Beyond the Trevi Fountain: The ancient Roman’s guide to the secret gems hidden among the tourist sites

Visitors to Rome routinely take in all the usual sights of the city’s ancient past, from the Forum to the Pantheon and the Colosseum to the Palatine Hill. But for my money, it’s the traces and stories of the lives of the ordinary Romans that provide the real colour.

Just outside the Porta Maggiore is an incongruous sight. A prominent tomb shaped like a stack of bins for kneading dough stands surrounded by modern streets, silent among the racket from the modern traffic that churns around it.

This was the burial place of a successful freedman (libertus) called Eurysaces who lived in 1BC. Eurysaces had a sense of humour. “It is obvious this is the tomb of Marcus Vergilius Eurysaces, baker, contractor”, proclaims the inscription. The tomb is thus an elaborate joke, hence the substitution of dough bins for the usual cremation urns. Apparently, not in the least despondent at the thought of his death, Eurysaces had made a small fortune from his nearby bakery business on a state contract for supplying grain dole and was keen for everyone to know it.

The tomb towered over the endless cavalcade of carts, animals and pedestrians that entered and exited the ancient city on either side.

For the most part the lives of the ancient Romans, whatever their class, were short and harsh. The inhabitants of Rome, perpetually on the move in and out through the gates and packing the streets and public facilities, were dwarfed by the buildings.

Pedestrians were deafened by the clatter of iron-rimmed cartwheels on the lumpen volcanic boulders of road surfaces and were scattered on all sides to make way for the rich. “Only the wealthy get to sleep in Rome”, complained the poet Juvenal about the noise.

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The sun was barely able to creep down the narrowest alleys beside which most Romans lived, only briefly illuminating the dirt, peeling plaster and filthy streets while casting fleeting shafts of light into tenement apartments and shops and onto streetside shrines.

Nearby that same sun burnished the glittering temples of the Forum, with their garishly painted statues of the gods, the emperors, and other greats, as well as the spoils of war. The air was fouled by countless furnaces, sacrificial fires and lamps, and the senses ravaged by the commotion and noise.

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Martial, another poet, wrote an epigram moaning about noisy schoolmasters, the clinking of coins on the money-changer’s table, and even the racket when pots and pans were bashed together at night during a lunar eclipse to ward off evil spirits.

Rome’s backstreets were lined with apartment blocks where men like Martial lived. Part of one survives at the base of the Capitoline Hill, beside the steps to the church of Santa Maria Aracoeli. The ancient street frontage featured individual shops and upstairs residences, just as in the modern city. Tourists hurtle past in coaches or on foot and scarcely notice this fragment of the real ancient Rome.

If you want to get an even better sense of the ancient city, hop on the Linea B metro to Piramide and then walk across to the Lido di Ostia trains (your metro ticket, whether single journey or all day, is good for both) and head out to the peaceful ruins of the port of Rome at Ostia.

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Here you can walk along Roman roads past tombs and into the maze of back streets, houses, apartment blocks, collegia used by the commercial guilds, baths, temples of gods as varied as Jupiter and Mithras, and even a latrine at the Forum Baths. Patrons sat around three sides of the building relieving themselves through the keyhole openings in the marble benches, doubtless while chewing over the day ahead or just done. Ostia also has several uncta popinae, “greasy cookshops” that once were everywhere in Rome.

Around 89BC a magistrate Asellio revived an ancient law prohibiting the levying of interest on loans. While Asellio was sacrificing at the Temple of Castor and Pollux he was attacked by an irate moneylender and then a mob of his cronies. Asellio fled into a nearby tavern but was set on by the gang and had his throat cut, to the dismay of diners who must have lost their appetites.

To escape the racket of modern Rome, catch a bus to the Via Appia Antica outside the Baths of Caracalla and walk south past the Tomb of Cecilia Metella. The ruins of the ancient tombs that lined the streets radiating out of the city begin to appear.

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But this was also where a celebrated raven was buried. He lived at a cobbler’s in the Temple of Castor and Pollux, three columns of which survive in the Forum, and chanted out names of members of the imperial family. He attracted trade, much to the annoyance of a rival cobbler who killed him. The Roman people, horrified at this monstrous act, formed a huge procession to carry the bird to his grave on the Via Appia.

Guy de la Bédoyère is a historian and writer. His book ‘Populus. Living and Dying in the Wealth, Smoke and Din of Ancient Rome’ is published by Abacus on 4 April