Porta Asinaria: The Gate Where Rome Was Betrayed
Why is it significant?
Walk along the old brick wall until you reach a gate flanked by two massive round towers, and look down. The gate is sunk metres below the modern road, as if the city had slowly risen around it like a tide... which is exactly what happened.
Key Facts
| Place | Porta Asinaria: The Gate Where Rome Was Betrayed |
|---|---|
| Address | Piazza di Porta San Giovanni, 00183 Roma RM, Italy |
| Geo Coordinates | 41.88570, 12.50880 |
| Part of Walk | Rome in Layers: The Quiet Celian Hill, San Clemente & the Lateran |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk along the old brick wall until you reach a gate flanked by two massive round towers, and look down. The gate is sunk metres below the modern road, as if the city had slowly risen around it like a tide... which is exactly what happened.
This is the Porta Asinaria, one of the gates of the Aurelian Walls, built in the 270s when Rome, for the first time in centuries, felt it needed protecting. The two towers were added a little later, when the walls were strengthened against the barbarian invasions. Nobody is quite sure where the name comes from: perhaps a family called the Asinii, perhaps a road. Romans, naturally, have always preferred to think it was the donkeys' gate.
In the winter of 546, Rome was besieged by the Gothic king Totila. The city was starving. According to the historian Procopius, a few of the soldiers guarding this gate, Isaurians from Asia Minor, made a secret deal with the enemy. One night they opened the Porta Asinaria from inside, and the Goths poured in. The city that had once ruled the world was taken through a side door, by a bribe.
By then the population had collapsed, and in the years that followed, Rome would shrink to a few tens of thousands of people huddled near the river. Over the centuries rubble, earth and new streets raised the ground around the gate, until in 1574 Pope Gregory the Thirteenth closed it and opened the new Porta San Giovanni right beside it, the one the traffic still uses.
And that is the whole walk in one picture. You began at a monastery that sent monks to the end of the known world, went down into a church buried under a church, past martyrs, nuns and a pharaoh's needle. Every step was a layer laid on top of another, and here the oldest layer is still visible, waiting at the bottom. San Giovanni metro station is just outside the gate, if your legs have had enough of time travel.