TRAVELING IN STYLE : WALLS of GLORY : In Rome, Walls Don’t Just Hold Up the Roof: They’re Symbols of Imperial Might, History Immured

ACCORDING TO LEGEND, WHEN ROMULUS, AFTER WHOMRome was named, founded the city in 753 BC, he traced the limits of its walls in the earth with his plow and then began to erect fortifications. His jealous twin brother, Remus, leaped over the foundations as a gesture of ridicule--and Romulus promptly slew him. The walls of Rome were thus writing the city’s history almost before they existed. (If Remus had killed Romulus instead, the city might now be called Rema instead of Roma.)

Rome wasn’t built in a day: It was put together, stone by stone and brick by brick, over a span of more than 2,000 years, and its walls are positively steeped in the mystery and spirit of the past. All cities are composed of walls, of course--the walls of houses, battlements, factories, churches and shops. But Rome is Western Europe’s oldest continuously inhabited capital (Athens is older, but has traditionally been considered a part of Eastern Europe), and its walls seem to encapsulate--to immure--its history in a particularly vivid way. Walls of the ancient empire, papal walls, the walls of Mussolini and Fellini--these define the city even as they give it shape. To know Rome, it might be said, know its walls.

Other cities on the Italian peninsula were once surrounded by fortified walls, of course, erected specifically to protect inhabitants from the “barbarians”--which basically meant anyone who spoke neither Latin nor upper-class Greek, and who didn’t know what wine was, preferring to drink a sort of beer instead. These walls seldom kept the beer-swillers out--and most of them, or their remaining vestiges, were demolished after Italy became a unified modern nation in 1870.

In Rome, however, many miles of Imperial-era city walls are still intact. Perhaps the oldest segment, said to be part of a super-wall erected after the Celts staged a successful surprise invasion of the city in 390 BC, can be seen outside the Stazione Termini, the central train station.

Rome’s last imperial wall-builder was the Emperor Aurelian (AD 212-275). His wall, dating from the last year of his life, encircled the city for a rambling 11 miles and had 18 gates. The most famous of these portals, which still stands, is the Porta di San Sebastiano or St. Sebastian’s Gate. Originally called the Porta Appia or Appian Gate, this was the beginning of the great Appian Way, built in 312 BC, one of the greatest of all the many roads leading to Rome--though perhaps more important was the fact that it led away from Rome to Brindisi, at the bottom of the Italian boot, and was the pathway along which Roman foot-soldiers trekked on their way to set sail for Egypt, Palestine and points east. In the Medieval-era towers of St. Sebastian’s Gate, there is a relatively new museum, the Museo delle Mure, dedicated to the history of the Aurelian walls and the Appian Way. It is also the starting point for a walking tour along the parapets of some of the turreted old walls. In this century, sections of the wall have been let out to writers and artists for studios. For a time, actor Marcello Mastroianni was one of the intramural residents.

ONE OF THE MOST FASCINATING OF ALL THE CITY’S WALLS IS A DOUBLEsection called Il Passetto, or the short passageway, which runs for perhaps half a mile and links the Castel Sant’Angelo with the Vatican. The castle, a commanding structure overlooking the Tiber, was originally built by the Emperor Hadrian (AD 76-138) as his family mausoleum, and was later “converted” to Christian use as a papal fortress, prison and treasury. Il Passetto was based on a segment of wall from the 9th Century, extended by Pope Nicholas III in 1277. But it was in the late 15th Century that Pope Alexander VI--who, being a Borgia, decided that a quick and well-fortified emergency exit might one day come in handy--gave Il Passetto its present form, constructing a parallel wall close by the first one and covering it over. This measure served one of his successors well: In 1527, when Rome was being sacked by mercenary troops of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, Pope Clement VII took refuge in the Castel Sant’Angelo, by simply walking briskly, disguised in a cloak and hood, along Il Passetto from the Vatican, followed no doubt by an entourage carrying a month’s supply of food and drink. Il Passetto recently figured in another, less violent conflict between church and state: Arches were cut into the walls of Il Passetto not long ago to allow traffic to pass through, and in 1990 shards of tile and crumbs of brick began falling down upon the buses and taxis that used the new roadway. This led to a diplomatic tug-of-war between the Vatican and the Italian Republic, as each claimed that the other owned the wall and should undertake repairs. The dispute was finally solved last year, when the Italian government agreed to buy title to the wall for a token sum. Restoration work on Il Passetto has begun.

