Mountains, Mosaics, and Ancient Roman Rivers

CONTENTS

1. Ravenna
2. The Rubicon
3. Urbino and Marche
4. The Metaurus River
5. Abruzzo
6. Monticchio and Campo Imperatore
7. Majella and Caramanico Terme
8. Rome
9. Useful Links
10. Maps

Ravenna

Erin met me at the rental car garage as I tossed the climbing gear in the trunk of the Panda. She had just dropped off the sequin dress she wore to the ball celebrating her graduation from Bocconi, held in the Napoleonic Palazzina Appiana in Parco Sempione near our house. The next week would require no formal wear. We pulled out into Piazzale Loreto where a gas station once stood that saw Mussolini’s corpse hung upside down in 1945, the most infamous moment in modern Italian history. We would pass near his hometown of Predappio today, but the tomb of Il Duce didn’t make the cut – we had more exciting mausoleums to see that morning.

We streaked towards the Adriatic under gray skies, finally seeing the sun as we neared Ravenna. The umbrella pines appeared and we sensed the sea nearby. We were alone at the massive mausoleum of Theodoric, marveling at its the capstone – a single piece limestone weighing half a million pounds that was hauled here from hundreds of miles away – and the huge crimson bathtub which was reputedly his sarcophagus. The Ostrogothic king reigned (493-526) over the remains of much of the recently fallen Western Roman Empire. He didn’t rest in this room for long: his remains were dispersed shortly after his death by the Byzantine general Belisarius when he retook Italy on behalf of the Eastern Roman Empire.

In the city center, the architecture of the ancient basilicas reminded us of Rome or perhaps Sant’Ambrogio in Milan, and like those two cities Ravenna was the capital of the Empire – having been moved from Rome to Mediolanum (Milan) in the 4th Century, and then to Ravenna in the 5th. It remained the seat of government under the Germanic Ostrogoths and then the Greek-speaking Byzantines through the 8th Century.

In Italy, even great art can get lost in the crowd. Inside, Ravenna’s basilicas and baptisteries contain treasures which, relative to their worth, feel almost undiscovered: the best-preserved and largest quantity of Byzantine mosaics outside of Byzantium (aka Constantinople, aka Istanbul) itself. Rarely have my high expectations been further exceeded than in Ravenna, and because it is off the beaten path, we had them nearly to ourselves.

We stopped first at the Mausoleum of Gallia Placida, the Roman empress who commissioned it but was never buried here. The mosaics were dazzling, with a brilliant blue background sparkling with stars, archways with haloed saints and burning altars and books, and others with stags and twisting vines.

The Basilica of San Vitale is the only Byzantine church to survive almost unchanged from the 5th Century. Here they are all green, and all-over: climbing to the top of the ceiling and down again. They are of immense historical importance as they include images of the Emperor Justinian and Empress Theodora and their courtiers, more realistic likenesses than almost any other portraits before the Renaissance, with the exception of Hellenistic and Roman (especially Republican-era) sculpture.

On the frieze at the Basilica of Sant’Apollinaire there are dozens more vivid portraits of people who lived fifteen hundred years ago, along with warships, and the nativity, all on a gilt background. The building was constructed by our friend from above, Theodoric, as was the Arian Baptistery, with its round ceiling hanging low. The nearby Baptistery of Neon shows John the Baptist baptizing Christ, but also Zeus as the personification of the River Jordan. Old traditions sometimes die hard.

On the street corners we saw a few pieces by Invader, in his signature pixelated style showing arcade game aliens. Unlike most street art, they are attractive and understated, and a fitting tribute in a city famed for its mosaics.  

Above: Basilica di San Vitale; at left, the Empress Theodora (r. 527 – 548), wife of Justinian. Of humble origins she became the most prominent woman in the Empire and was instrumental in suppressing the massive Nika Riots, caused by two opposing chariot factions, which destroyed half of Constantinople and nearly overturned her husband’s reign. She allegedly said it was better to die wearing the purple (the color of royalty) than to flee, and urged her husband to dispatch Belisarius into the hippodrome to slaughter the rebels.

