by Alizah Holstein
Think of a Roman monument. What leaps to mind? The Pantheon? The Colosseum? The Arch of Constantine? Maybe even the aqueducts? I’ll wager that when you thought of the word “monuments,” your imagination traveled upwards instead of down. For what is a monument if not a tall, grand thing, large, and to some perhaps, looming? I do recognize it’s possible—though unlikely—that you conjured the catacombs. And it’s even less likely that you thought of roads.
Cultural critic Robert Hughes described roads as Rome’s greatest physical monuments. Their network extended some 50-75,000 miles and they were the sine qua non of Rome’s expansion. I should add a minor but nonetheless relevant detail here: some of my happiest moments have been spent on Roman roads. As were some of yours, in all likelihood, if you have ever felt ebullient in Rome or on the Italian peninsula, or indeed in Spain or France or England or Germany or the Balkans or Greece or Turkey or Syria or Israel or Gaza or Egypt or Algeria or Morocco.
Let me put another question to you. What is your favorite Roman road? If you’re a pilgrim, you might say the Via Francigena. And should you offer the Via Flaminia, Via Aurelia, or Via Aemilia or some other ancient equivalent, I imagine you have your reasons. But if you are a romantic like me, the only possible answer is the Via Appia, which is, after all, the regina viarum, the queen of roads. Think of cypress trees, ancient, crumbling tombs, jasmine and pinecones and fields of wildflowers. Think also of tourist traps, gladiator impersonators, a War World II massacre site, and prostitution. Think of paradox as the defining feature of the human condition. Still, even its name is beautiful: Via Appia. Look at all those a’s and i’s, like a palindrome just off its center, the V and A the very valleys and arêtes through which the road cuts.
The history of ancient roads is naturally entangled with the geography of the lands they cross. In the fourth century BCE, the statesman Appius Claudius Caecus wished to connect Rome with Capua, which was at that time the peninsula’s second largest city. The road that resulted—the via Appia, or Appian Way—would bear his name. But between Rome and Capua lay an alluvial plain, the Pontine Marshes, that for most of history had resisted human habitation. Early Romans desired to cross it more than they wished to settle it. Appius decided that his road project would not be diverted by a bit of stagnant water, and so he built a causeway across the marsh. Although successful, that stretch of road gained notoriety as particularly unpleasant, suspended as it was amid muck and mire, and on account of moisture it remained in constant need of repair.
Plutarch claims that Julius Caesar, centuries later, drafted a plan to drain the marsh by diverting the Tiber southwards. This plan was never brought to fruition. Well over a millennium passed before Pope Boniface VIII succeeded around 1300 in draining a small swath near the town of Sermoneta, an action that conveniently freed up land recently acquired by his family. Two hundred years later, Leonardo da Vinci was hired by the Medici of Florence to devise hydraulic systems so that they, too, could increase their family’s estate.
There ensued a great line of aspiring swamp-drainers: one can hardly find a sixteenth-century pope who did not set himself the goal of land reclamation in the Pontine Marshes. But in the end, the swamp always seemed to win. Perhaps its most high-profile victim that century was the prolific builder Pope Sixtus V, a pre-modern Robert Moses whose sheer ambition, indiscriminate appropriation of ancient building materials, and lack of compunction about slicing and dicing a populated, hilly city into broad, straight avenues, completely redesigned the urban map of Rome. Sixtus was ultimately undone by a marsh mosquito, dying of malaria in late August 1590. One month later to the day, malaria (or one might say, the marsh) also claimed his successor, Pope Urban VII, who on account of the humble mosquito still holds the title—thirteen days—for the shortest papacy in history. It exceedingly unlikely that the two popes’ deaths can be attributed to the same proboscis, but I admit some delight in imagining that they were.
In the twentieth century, human pressure on the Pontine Marshes ticked up significantly when, in the 1920s, the Italian government made it a national priority to drain the area. Under Mussolini’s leadership, many thousands of workers from northern Italy were brought south and tasked with the miserable, often fatal task of draining the land with plows and shovels. For over a decade, Mussolini periodically visited the work sites, posing bare-chested among grain-threshing workers, promoting the false notion that he too was working alongside them for photos that fed his propaganda campaigns.
A critical moment for the Pontine Marshes came in 1934, when six giant pumps were put into place in Mazzocchio, the region’s lowest point. Every day of every year since, they have pumped 9,000 gallons of water per second from the saturated soil. With those pumps, the province of Latina emerged like an inverse Atlantis, and its five principal towns, Littoria (now called Latina), Pomezia, Sabaudia, Pontinia, and Aprilia burst into being. Latina has become a vast producer of agriculture and is home to thriving chemical and pharmaceutical plants. More than eight decades later, the province still relies on those six pumps to keep the region safely habitable for human life.
What flourishes here now comes at incalculable environmental cost. The water systems suffer from pollution so extreme that many of them rate, in terms of phosphate and nitrate levels, as raw sewage. MIT professor Alan Berger, who has studied the area in depth, advises people to “only eat from uphill,” and describes the environment as “so ecologically out of balance that if it goes on this way, it will kill itself.” For this artificial landscape, Berger prescribes radically artificial solutions: creating an entirely new system of water networks that work in tandem with newly introduced species of plants to absorb pollution. One thing, however, is certain: for the foreseeable future, human life here remains dependent on those six pumps. Were they to cease operation, it would take a single week for the entire province of Latina, like a sandcastle by the sea, to fill back up with water.
And what of our love song to the queen of roads? As it turns out, we have quite accurately replicated the experience of our predecessors: out we ventured, whistling with the brightness of our expectations, but rather quickly we became mired in the marshes. How easily our hopes take flight, and how reliably we are reminded that nature keeps the final score.
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