BY SLAYING HIS BROTHER for unceremoniously breaching them, Romulus announced from the start that the walls of Rome were to be taken seriously. Indeed, they were designed to protect the city not only from military aggression but also from perceived cultural or religious impurity. Thus, for instance, the burial of common citizens, slaves, Jews and early Christians was forbidden inside the walls. So was the construction of “non-Roman” structures--as Gaius Cestius, who was in charge of catering for divine ceremonies and who died 12 years before the birth of Jesus, found out. He designed his own tomb in the form of an Egyptian pyramid, but had to build it well outside “official” Rome.

Ironically, by the time Aurelian constructed his massive wall around the city 200 years later, Rome had expanded to reach the site of the pyramid--and the wall was designed to include a corner of the structure. Constructed in less than a year’s time, of brick with a marble facing, the pyramid must have been an impressive sight even by Roman standards, standing almost 90 feet tall. Inside, there isn’t much to see--just some minor wall paintings, as Roman citizens learned in the 1980s when the government opened the tomb for a day--and Cestius himself was hardly a major figure. Nonetheless, probably precisely because it was incorporated into Aurelian’s walls, his pyramid is the only ancient Roman tomb that remains intact in the city today, untouched by vandals or property developers--and this in itself confers upon the onetime caterer a certain lasting fame.

The significance of being “inside” the walls of Rome has been pointed up in quite another way rather more recently: One of the most famous Catholic churches in Rome is San Paolo fuori le Mura, St. Paul’s Outside the Walls--built beyond the limits of Christian Rome in the 4th Century, on what was said to have been St. Paul’s burial place. (The original church was destroyed by fire in 1823, and rebuilt according to the original design.) In 1870, anti-papal Italian troops broke through the walls of Rome with cannon-fire, wrenching the government of the city from the Vatican. Members of the city’s American Episcopalian community--who had previously been forbidden even to hold services within the city proper, much less to build a place of worship there--promptly began construction on a church of their own. They named it, quite pointedly, St. Paul’s Within-the-Walls.

THE CHURCH OF SAN Clemente, on the Via di San Giovanni in Laterano, is a multilevel history of Rome, wall upon wall, under (and partially far under) one roof. On street level, one enters a 12th-Century church, unfortunately “modernized” with some baroque additions in the 18th Century. One flight down are the walls of a 4th-Century church, excavated only in 1857 and adorned with wonderful frescoes dating from the 8th through 12th centuries. One of these is a portrait long venerated as that of the Virgin Mary, but now believed to represent the Byzantine Empress Theodora (AD 508?-548). There is also a remarkable 9th-Century fresco of the “Last Judgment,” quite unlike Michelangelo’s version of the scene in the Sistine Chapel. Here, everyone marches confidently toward Paradise, wearing beaming smiles.

Another flight down--about 60 feet below modern street level--is a 3rd-Century temple dedicated to the Persian cult of Mithraism. Until the Mithraic cult was outlawed in AD 395, it threatened to overtake Christianity in popularity. Further excavations at this level have revealed a 6th-Century sacristy used by Pope Gregory I, a 1st-Century sarcophagus, and a mysterious huge wall of volcanic stone, with no doors, no apertures of any kind. According to one theory, this is the wall of a vault in the new mint Nero is known to have built after the Great Fire destroyed much of old Rome in AD 64.

THE WOULD-BE EMPEROR of 20th-Century Rome liked to build walls too. Between the Piazza Venezia and the Colosseum, along a boulevard built by Benito Mussolini for triumphal military parades, there is a brick retaining wall adorned with three large bas-relief stone maps. The first delineates the extent of the ancient Roman Empire at its modest beginnings; the second shows the Empire at the height of its grandeur, stretching from Scotland to Turkey; the third depicts Mussolini’s own brief “empire”--basically Italy itself and the only three countries he ever conquered (however briefly): Libya, Ethiopia and Albania. This remnant of Fascist braggadocio seems alternately ridiculous and sobering--but in either case, it seems a good thing that it wasn’t destroyed in a fit of post-Fascist political correctness.

