Digging up Rome

It is often said that you can’t repair a water main, break ground for a parking garage or dig up a potato in Rome without finding a treasure.

The roots of the Eternal City, which just celebrated its 2,762nd birthday, go deep and are still being unearthed. When first plumbed in the 16th century, the layer cake underneath the city yielded classical artifacts that helped inform the Renaissance.

Almost as inevitably as yellow mimosas bloom in the spring, archaeologists keep coming here, wrangling excavation permits and opening trenches. Passersby see red-and-white-striped plastic tape and piles of dirt, but rarely learn what is being sought in the rubble, because when a dig yields an important find, it takes years of negotiation, fundraising, preservation, public-access construction and scholarly interpretation to open a site to visitors.

As a resident, I often pass excavation sites and wonder what is going on. I got a chance to find out last fall when I visited a dig in Aqueduct Park, on the southeastern side of the city, where an ancient water conduit makes a broad bend on its way into the capital. Since 2006, when the American Institute for Roman Culture began an archaeological dig, the park has yielded treasures: intricately worked mosaics, the head of a god thought to be Zeus and structural evidence of a 1st or 2nd century bathing complex larger and more sophisticated than any yet found in the area immediately surrounding Rome.

Records identify it as the site of the Villa delle Vignacce, owned during Imperial Roman times by brick manufacturer Quintus Servilius Pudens.

It is unclear whether the multistory bathhouse, with its intact Roman saunas, was part of a private villa or a public complex.

In either case, the site calls into question long-held concepts about the configuration of Imperial Rome.

“To find an urban-style bathhouse in suburban Rome is striking,” said Darius Arya, the institute’s director.

Lacking funds to preserve the dig last winter, Arya summoned an earth mover to cover it, obscuring the hard evidence of the discovery.

Before doing so, however, he enlisted Gabriele Guidi, an associate professor at Milan Polytechnic, to document the site. Using advanced laser technology, they assembled a virtually enhanced plan of the bathing complex.

That’s good news for scholars, but of scant interest to tourists. Arya said that shoring up the site, encircling it with a semi-permanent fence and building roof structures to protect it from the elements during the digging off-season, which usually lasts from October to April, would have cost more than $500,000.

In 2006 and 2007, excavation work at Villa delle Vignacce was underwritten first by the American Express Foundation, then by private donors. Last fall, Arya hoped for support from Rome to keep the site open, but city money did not materialize, and private funding has dwindled in the wake of the global economic meltdown.

Umberto Broccoli, the city’s superintendent for cultural heritage, has begun to reevaluate such work in the Italian capital, pressing archaeologists to find money not just for excavation but for site preservation as well.

Broccoli likened archaeological sites to children. “It takes a great deal to maintain them,” he said. “If we can’t properly look after them, do we need more children?”

The emphasis on preservation includes rethinking the way the city’s scant funds are being allocated at high-profile sites such as Circus Maximus, a chariot racecourse just south of the Roman Forum, known to have been used until 549. Tourists can visit the site, but it has suffered from poor drainage, and layers of earth have obscured the original track.

The city has found $2.85 million to restore the site, but only a fraction will go toward excavation. The rest is earmarked for creating a park-like space so that visitors will be able to stroll in the footsteps of charioteers.

“Conservation is now coming to the fore in a systematic way,” said Giorgio Buccellati, professor emeritus at UCLA’s Cotsen Institute of Archaeology. “But it costs money, which is hard enough to find for excavation.”

An alarming failure to preserve archaeological discoveries occurred at Herculaneum, a Bay of Naples town that was buried, along with Pompeii, by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in AD 79.

Excavation there in the 1980s left the low-lying site an eyesore and endangered extremely perishable findings made of wood, cloth and papyrus.

The town’s imperiled condition prompted David W. Packard, president of the Los Altos, Calif.-based Packard Humanities Institute, to pledge $100 million to the Herculaneum Conservation Project, which is trying to fend off further degradation, implement long-term conservation strategies and fully document the site.

