ABSTRACT
It is still possible today to stand at the top of the via in Selci just before the Piazza di San Martino ai Monti, on the exact course of the ancient Clivus Suburanus, and look across at the three storeys of a house façade of the high Roman Empire: at the base, five pilasters of great blocks of travertine supporting the brickwork of a vaulted portico, above which range the blocked arches of two rows of windows. You can still pick out these five travertine pillars on the fragments of the Marble Plan of the city of the early third century (Rodríguez-Almeida 1980: 82-92, tavs IX, X). You can make out, too, that before it became church property, eventually the convent of Santa Lucia in Orpheo, the building served as one of the magnificent apsed halls characteristic of late antiquity (Krautheimer 1937, Corpus Basilicarum II: 186-90; Guidobaldi 1986: 188-92). You can pursue the mediaeval toponym and recognise the proximity of the ancient lacus Orphei, an ornamental public fountain duly listed in the fourth-century regionary catalogues of the city and also identifiable on the third-century marble plan. The lacus stood a few metres uphill in front of the church of San Martino ai Monti. And you can read that epigram of Martial (7.61.110) in which he bemoans the struggle of climbing up the Clivus Suburanus, through the dirt and noise and confusion of passing wagons laden with building stone (on their way down, doubtless, from the quarries at Tivoli to the non-stop imperial building works of the Forum), and imagine the precise position of the house of his friend and patron the younger Pliny – this, too, identifiable on the marble plan.2 So present is the urban texture of antiquity; almost submerged in the later structures of a city which knows no ruptures in its continuity of habitation, yet still detectable to the seeing eye.
