DAY 8: Baths of Agrippa

09.07.2014

Down the road from the Pantheon, in one of the narrow streets behind it, I almost accidentally spotted a strange leftover. In the elevation of the street I saw a tall and thick wall which clearly stood there since the Ancient Rome. It was cutting the street elevation at two places, in fact being a semi-circular structure. I could tell that it was not part of a city wall as it was deep inside the centre of Rome and that it was probably a remain of a large public building. I could not tell, however, what set of circumstances led to its survival, while the rest is gone without a trace. The street came around it and alienated a surviving vault of a Roman Bath.

I then realised, that was a wall of the Baths of Agrippa, a large civic complex which the Pantheon was initially part of. The gigantic trace is also a reminder of an infrastructural project built by Marcus Agrippa in 19 BC. The aqueduct Aqua Virgo was supplying Rome with water and the baths were its civic extension, a gift to the Roman public.

The baths of Agrippa were an important social hub taken care of by later emperors and restored after the great fire of AD 80. In the seventh century their dramatic transformation begins with abandonment of the baths – after the structure fell into disrepair when Ostorogoths cut off the aqueduct water supply of Rome in 530s.

The ruins were depicted by Baldassare Peruzzi and Andrea Palladio in the XVI century and later further decomposed into urban fabric of Rome through reuse of building material, with one ambiguous piece of composition cast into the street of modern Rome.