Almost as important as conservation is the process of preparing sites for public visitation. This entails providing safe access and clear explanations for guidebook-toting sightseers.

Despite diminishing public funds -- a 30% cut in the budget of the Italian culture ministry is expected in the next three years -- there have been several important public openings of archaeological sites in Rome, including the 2007 debut of the Museum of the Imperial Forums. One of a 15-member chain of museums overseen by the city’s cultural heritage department, it occupies the stunningly restored ruins of Trajan’s Market near the Piazza Venezia.

And last spring, the Italian government opened a series of frescoed chambers in the home of Emperor Augustus on the Palatine Hill.

The fabled Palatine, a precinct of palaces overlooking the Forum, is where the city’s mythological founder Romulus was born, and thus, Rome’s ground zero. Last year, archaeologists announced the discovery of a sanctuary there that is thought to enshrine the tomb of Romulus.

The find is considered noteworthy enough to justify continued digging. But it could be decades before visitors get to see the Romulus sanctuary. Unusually heavy rain in December felled trees, flooded sewers and left massive puddles on the Palatine, endangering archaeological treasures.

Back at Aqueduct Park, the reburied ruins of the Villa delle Vignacce bathhouse were unaffected by the weather. As Arya said, the best way to preserve an archaeological site from the elements and public degradation is to cover it up.

Be that as it may, the organization raised enough funds to reopen the dig this summer, though in a different section of the site.

And so, whenever I go walking in Rome, I keep my eyes glued to the pavement, wondering what’s down there.

It’s maddening not to know, but an inescapable part of the Rome experience.

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susan.spano@latimes.com

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Archaeological activities

Visiting archaeological sites where digs are underway and tourist access is limited is generally discouraged. But there are tours and programs in Rome for people interested in archaeology. Here’s a sampling:

- The Archaeological Institute of America, with headquarters in Boston, sponsors a range of travel programs, including some that explore Rome and Greece. For information contact: AIA Tours, P.O. Box 938, 47 Main St., Suite 1, Walpole, NH 03608; (800) 748-6262.

- Context Travel, 40 Via Baccina, Rome, 011-39-06-482-0911 or (888) 467-1986 in the United States, www.contexttravel.com, offers cultural tours led by docents who are experts in such fields as cuisine, classical history and architecture. Context’s 3 1/2 -hour “Underground Rome: The Hidden City” visits sites where archaeological excavations are underway, including the Crypta Balbi and the Church of San Nicola in Carcere. Group tours cost about $70 per person, and private tours can be arranged.

- Excavations below St. Peter’s Basilica, Excavations Office, Fabbrica di San Pietro, Vatican City, 011-39-06-698-85318, www.vatican.va /roman_curia/institutions_connected/uffscavi/

documents/rc_ic_uffscavi_doc_

gen-information_20040112_en.html, are part of a Vatican tour that takes visitors into the necropolis below St. Peter’s, where St. Peter the Apostle, the first Catholic pontiff, is thought to have been buried -- for many people, both a religious and archaeological ground zero. Reservations must be made in writing by e-mail or fax: scavi@fsp.va, 011-39-06-698-73017. Tickets cost about $13 per person.

- Gruppo Archeologico Romano, 168 Via Baldo delgi Ubaldi, Rome, 011-39-06-638-5256, www.gruppoarcheologico.it, is part of an Italian organization that offers hands-on archaeological summer camps in English. In Rome, the organization offers courses conducted by experts at such sites as the Villa of Augustus on Palatine Hill and the early Christian baptistery of St. John the Baptist at the Basilica of San Giovanni in Laterano.

- Rome Rewind, 5 Via Capo d’Africa, Rome, 011-39-06-77076627, www.3drewind.com, is a high-tech, three-dimensional animated program, especially good for kids, that uses as its premise the discovery of an archaeological site near the Colosseum, where gladiators prepared for combat. From there, it brings to life sites all around the Forum as they were about 310, helping prepare visitors for explorations in the nearby ruins. Tickets are $14 for adults and $10 for kids.