The Rubicon

After a piadina (like an Italian quesadilla, ubiquitous nationwide but local to Emilia Romagna) we moved on.

A bit before dusk we arrived in Savignone sul Rubicone, and walked to the Roman bridge over the Rubicon. The name of the river has come down to us for passing a point of no return. It once marked the boundary between Italy and Gallia Cisalpina, among the provinces under Caesar’s administration during his Conquest of Gaul, which greatly enlarged Roman dominion and revenue. Forbidden by enemies in the Senate from standing for re-election to the consulship, and instead facing prosecution, Caesar crossed the Rubicon with Legio XIII Gemina on the evening of January 10-11, 49 B.C. As Plutarch tells us, “he proclaimed in a loud voice to those who were present ‘let the die be cast!’ and led the army across.” Many times men have pitted their will against the world; very few times have they won. The resulting civil war collapsed the Republic and paved the way for transformation to Empire under his great-nephew Augustus.

The site where he crossed is believed to be here, where the ancient Via Aemilia once ran south. It is little more than a drainage ditch now, agriculture having altered its flow, and it was never wide even in antiquity, making it all the more interesting to ponder the momentous decision made here. We would do well to remember that such a thing was brought about by the inflexible brinksmanship of partisans on both sides of Roman politics. There is nothing new under the sun.

Urbino and Marche

It was dark when we arrived at Ca’Balsomino in the hills of Marche, a newly built inn on a ridge with exceptional views of Urbino. The next morning the mist covered the hills, and the spot was windy like Wuthering Heights. Urbino itself was empty in the rain. We were one of only two couples in the massive Palazzo Ducale, where the doorways are all marked FED DUX for Federico da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino (1422-1482). A true Renaissance man, he was a famed warrior, statesman and student of Classical languages, and patron of the arts second only to the Medici. He built this palace and was immortalized in a portrait by Piero della Francesca that hangs in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.

In fact we were here for Piero. We have traveled widely to see his work in Tuscany and Umbria. In the Palazzo Ducale of Urbino, there are hundreds of paintings, but one stands alone: The Flagellation of Christ. While his frescoes are often as wide as church walls, this one is barely bigger than a checkerboard and painted on worm-eaten wood, but it is his masterpiece, called by Kenneth Clark “the greatest small painting in the world.”

I had seen it a thousand times as a slide in my Art History studies. Now I admired it for what felt like twenty minutes. The marble backgrounds and meticulous receding perspective create a space so real it seems you could step inside it. I stared into the eyes of the figures, pupils smaller than a pinhead but still so expressive. On the left, a serene Christ is scourged in front of Pilate, whose family name Pontius is of Samnite origin. The Samnites were based in this region, and famous as antagonists of the Roman Republic. The signature of Piero is inscribed in Latin on the base of the throne. King Herod watches with his back turned. In the right foreground, three men in Renaissance garb stand. Their identities remain unknown, subject of enormous speculation for centuries, but the youth in the center is believed to be the brother of Federico whose assassination allowed his own rise.

The other highlight of the Palazzo is the private study of the Duke, called Lo Studiolo. This was a place of contemplation where he came every day to read Latin and Greek. The intarsia (wood inlay) is magnificent, perhaps the finest example in the world.

A scholar in his free time, Federico was also a patron of education, and to this day Urbino is home to a major university. On that December day, graduates walked the streets wearing their gowns and laurel wreaths. We said the traditional “auguri” as we passed them. Erin had worn her own wreath earlier the same week. This trip was meant to celebrate her graduation, but the mood was darkened by work, or lack of it: I had too much to do, and Erin had none to do, having finished school without a job in place, critical to our visas and remaining in Italy longterm. We continued south under gray skies.

