Over the course of its long existence, Rome has been vastly altered, not only in its urban plan but in its very geography.
Standing on a bridge over the Tiber River, a visitor has to look quite far down to see the water, at least 50 feet (about 15 meters). Rome has risen far above the river that gave birth to it. But this is just part of a bigger story of urban transformation, one in which geographical features were not a given, but more of a suggestion.
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Take the Tiber, for one. In Rome’s earliest existence, it was a border, and on the other side, the Trastevere side, was the litus etruscus (the Etruscan shore), property of the Etruscan city of Veii. Rome was a frontier town that came into being because the river could be forded there, and the track that became the via Salaria (Salt Street) crossed it there on its way to the salt pans at Ostia. Salt was a rare and necessary commodity, and the intersection of the river and the track created a natural point of exchange between goods coming upstream from the Mediterranean and salt, a sort of international currency (even today, the lucky among us are paid a “salary,” originally a word for a Roman soldier’s allowance to buy salt).
The flock-keeping inhabitants of the lands around Archaic Rome needed salt urgently. A human only needs about six and a half pounds of salt a year to live, but a sheep needs up to nine pounds, and a cow about 44 pounds a year. Hence one of the ongoing Roman territorial concerns was to secure control of the salt pans and the route to the city. The river’s edge was regularized and made passable early on, as the shallow boats called the naves caudicariae, or river barges, could be hauled upstream by oxen, people, or, on one legendary occasion, a Vestal Virgin as proof of her virginity. The city was about three feet (one meter) above the Tiber’s waterline. This was dangerously low, and the reason why the earliest settlements were on the Palatine and Capitoline Hills.
In the late 6th century BCE, the Tiber Island was formed, in part due to the widening of seismic microfractures in the bedrock of the riverbank. However, a 2018 study also cited “anthropic activity,” meaning human intervention, as another reason. At around the same time, the Romans overthrew their monarchy. Legend says that the Tiber Island was formed when citizens dumped the last king’s huge grain supply — his wealth — into the river, but the reality was much harder work. A people willing to cut an island into their river would clearly not hesitate to make simpler changes to the urban geography.
The Tiber had, and still has, a dangerous tendency to flood, which required a series of artificial infills in the fields alongside the river. Defending the city from enemy attacks also demanded a good deal of alteration of the terrain, especially where there was no cliff to use as a natural barrier. Most of Rome’s hills are spurs of a plateau called the Esquiline Hill. On the Esquiline, in the mid-Republic, a colossal earthwork and wall was built by Roman citizens, not enslaved people, around 376 BCE. Julius Caesar had an ambitious plan to reroute the Tiber from a point north of the city, behind the Vatican and Janiculan hills, to rejoin the original riverbed south of the city, but this massive project was stopped by his murder in 44 BCE.
The emperor Nero built no less than three gigantic palaces in succession: the Domus Tiberiana, the Domus Transitoria, and after the Great Fire of 66 CE, the even more ambitious Domus Aurea, cutting into the Oppian hillside, digging an ornamental lake on the site of the later Colosseum, and expanding the Palatine Hill with vaulted terraces. In the later 1st and throughout the 2nd centuries CE, Roman emperors Domitian and Trajan continued to artificially raise Rome’s ground level, especially in the area of the northern Campus Martius between the river and today’s via del Corso, as a sort of dike protecting the city from floodwaters. Trajan demolished the whole saddle of the hill joining the Capitoline to the Quirinal, and on his famous column, an inscription says that the amount of earth removed was equal to the height of the column. Meanwhile, floods and landslides brought mud to the low-lying areas of the city, in differing degrees, and the steepness of the famous seven hills was to a degree worn down.
As the empire contracted, so did the city’s capacity to maintain and protect itself. Between 272–275 CE, the emperor Aurelian built a new, larger circuit of city walls, which mostly still stand. By the end of late antiquity, Rome’s population had shrunk to 10% of its Augustan-era size of about a million people. A long phase of making do had begun. But it is striking that even from the city’s earliest days, the Romans were not at all fazed by the prospect of shaping the geographical landscape of the Urbs, from the Tiber Island to the elimination of the saddle heading east from the Capitoline. Caesar’s plan to reroute the Tiber was just a larger-scale expansion of the Roman willingness to play god with the cityscape. The most extraordinary aspect of this tale of earth-moving without machines, tractors, and mechanized equipment is that it continued into the city’s next phase of life under the rule of the popes, when some of the most ambitious plans for the redevelopment of Rome were formulated and carried out. The discontinuity of natural features, their removal or enlargement, is a continuity in the longer story of Rome’s urban life.
Source: Hyperallergic.com