There’s a whole collection of walls dating from the Fascist era in the Roman suburb known as EUR--for Esposzizione Universale di Roma. This Universal Exposition, a World’s Fair planned by Mussolini for 1942, never took place; it was called off because of World War II. Construction stopped and the site stood more or less empty until the late 1950s, when work was resumed in anticipation of the 1960 Rome Olympics. Today, the massive buildings constructed for the fair house several interesting museums--one of Italian folk art and traditional tools and costumes, one of Roman culture (including a remarkable scale model of Rome in the 4th Century, supposedly including representations of every building then standing in the city) and one of prehistoric and ethnographic artifacts. EUR has a sort of lunar aspect today, its walls faced in white marble or travertine stone, its streets strangely lifeless--though many of the smaller buildings are now occupied by offices or by apartments, increasingly trendy in a kitschy way.

Mussolini was also responsible for the construction of a place where most of the walls were, by design, highly temporary--Cinecitta, the gigantic film studio he had built outside the city in 1938. Here the great postwar masterpieces of Italian neo-realist cinema were produced; here (and in Rome itself) Fellini made his great paeans to Roman life--”La Dolce Vita,” “Fellini Roma” and the rest; here Clint Eastwood was reborn as the star of Sergio Leone’s “spaghetti Westerns.” In the ‘70s and ‘80s, Cinecitta languished, production having been largely driven out of Italy by rising costs. Today, though, it is enjoying the beginnings of a revival, with both television crews and at least occasional major filmmakers taking over its stages--redesigning its walls, as it were, again and again.

ONE THING ABOUT THE walls of Rome that nearly everybody notices--and comes to love--is their harmony of color. Rome is basically ochre. Warm, glowing, earthy ochre. There have always been variations in shade, of course, and the older paint jobs tended to fade into an appealing terra-cotta hue. Now, though, all that is changing: In the past five years, acrylic paints in hues that defy polite definition have invaded Rome, covering over apartment blocks, palaces and churches alike--sometimes in two- or three-toned variations, to accentuate the ornament or architecture of a facade. Municipal authorities seem to have surrendered all control over the appearance of the city. The whole place is starting to look like one big ad for “the United Colors of Benetton.” Well, the walls of Rome have survived barbarians, papal politics and world wars. They will probably survive pastels.

GUIDEBOOK

For Wall Followers

Telephone numbers and prices: The country code for Italy is 39. The area code for Rome is 6 from outside Italy, 06 from within the country. All prices are approximate and are computed at a rate of 1,550 lire to the dollar. Hotel rates are for a double room for one night.

Getting there: Alitalia flies nonstop from Los Angeles to Rome three times a week.

Where to stay: A few hotels, all centrally located, that are particularly recommended: Hotel Hassler Villa Medici, Piazza Trinita,del Monti 6, tel. 678-2651, fax 678-9991, a super-deluxe establishment at the top of the Spanish Steps. Rates: $335-$450. Hotel Flora, Via Vittorio Veneto 191, tel. 497-821, comfortable and shabby-genteel, one narrow street away from the Aurelian wall. Rate: $190. Hotel Margutta, Via Laurina 34, tel. 322-3674, basic facilities in an attractive neighborhood near the Piazza del Popolo. Rate: $80.

What to see: Castel Sant’Angelo, Lungotevere Castello. Open Monday from 2 to 4 p.m.; Tuesday through Saturday from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m.; Sunday from 9 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Church of San Clemente, Via di San Giovanni in Laterano. Open Monday through Saturday from 9 a.m. to noon and 3:30 to 6:30 p.m.; Sunday from 10 a.m. to noon and 3:30 to 6:30 p.m. Museo delle Mure, Porta di San Sebastiano, Via Appia Antica. Open Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.; Thursday from 4 to 7 p.m.

For more information: Italian Government Tourist Board, 12400 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 550, Los Angeles 90025; (310) 820-0098.