A little north of Sangemini, half way between Rome and Assisi, is the Roman town of Carsulae. It was excavated by archeologists funded by the Italian government between 1951 and 1972 and now emerges from the surrounding farmlands like a partially exhumed skeleton.
Carsulae came into existence when the Via Flaminia, a strategic connecting road between Rome and the Adriatic, was completed in 220 BC. Until then, local Umbrians (whose precise origins seem to baffle historians) were more likely to make their homes in the forested hills than down on the gentler lands, but they couldn’t resist the attractions of the new road with its promises of traffic and trade and thus a citizenry was born.
After a while it became quite an important town, at one time, for example, being chosen by Vespasian’s generals as a camp site for his troops when they were on their way to Rome to take the imperial throne. At Carsulae they could not only replenish their supplies from the small surrounding towns but were also nicely placed to oppose Vitellius, whose legions were quartered in Narni, a significant garrison on the road to the Eternal City.
Forum Arch
Today it is a place of ruined houses, temples and tumbled stones; a ghost-haunted graveyard of grey-white, gleaming masonry where it takes very little imagination to hear the rattle of wheeled carriages or the screams of a blood-lusted mob coming from the nearby amphitheatre.
The only fully intact building (apart from a discreetly placed caretaker’s cottage) is a mediaeval Romanesque chapel, Chiesa di San Damiano, built over the remains of an earlier Roman building near the forum.
On my first visit to Carsulae a chapel wedding has just ended. The bride and groom are being artistically photographed among the ruins as the guests, wonderfully stylish, (Italians do these things so well) get into their cars and drive off with loud ‘ciaos’. Soon they have all drifted away and I, in a place of the greatest archeological significance, a place which, anywhere else in the world would be crowded with tourists, am left the sole remaining occupant.
The excavations lie on a broad ledge with clear views to north, east and south but backed by a scrub-covered hill to the west. The narrow Via Flaminia runs gently uphill from where it appears out of open country to the north; its line is across the platform of the town, close and parallel to a modern minor road, to plunge quite steeply off the edge of the plateau on its way to Rome.
Via Flaminia
I’ve read about the roads of old Roman towns but I’ve never actually, knowingly, stood on one. I’ve read about the ruts worn into the stones by ancient traffic but I’ve never, as I do today, knelt and run my fingers along the grooves. Deep as my finger-lengths, the ruts are remarkably consistent distances apart - as if there had been a law prescribing wheel track. It gives an awesome impression to look along the paving blocks laid neatly side by side and to realize that every single block of the Via Flaminia, from Rome to the eastern coast, was dressed and laid by hand. Now - as ever, I suppose - grass grows between the stones; it also covers the floors of the excavated buildings, for with the exception of the road surface, it’s the walls of Carsulae that have been revealed rather than its floors and sub-floors.
Temples of Gemini
Climbing to the stop of the stepped walls I can look down into two rectangular chambers, both identical in size and shape. These are the temples of Gemini both of which had their own priests and acolytes (a doubling up of costs and administration which probably irritated the local ratepayers). Seeing these temples, a possible ancestry of Carsulae to ‘modern’ Sangemini (Saints Gemini) is suggested; but I wonder why it was necessary for a new town to grow elsewhere than here, on the site of the old settlement. Not big enough? Re-alignment of the highway? Earthquake? Plague?
Southwards from the temples is a slender arch, entrance to the forum. Incredibly it is is still standing, stress bearing on its keystone as ever it did. Beyond, the road runs through ripened grasses to another, rounded arch, the Arco di San Damiano, at the end of the town. There, where the road starts to descend, is a collection of stately tombs and sepulchres, the Necropoli Monumentale. They’re weird: I can’t believe that they are contemporaneous with Roman Carsulae, they look like Victorian or American dynastic symbols of immortality, or outctrops of Paris’s Père Lachaise Cemetery, those expressions of status that litter necropoli or lawn cemeteries and talk more of money than sense - immortality for cash.
I return along the Via Flaminia to examine the ruins on its west side. Ancient Roman towns were built on cross-roads, at Carsulae the minor cross passes to the south of the foundations of a basilica next to the residential area. Behind the basilica, and across the modern road, is the most thought-provoking excavation of all, the anfiteatro - amphitheatre.
It’s large and yet intimate; a sports oval surrounded by stone tiers which, while not fully laid bare are exposed enough to allow me to visualize the expectant crowds at the show, all munching the Roman equivalent of popcorn, yelling smart remarks at their middle-class neighbours while placing bets on their favoured gladiator or a hungry lion.
The architects and masons put a bit of extra love and care into this place. It’s not just block on block, but relieved by decorative pillars and small, brick-like stones laid in diamond patterns. At points around the floor of the oval, corridors lead from dressing rooms and holding pens under the embankments giving access for animals, gladiators, and performers in the games of victor and vanquished; the prospect of how much blood was spilt in the earth of the pit is a sobering thought. At times the arena was flooded and mock naval battles were fought by armed men in miniature ships! The water came from cisterna, reservoirs either side of the amphitheatre - I can still see them - which must have been filled with rain water collected from the hill behind the town.
At the back of the anfiteatro is the most elegant of Carsulae’s uncovered structures, a theatre - teatro - a semicircular sunken performance area around whose curve rises the open-air auditorium beneath which is a series of cells - the dressing rooms of the performers: principals, players, chorus, tumblers, jugglers, fire-eaters and musicians. The stage would have been perfectly lighted by the late afternoon sun dropping past the hill and sliding, on a summer’s day, to light the road to Rome and, perhaps, to remind the playgoers from whence came their power and privilege.
But the day is running out for me: the late sun smeared gold on the stones and the sere summer grasses. Low light moulds the masonry, showing every shaping by the craftsmen and all of time’s erosion and then, quite suddenly, there is no gold left, only smoke-blue after-light. I put my cameras away.
Reluctantly I leave the deserted town promising that I will go again one day to Carsulae, to lie with one ear close to the ground to pick up those same vibrations felt by Vespasian when he laagered around 70 AD; and by Constantine who travelled the length of the Via Flaminia in 312 after conquering Verona and whose troops rested in the town a few days before he had his cathartic conversion to Christianity.
Looking one last time at the bush strewn slopes I wonder how much still lies hidden up there, how many Roman floors, mosaics, walls, tiles, pipes, channels, leats and flumes: in the end the inescapable thought is that no matter where one might dig in Italy - especially along the routes of the legions - something fascinating would turn up: and the thought, too, that for the Italian government to have funded the Carsulae ‘dig’ without expecting it to become a well sign-posted revenue-earning shrine shows restraint and civilization beyond the capability of most countries.
From ‘Antipasto’ random samplings from various writings made over a few years of visits to a ‘New Zealander’s Italy’
© DON DONOVAN
