In celebration of Halloween week, we’ve written a series of articles dedicated to Spooky Rome. If you’ve missed our earlier missives, which covered such topics as ancient Roman ghosts and ghost stories, raising demons in the Colosseum, and the bone-encrusted Capucin church, we invite you to indulge your inner ghoul by clicking back to those articles.
Today our daily dose of haunting comes from the Middle Ages, an era in which superstitious beliefs about Rome’s ancient past thrived in the Eternal City. Among the more interesting medieval speculations was the idea that the oculus (or hole) in the dome of the Pantheon had been created in 609 AD, at the very moment that the ancient Roman temple was consecrated and became a Christian church. Christian Romans speculated that the act of consecration had terrified resident pagan spirits, causing them to knock a perfectly circular hole in the building’s dome as they took hurried flight from their long-established home.
The Remorse of Nero by John William Waterhouse. 1878. Private collection.
Another medieval legend suggested that the city was still haunted by the restless spirit of the Roman Emperor Nero. Students of Roman history will remember that it was Nero who ruled the city when the Great Fire of 64 AD broke out in the area of the Circus Maximus and burned for six days, destroying about 2/3 of Rome in the process. Once the fire ended, Romans declared that its cause was an act of arson perpetuated by slaves of Nero. To counter their accusations, Nero accused the Christians of having started the fire, and punished this new religious group by staging the first persecution in the 60s AD.
Medieval Romans believed that Nero’s soul could not rest easy on account of his anti-Christian actions and that his malevolent ghost haunted the area near his pyramid-shaped tomb (now called Piazza del Popolo). There, a walnut tree that grew on the tomb was home to a flock of ravens. Superstitious Romans believed that the ravens had been sent by the devil to torment Nero, thereby making his ghost restless.
Spurred to action by popular demand, Pope Pascal II (1099-1118) exorcised the area by chopping down a walnut tree that had grown over Nero’s tomb, throwing the tomb into the river, and building a church on the site. Today that church (since rebuilt by Pope Sixtus IV in 1472) is called Santa Maria del Popolo and exorcism of Nero’s ghost is depicted in an gilded stucco image on the right of the chancel arches.
We at Eternally Cool have little doubt that Nero’s ghost is still roaming the city and we’re always hoping for a sighting. While we wait, we like to get our Nero fix by watching the ultra-campy Quo Vadis, a film made by MGM in 1951. Directed by Mervyn LeRoy and produced by Sam Zimbalist, the movie is adapted from the classic 1895 novel Quo Vadis by Henryk Sienkiewicz. It stars Robert Taylor, Deborah Kerr, Leo Genn, Peter Ustinov, while Sophia Loren has an extra’s role as a slave girl in one of her first film appearances. Elizabeth Taylor also has a cameo.
The film tells the story of a Roman military commander, Marcus Vinicius (Robert Taylor), returning from the wars, who falls in love with a devout Christian, Lygia (Deborah Kerr). Commander Vinicius becomes intrigued by her and her religion. Their love story is told against the broader historical background of early Christianity and its persecution by Nero (Peter Ustinov).
And, when Quo Vadis just isn’t enough and we’re in need of a real Nero fix, we turn to that fabulous 1960s series, The Time Tunnel, and in particular the episodes called “Visitors from the Stars” and “Ghost of Nero,” in which Doug and Tony encounter the Emperor’s specter:
Visitors from the Stars: The aliens land near Mullins, Arizona in 1885 in search of protein sources. Doug’s mind is taken over by the aliens. When Tony breaks the alien’s control device, Doug’s mind is restored. Aliens investigating the disappearance of their spaceship in 1885 appear at the Time Tunnel. They depart after seeing the spaceship leaving on the Time Tunnel’s projector. Cliffhanger: Tony and Doug arrive near the Italian-Austrian Alps during World War I; an explosion knocks them out and uncovers Nero’s sarcophagus; a sword floats out of the sarcophagus.
Ghost of Nero: Tony and Doug are uninjured. It is 23 October 1915 at the villa of Count Galba. The ghost of Nero seeks revenge on the Galba family. The ghost comes through the Time Tunnel to the present, but it is sent back. Tony and Doug meet a corporal Mussolini, who becomes possessed by the ghost of Nero. Cliffhanger: Tony and Doug arrive at the tent of Joshua who believes that their arrival has been prophesied.
What are these guys doing traveling through time? Determined to prove that Project Tic Toc was capable of sending humans through time, Dr. Tony Newman and Dr. Doug Phillips entered the project’s time tunnel before final tests were completed. Now, caught in time and unable to return home, the two scientists battle to stay alive as the Vortex of Time thrusts them into the middle of some of the most significant events in world history. But even more important, as the time travelers encounter famous and influential people of the past, they must make sure their actions don’t inadvertently change history and alter the future.
