It was a huge, huge, wealthy building, exposed to the southwest to enjoy the sun's light and heat for the most part of the day. It is said that there were huge windows, marble columns, mosaics, sculptures and rich decorations.
By walking through the ruins you get the idea of the grandeur of the place, but even with great imagination I believe that its magnificence cannot be perceived… what this complex really was at the time of its operation. Gardens, changing rooms, wardrobes, theaters, libraries, massage and depilatory rooms, gym. And like in all the spas of respect, the three areas to soak up: the frigidarium with cold water, the tepidarium with the warm water and the calidarium with the heated one, as well as the Natatio, a huge outdoor pool that today would be called Olympic pool.
The design of the thermal buildings was fairly regular and symmetrical between the right and left sides. At the center, the three "water" areas, with the Calidarium at the end of the path, circular plant environment that actually protrudes from the quadrangular plant on the south side.
Barbara talks enthusiastically about the meaning the Romans attributed to the spa: they are not something that only trains and reinvigorates the physical but completing a 360 degree well-being, which also includes the social and cultural part of life.
I cannot imagine 15-meter-high rooms decorated with precious marbles and mosaics, while thousands (literally) of people walk through them. Athletes competing in sports and playing with the ball, riches and poors depilating (tweezers, now like then!), Gentlemen doing the sauna as they talk about business, wealthy and more wealthy who preserve their valuables in the cloakroom sheltering from thieves, women talking in the Tepidarium, an entire world that swims, cleanses, dives, speaks, plays, converses, gossips.
Men and women were first separated (they went to the spa on alternate days or times), then, over time, the spas use was allowed in the same environments and times (Then, the tittle-tattle city life was enriched: I wonder what could happen in the various rooms, with heartache for the fans of modest life.
But who did all the work?
"As above so down," our friend Ermete Trismegisto said (https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ermete_Trismegisto)
and in the case of the Spas, "what is up there exists thanks to what is below".
With the continuation of the visit it became clear that under the spa floor, there is a whole and speculative world, which allows that out of the ground to work.
An enormous platoon of workers (mostly slaves, but also skilled workers) as ants arranges thermal life, cuts wood, lighting fires, running ovens, supplying the upper environments of materials, and supply the underground ones with food and everything that was needed to keep the work force active.
In the huge underground could enter horse-drawn (at one of the entrances there are still remains of a roundabout for traffic) which transported various materials but mainly firewood that was thrown into huge furnaces and which allowed water heating through cavities in the floor (Hypocaust). The hot air from the furnace was conveyed to the upper rooms not only by passing it under the floor but also through other hinges on the walls. It took a long time to heat up water and walls, but once it was set, it was hot. A really ingenious method, and if you want to see a video to make the concept more clear click here Eng
Walking on those stones, thinking about how many years they've been there, trampled, used. What they saw, what they witnessed. It looks like something too big to digest. These situations always leave me in a state of grace. Objects surviving while hundreds of thousands of lives have not. Man's work survives on man itself.
After wandering between these thoughts and the underground corridors with Barbara’s very nice explanations… as if it had fallen from the sky (or sprouted from the bowels of the earth), round a corner ... puf! An apple appears. A huge apple. An enormous marble apple.
Contemporary italian artist Michelangelo Pistoletto wanted to speak here of original sin and hope. Not everything is lost, he says.
Well I hope it too :)