Arch of Gallienus & the Witches of the Esquiline
Why is it significant?
Here, on a little street, a single ancient arch stands squeezed between a church and the houses, as if the city had grown around it without noticing. Traffic squeezes past. Pigeons nest in the cornice. Hardly anyone looks up at the inscription.
Key Facts
| Place | Arch of Gallienus & the Witches of the Esquiline |
|---|---|
| Address | Via di San Vito, 00185 Roma RM, Italy |
| Geo Coordinates | 41.89580, 12.50140 |
| Part of Walk | Emperors, Saints and Alchemists: Monti & the Esquiline Hill |
| Generated | Generated |
Here, on a little street, a single ancient arch stands squeezed between a church and the houses, as if the city had grown around it without noticing. Traffic squeezes past. Pigeons nest in the cornice. Hardly anyone looks up at the inscription.
This was once the Porta Esquilina, a gate in the oldest walls of Rome, the walls traditionally attributed to King Servius Tullius. Around 262, a local official rebuilt it and dedicated it to the emperor Gallienus and his wife Salonina. Gallienus ruled in one of the most desperate periods of Roman history: invasions, plague, rebellions, his own father captured by the Persians. Flattering inscriptions like this one were how loyal men kept their heads.
Outside this gate, in the days of the Republic, stretched the Esquiline field, and it was a terrible place. Here the poor, the slaves and the executed were thrown into open pits, and the bodies were left to the dogs and the birds. Archaeologists in the nineteenth century found these pits still full of bones.
Then, in the age of Augustus, his friend Maecenas, the great patron of poets, covered the area with earth and turned it into magnificent gardens. The poet Horace, whom Maecenas supported, celebrated the change in a satire. It is told by a wooden statue of a garden god, who complains that witches still come at night to dig for bones and brew their spells. And how does he scare them away? With a sudden, enormous noise from his rear end... Yes, one of the great Latin poets wrote a fart joke, and it is still read in classrooms today.
Rome is layered like that: the gate, the graveyard, the gardens, the jokes, and then all of it buried again under nineteenth-century apartment blocks. Continue east. A huge arcaded square opens up ahead, and in its gardens stands a door that leads nowhere.