The Metaurus River

As I often do, I dragged Erin on a detour to a forgotten place, in this case, a roaring river swollen from the rains. No monument marks it, but much like the Rubicon, the history of the world changed here, at the Battle of the Metaurus River in 207 B.C. During the Second Punic War, Hannibal had devastated Italy for over 10 years after crossing the Alps with his elephants, defeating one Roman army after another. But he was badly in need of reinforcements. His brother Hasdrubal crossed the Alps to join him. Before they could meet, he was intercepted by the armies of both consuls. Despite being political opponents, Claudius Nero had marched overnight to join his colleague Marcus Livius. The next day they surprised and massacred the Carthaginians. Hannibal learned of the defeat when the Romans tossed a sack containing his brother’s severed head into his camp. Upon receiving it, he said “Rome will now be the mistress of the world.” And it came to be so. He was soon forced to abandon Italy for home (modern-day Tunisia) and eventually defeated. Rome, not Carthage, came to rule the Mediterranean.

Abruzzo

The highway turned inward from the sea and through the clouds we saw Gran Sasso, covered in snow, massive in its prominence against the lowlands. We continued on toward Goriano Valli, arriving in twilight. The village was beautiful, but in the grotto of the apartment, it seemed we had made a mistake, that perhaps we should have stayed in Milan. There were no restaurants open within fifty kilometers, and we had no plan for the morrow. Far from home, our problems felt magnified, further out of our control. For a moment we pondered going back, but decided to try it for a day.

Out of a hat I picked a restaurant in L’Aquila and they told us to come in an hour, the distance of the drive to the capital. We parked in a piazza with an ancient church propped up by scaffolding; like most buildings it was devastated by the 2009 earthquake, killing hundreds. A quarter of the city remains in ruins.

The restaurant Lo Scalco occupies a magnificent stone building with a huge courtyard. It means The Carver. It turned out to be one of the best meals I’ve had in Italy, which means better than almost anywhere else in the world. Squid and cuttlefish and bacalao (Abruzzo has both mountains and a large seacoast), bread baked with wine and chickpea soups, spaghettone with cream, and local pork and lamb from the pastures of the region, famed for its sheep. It was wonderful, and the staff were kind. Our spirits were restored.

Back in the village I parked by the stone wall at the bottom of a steep orchard. We heard a rustling and snorting, and saw dark forms moving among the plants of the garden above us, looking almost demonic in the light of the full moon. It was the largest group of wild boars I had ever seen. The woods of Arcady are dead but in Abruzzo, a bit of mystery is left. I stopped and stared, mesmerized, but Erin urged me to hurry inside.   

Monticchio and Campo Imperatore

In the morning the sun shone but the valley was full of mist. We drove towards Campo Imperatore, the highest part of the Apennines. As we headed up into the hills we saw San Stefano di Sessanio (one of the borghi piu belli), where they will pay you to come open a business to rebuild a region suffering from population loss. Tempting. But as I feared, the road above was already closed for winter.

Quickly we reverted to rock climbing at Monticchio, a crag my friend recommended, walking past an old quarry into an amphitheater shaped wall. The routes were unmarked but well-bolted. The sun warmed us on a December day, and across the valley we watched as a shepherd and his huge Abruzzese dogs drove their sheep down the steep hill towards home. It was a perfect place, and we had it all to ourselves.

This was no surprise: Abruzzo is one of the least-populated and least-visited regions of Italy. It is also the greenest, in terms of the amount of parkland relative to area. The woods are full of wolves and bears found nowhere else in the country, and rarely in all Europe.

After leaving the crag we decided to try a different road up to Campo Imperatore, the huge valley between mountains called “Little Tibet,” and famous as a film location. The funivia operator gave me the Club Alpino discount but said we wouldn’t have long: the last car up was leaving in a few minutes, and the last return was an hour after that.

