The improvements which are being rapidly carried out, especially in the neighborhood of the Central Railway Station, supply us daily with discoveries, valuable artistically, scientifically, and geographically. It may be said that not one, but two Romes are being reconstructed at this moment – the modern, with its boulevards, squares, and churches; the ancient, with its temples, thermae, aqueducts and theaters.
Rodolfo Lanciani, Letter from Rome
The passage above, written on January 15, 1876, by the archaeologist Rodolfo Lanciani and published in The Athenaeum, an English journal of the fine arts, captures the spirit of excavation and modernization that characterized Rome in the late nineteenth century. Just six years earlier, the Eternal City had become the national capital of the newly united Italy, a position that granted it a political and civic prestige akin to that which it held as capital of the ancient Roman Empire.
As government offices and their associated civic servants crowded into the new capital, Rome experienced unparalleled growth – the population more than doubled in the years between 1870 and 1900 and continued to rise rapidly after the turn of the century. Such speedy growth demanded intense urban development: the city and its infrastructure were in dire need of expansion and modernization for many houses, roads, and sewers were at least several centuries old. Urban development was impossible in Rome, however, without conducting archaeological excavations upon the ancient, medieval, and early-modern ruins that lay below. Thus, in the decades following the unification of Italy, a great deal of archaeological activity accompanied urban transformation and growth.
Among the monuments to be excavated and studied in this time was an impressive tract of the Republican or “Servian” Wall on the Esquiline Hill. Running a course of about 100 meters and standing up to nine meters in height, the wall fragment is made of large tufa blocks, some of which still bear quarry-marks in the form of Greek letters. Late nineteenth-century excavators believed this tract to be part of the wall attributed by Livy (1.44) to Rome’s sixth king, Servius Tullius (578-535 BC). Despite the fact that this assumption has been disproved – the wall is constructed of a type of tufa available only in the Etruscan city of Veii and the quarries from which its massive blocks were lifted became available to the Romans only after their defeat of Veii in 396 BC – its preservation is still remarkable.
When, in 1938, the Romans found in necessary to improve their public transportation system with the construction of a new train station, the architect, Angiolo Mazzoni, was forced to contend with this hulking mass of ancient wall and he did so by building today’s Stazione Termini around and above the Roman structure. Thus, today, a trip to the train station is also a journey through time. Outside of Termini, the heavy “Servian” Wall is majestically juxtaposed with the building’s monumental travertine and glass facade (see photo above). Meanwhile, in the basement of the station, a further tract of the wall stands in the middle of a newly renovated shopping mall, cutting its path through an ever-busy McDonalds, where Romans and tourists alike snack on Big Macs and Chicken McNuggets while admiring the ancient structure.
