Well one "Magic Door" and a gate...okay, an arch. Trying to make our time in Rome count (I was working the last time I was in Rome) we headed off to find a couple of rather obscure sites near the hotel.
Piazza Vittorio (Emanuelle II, but apparently usually just refered to as Piazza Vittorio) just southwest of Santa Maria Maggiore. This square was created during the late 19th century after the unification of Italy. Typically they were trying to tidy up the city by demolishing great swaths of medieval buildings and replacing them with rather insipid neoclassical apartment buildings.
For many years this was an open market, which from what I heard only recently moved a few blocks away to covered territory. I have to say it had the air of an abandoned funfair, with an area of kiddie rides making strange music, lots of gravel, and of course being winter it was dark already.
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| Creepy statues of Bes and "Magic Door" |
I did have a reason for wanting to see the park, well two, first an unusual "Magic door" that was originally one of several gates to the villa of Massiminio Palombara, Marquis of Pietraforte. Apparently the villa was built here in the late 17th Century and was covered with inscriptions in Latin, Hebrew and other languages. Seems like someone was an alchemist with money to build a secretive villa (that just now happens to be in the center of Rome), that would be so cool!
The statues flanking the door are actually not original though they are ancient...que? The story goes that the statues are actually from the local temple of Isis (they most certainly do look like the Egyptian god Bes) and that they were set up here since the villa was demolished. To add to the creepy circus of the damned atmosphere the only photograph I got of the magic door is all grainy and spooky. Woooooo...spooky.
There is also a huge ruin of some sort of fountain thing (says Wikipedia). The magic door ties into a couple of legends and famous people that I am already very familiar with, the Voynich manuscript was housed here and the Marquis attended the exiled court of the slightly loopy Queen Christina of Sweden. The same Queen Christina that got Descartes killed and then abdicated, became a Catholic and moved to Rome.
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| Arch of Gallienus, Via San Vito |
Somewhere near here on the Via San Vito, there is a triumphal arch. The arch of Gallienus. This one wedged between a couple of buildings. For some reason this rather excites me. It’s just a few blocks south east of Santa Maria Maggiore. It looks extraordinarily well preserved. Apparently it was built in 262 by a private citizen with the highly auspicious name: Marcus Aurelius Victor (oooh innit fancy, toffee-nosed git). Good ol' boy Marcus dedicated this arch to the the Emperor Gallienus probably some time after his father (Emperor Valerian, yeah like that herb that stinks) was captured by Shapur I of Persia. Originally it had a big arch in the center (the surviving one) and two smaller flanking arches, much like the ones that are found in Roman satellite cities in North Africa and Asia Minor. Eventually the side arches were torn down. Didn't get a great picture but as the holiday strobe lights washed over the arch I couldn't help think about Gallienus living the life, having triumphal arches built for him by private citizens, while his father spent the rest of his days as a humon mounting block for Shapur I. I once read that the Persians had the skin flayed off the former emperor, dyed, stuffed and hung in a palace where they could show him off to visiting Roman ambassadors. That might be fiction, though it sounds cool to write about.
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