The top was desolate. There was an ancient hostel and a new one, and an astronomical observatory, but the ski lifts were off. We were alone as one of the best dusks of my life unfolded, unique due to the position of the mountain smack in the middle of Italy. Simultaneously we could see two seas: on the west, a dazzling orange sunset over the Tyrrhenian; on the east, the full moon rose over the Adriatic, between two snow-capped peaks, the sky slate blue then purple.

The snow crunched under our feet, in perfect condition. The wind whipped hard. We walked back and forth on the ridge for the whole hour, then took the last car down with the staff. At home, making pasta in the little apartment, we were overwhelmed with gratitude for one of the most beautiful days we had spent in this country, or anywhere.

Majella and Caramanico Terme

The next day we planned to climb again, but saw many cars packed with obvious climbing gear on the roads. Erin mentioned that it was a holiday, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. It turned out they were all headed towards the crag at Roccamorice. It was a zoo, with many of the routes set along the cracked asphalt road. The contrast with the day before was too much and we bailed for a hike.

In the Majella Park, we drove nearly 5 kilometers up a steep road riddled with potholes, washed out in parts, barely wide enough for one car. Halfway up we met a car coming down, an Italian couple in their sixties. They moved over and let us pass perilously close to the edge. Windows down, I asked in Italian if the road worsened. No, it is the same all the way to the parking lot, which isn’t really a lot, and the rifugio is just a bivacco, no food. I thanked them. “Why are you here?” they asked. Holiday. No, why Abruzzo? The mountains. They were surprised. Only one in ten visitors to Abruzzo is a foreigner.

The wind whipped hard on the hike up the ridge. We arrived at the bivacco to find an older couple. She greeted us in English, the first we had heard here. It turned out she was from Oregon but married the Italian man next to her, and had lived in Abruzzo for many years, in a village down the valley so small it didn’t have a bar. It sounded like heaven to me. She too asked why we were here, then whether Erin knew a few professors at Bocconi, the man’s alma mater. It’s a country of sixty million people but you never know, and who you know matters.

From the top of the hike we looked down on Caramanico Terme, another of the borghi piu belli dell’Italia. We drove down and found hundreds of cars parked along the main road, guided by police. They had come for the Christmas market, with lights and trees and booths selling gifts, handmade jewelry, local food products, arrosticini on sticks, mulled wine with Sambuca. There was also a scary life-sized La Befana, a hideous witch who brings presents to the children like Santa Claus, but on Epiphany Eve. Everyone was drinking and making merry.

We cut a strange figure here. Some people stared, though of course we were perfectly welcome, we just didn’t belong. But that was nothing new. I didn’t feel I really belonged in Virginia, where I grew up. For a while I thought I did in New York until I realized fitting in and blending in weren’t the same. And not in Milan, though it was nice. Perhaps it was a platitude, but I knew we belonged together, and we could probably go anywhere, as long as it wasn’t back. That thought was comforting at a moment when our future in this land had never seemed so uncertain. But we were far from defeated. I was closer than ever to my childhood dreams of classics and climbing, and had crossed the Rubicon long ago.

Rome

It was time to return home, and yet again, the map drew us to an unplanned place: Rome, two hours across the Apennines. We traded tiny Goriano Valli for the Eternal City. We parked at the Borghese Gardens, near the nominal excuse for this trip: two unseen Caravaggio paintings at Santa Maria in Piazza del Popolo, The Crucifixion of St. Peter, and The Conversion of St. Paul. Filled with Caravaggio’s high drama of dark and light, they are a gorgeous and moving pair. On the right, we see Paul (then called Saul) fallen from his horse on the road to Tarsus. Controversial even its time, Caravaggio prefers the horse to the saint: the subject is but a small part of the scene, lying supine in the mud, his sword and cape cast off. He will not need them again. His hands are thrown back over his head. There is no doubt: he has seen the light. On the left St. Peter is nailed to the cross and crucified, at his request, upside down. He pays the ultimate penalty for professing what Paul has just experienced.

