Appearing almost a decade after his topographical study coauthored with Diane Conlin on the ancient Campus Martius (2014), Paul Jacobs’s new volume overlaps only modestly with it, shifting both chronological and geographic scope. This is a close-up study of a single neighbourhood within that vast urban region, studied longitudinally from the beginnings to the present. Called in antiquity the Prata Flaminia or Circus Flaminius and known in both medieval and modern times by the name of its most venerable church, Sant’Angelo in Pescheria, the district comes to life in J.’s capable narrative.
Most urban neighbourhoods, even famous ones, could never be portrayed this way, across two and a half millennia. Even within the Eternal City, no other quarter readily recommends itself to such a task. So many vital sectors of ancient Rome lose focus or the thread of continuity in the Middle Ages; many simply succumbed to the vast disabitato, the uninhabited, ruin-pocked wilds that persisted until the nineteenth century. But this one never did. Bustling and increasingly monumentalised in the Republican and Augustan eras, it never lost its presence in the city. Yet as its temples and theatres lapsed, it acquired a compensating mercantile and residential demeanour over time, juxtaposing famous potentates and their families (the Pierleoni; Cola di Rienzo, the Cenci, the Mattei) with the anonymous poor (fishmongers, craftsmen, ropers, junk dealers) and the famous Jewish enclave known as the Ghetto.
Progressing chronologically, the book falls naturally into three sections: antiquity (chs 1–4), the Middle Ages (chs 5–7) and modernity (chs 8–10). Though the narrative privileges the perspective of the longue durée, readers of this journal may be most attentive to the early chapters; they are my focus here.
Ch. 1 surveys the area known retrospectively as the Prata Flaminia: flat and sparsely populated, it stood near the early city’s river port but outside the Republican walls. Its early associations with Apollo and gradual accumulation of other early sanctuaries are attributed to the region’s sheer convenience and accessibility, both from the river and from the inhabited zone immediately to its east. Ch. 2 chronicles the richest phase of the district’s history, dense with votive temple foundations and (at least hypothetically) triumphal processions. It opens with the founding of the Circus Flaminius in 217 b.c.e. and the beginnings of that plaza’s longtime association with the urban plebs and their gatherings. J. progresses through the systematisation of the plaza’s north side by M. Fulvius Nobilior, M. Aemilius Lepidus and Q. Caecilius Metellus, and documents the progressive encirclement of the circus-like plaza with temples.
Ch. 3 reviews the projects of Caesar, Augustus and their allies, who inserted an entertainment district in among the sanctuaries around the circus plaza. An especially incisive section evaluates the careful siting and planning of the Theatre of Marcellus and its effects on pedestrian and traffic flow; now the nearly blocked east end of the circus became a ‘turnstile’ facilitating crowd control. J. argues persuasively that these developments reflect Augustus’ heightened interest in plebeian affairs, for the theatre was probably begun in earnest at about the same time as Augustus assumed the tribunicia potestas.
Encompassing a full half-millennium after Augustus’ death, ch. 4 settles for a sparser topographical record. Speculation about the location of the pomerium in this zone, and whether the plaza’s constricted east end could accommodate triumphal processions, covers familiar territory. The plaza was further occluded in the high imperial era as new structures were added at the southeast end and an arcaded building emerged right in the middle. It now assumed a more mercantile character, which it would retain for some eighteen centuries thereafter. The north porticoes burned down in the fire of Commodus; the remains of their Severan reconstruction are what we see today. With Late Antiquity and the dissolution of sanctuaries, these porticoes gradually evolved into a residential and ecclesiastical district. Beyond them, the decaying Crypta Balbi were repurposed into hovels interspersed with pyrotechnical industries such as glassworks and lime kilns.
Later chapters document the many transformations of the district but never lose sight of the enduring monumentality of the ancient buildings that remained in view and in use, forever in new ways — most prominently, the theatre complexes of Marcellus and Balbus and the south propylaeum of the Porticus Octaviae. This last remained an especially potent symbol of antiquity, ever ripe for reappropriation — whether as the south façade for the diaconia and church of Sant’Angelo; as the platform from which Cola di Rienzo delivered his harangue before marching to the Capitolium in 1337; or, infamously, as the public venue where in 1943 a Nazi detachment consigned over a thousand Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau.
I started reading this book with some scepticism, unsure of its purpose or utility; after all, every phase and part of the Circus Flaminius/Sant’Angelo district has, in isolation, enjoyed abundant scholarly attention. But I quickly warmed to J.’s project. What it offers is a refreshingly organic and longitudinal view of a perpetually vibrant place, rich with narratives of foreshadowing, change, reappropriation and reminiscence. It is also full of archaeology, which began in earnest in the 1870s and even now periodically opens new windows on the neighbourhood’s past.
