Via di Grotta Pinta: Living Inside Pompey's Theatre

Why is it significant?

Walk slowly down this quiet lane and notice that the houses on one side do not run straight: they bend in a smooth, deliberate curve, as if someone had drawn them with a giant compass. Someone did. You are standing inside a Roman theatre, and these walls are built on top of its seats.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Walk slowly down this quiet lane and notice that the houses on one side do not run straight: they bend in a smooth, deliberate curve, as if someone had drawn them with a giant compass. Someone did. You are standing inside a Roman theatre, and these walls are built on top of its seats.

This was the Theatre of Pompey, inaugurated in 55 BC, the first permanent stone theatre in Rome. Until then the Senate considered permanent theatres a danger to public morals, and audiences sat on temporary wooden stands. Pompey found a loophole. At the top of the seating he built a temple to Venus Victrix, so that, officially, the rows of seats were just a grand staircase leading up to a shrine. Behind the stage stretched gardens and colonnades, all the way to the hall where Caesar would die.

When Rome shrank in the Middle Ages, nobody wasted such a magnificent ruin. Families built their houses straight into its vaults, and the curve of the auditorium survived as the curve of this street. The name Grotta Pinta, the painted grotto, probably remembers decorated chambers people found under their homes, and several cellars around here still have Roman concrete arches holding up their ceilings.

And Augustus? He handled this building the way he handled everything. In his own account of his reign, the Res Gestae, he boasts that he restored the Theatre of Pompey at great expense... without inscribing his own name on it. Suetonius adds that he moved Pompey's statue out of the hall where Caesar was murdered and set it on a marble arch facing the theatre. Honour the defeated rival, advertise your own modesty, and let everyone notice. Modesty, used as a weapon.

One last secret. In 1864, workers in the courtyard of a palace beside the lane, Palazzo Pio Righetti, found a gilded bronze Hercules nearly four metres tall, laid carefully in a pit lined with stone slabs carved with three letters, FCS: fulgur conditum, lightning buried here. The statue had been struck by lightning, and the Romans buried it like something sacred. It now stands in the Vatican Museums. From here, cross Corso Vittorio Emanuele, walk the whole length of Piazza Navona, and keep going out of its northern end.