We waited in a long line at the Pantheon and entered the temple once consecrated to all the gods and now to one. Rain fell through the oculus, open to the sky, draining on the marble floor below. Erin said it looked like a James Turrell. To me no space feels so perfect as under this dome, the serenity and order are unrivaled. They say when the barbarian Goths sacked Rome they burst in, looked up, and left without touching anything.

We wound our way through the ancient core, busy even on a drizzly December day, back to the serpentine Via Veneto, of La Dolce Vita, thinking about the countless cigarettes smoked and proseccos drunk in these cafes. I missed the 1960s I never saw. We stopped for a lovely lunch at Café Mozart, a tavola calda Erin knew, then drove home.

On the autostrada we fretted over wifi, stopping at several Autogrills so Erin could send a resume and I could send a lease. Seven hours later I dropped the car at Linate having made an 1800km loop around the country we love. The bus dropped us back at the Duomo. The season of Advent had begun in our absence, so the spectacular Christmas tree was lit up with words that said “we want you to be yourself.” We were working on it.

Useful Links

• Restaurants
  • Lo Scalco, L’Aquila. Phenomenal Abruzzese cuisine in a magnificent space. It manages to be both fancy and chill.
  • Mozart Bistrot Cafe, Rome. Simple tavola calda style restaurant, meaning a place that has prepared food served hot and cold, common for lunch. Note this Mozart Cafe is on Via Toscana near the Borghese Gardens, not the one in Prati.
• Hotels
  • Ca’ Balsomino, outside of Urbino.
• Places
  • The Early Christian Monuments of Ravenna, including the Mosaics and Mausolum of Theodoric, UNESCO
  • Historic Center of Urbino, including the Palazzo Ducale of Federico da Montefeltro, UNESCO
  • Monticchio, route list for the rock climbing crag in Abruzzo.
  • Campo Imperatore, Abruzzo, link to all tourist and sport information for the Gran Sasso area
  • Parco Majella, Abruzzo.
  • Caramanico Terme, one of the borghi piu belli d’Italia
  • Santo Stefano di Sessanio, borghi piu belli d’Italia
• Other
  • The War With Hannibal, Titus Livius, an excerpt from Livy’s History of Rome, written in Latin in the 1st Century B.C. A major source on the Battle of the Metaurus River. You can also find it free on Perseus.
  • Commentarii de Bello Gallic, Gaius Julius Caesar, ca. 50 B.C. Caesar’s history of the Conquest of Gaul during his proconsulship. A classic of Latin literature for its clear prose. Read the English translation free on Perseus.
  • The Life of Julius Caesar, Plutarch, excerpt from his Parallel Lives, written in Greek in the early years of the 2nd Century A.D. This contains his description of Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon. Free translation courtesy of University of Chicago.
  • Caesar, Christian Meier, 1996. This is my personal favorite biography of Julius Caesar, by the esteemed German historian.
  • The Roman Revolution, Ronald Syme, 1939. Never out of print, this is the most important book on the transformation of the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire, by the 20th Century’s most important scholar of Roman history.
  • The Light of Italy: The Life and Times of Federico da Montefeltro, Jane Stevenson, 2021. A new biography of one of the most illustrious men of the Italian Renaissance, with a particular focus on his patronage of art and court life at Urbino.
  • Count Belisarius, Robert Graves, 1938. Not as famous (for a reason) as Graves’s magnum opus I, Claudius, but a fascinating portrait (historical fiction/biography) of the Byzantine general Belisarius. He fought campaigns on three continents, against great odds, and with success that ranks him amongst history’s most talented military men. He was also instrumental in suppressing the massive Nika Riots which cemented the rule of Justinian.
  • Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats, ed. C. Watts, or the free link to The Song of the Happy Shepherd for “the woods of Arcady are dead, and over is their antique joy…”

Maps