Rome in the Footsteps of an XVIIIth Century Traveller

Gregoriopolis

Early XIXth century map showing Ostia Moderna (Gregoriopolis)

31st December. This Day I went down to Ostia. It is at a distance of about 16 Miles from Rome. (..) Soon after leaving the City, past the ruins of the Cathedral of St. Paul, wh. was burnt in 1823, you become aware of the deserted character of the Country - scarce a Tree, for miles not the face of a human Being. In the Winter, you have Cattle & Buffalos grazing & wading, in the Summer, all return to the Mountains, flying from the Pestilence wh. tyrannises & destroys in the plain. But I found no sense of Sadness in this solitude. (..) You approach modern Ostia by means of a long flat bridge with a paved roadway, wh. is made across the marsh, here deep, & of course impassable without such artificial assistance. (..) The Town is of a very few houses with a Church & Inn, but it has no appearance of Misery, there is nothing sad in it except its Solitude.
Sir Charles Fergusson - Travel Journal in Italy 1824-1825
Modern Ostia is 15 miles from Rome, and about 3 miles from the sea. It consists of a fortress built in the time of Sixtus IV. by his nephew Card. Giuliano della Rovere, bishop of Ostia, afterwards Julius II., of a few wretched houses and of the church of S. Aurea, rebuilt by the same Cardinal, and containing a chapel sacred to St. Monica, mother of St. Augustine who died at ancient Ostia. (..) Before reaching Ostia we meet the salt ponds of Ancus Martius, now become mephitic pools. (..) The present wretched village was founded, in 830, by Greg. IV. at a distance of about a mile from the ancient city.
Rev. Jeremiah Donovan - Rome, ancient and modern: and its environs - 1842

Walls and gate of Gregoriopolis

Towards the end of the VIIIth century the power of the Byzantine Empire in Italy was reduced to the control of a few coastal cities in southern Italy and Sicily.
In 826 the Arabs or, as they were more often called, the Saracens occupied Crete and in 828 they started the conquest of Sicily. The coasts of Latium became vulnerable to attacks by the Saracens and the Pope had to take care of the defence of Rome. Because of this threat between 842 and 843 Pope Gregory IV built a fortified village, pompously called Gregoriopolis, near ancient Ostia. Its walls, notwithstanding the fact that they were reinforced in later periods, clearly show the limited resources which were available to the Pope.

View from the castle

The Saracens landed at the mouth of the Tiber in 846 and they did not bother about Gregoriopolis: they went on towards Rome and sacked the Vatican which was outside the walls erected by the Emperor Aurelian. They had established a permanent settlement at the mouth of the River Garigliano, near Minturno and from there they made raids inland as far as Subiaco.

Palazzo Apostolico - Stanze di Raffaello: The Battle of Ostia

"Leo IV. says Gibbon, was born a Roman; the courage of the first ages of the republic glowed in his breast; and, amidst the ruins of his country, he stood erect, like one of the firm and lofty columns, that rear their heads above the fragments of the Roman forum." He formed an alliance with the vassals of the Greek empire, with Gajeta, Naples, and Amalfi and their combined fleets engaged and defeated the Saracens near the port of Ostia. Donovan
Every artist will sketch the Castle of Ostia (it is covered in page two), and will remember as he works, that Raphael sketched it long ago, and that, from his sketch, Giovanni da Udine painted it in the background of his grand fresco of the victory over the Saracens, in the Stanza of the Incendio del Borgo in the Vatican, for here the enemy were as totally defeated in the reign of Leo IV. (a.d. 847 - 856).
Augustus J. C. Hare - Days near Rome - 1873
In 849 a fleet of ships from the maritime towns of Naples, Amalfi, Sorrento and Gaeta defeated the Saracens at Ostia, but the threat of their raids faded out only after 915 when Pope John X managed to form a new coalition and to personally take part in the battle which eradicated the Saracens from their permanent base.

Coats of arms of Cardinals who were bishops of Ostia and Velletri: (left) Guillaume d'Estouteville (in 1461- 1483 - main gate); (centre-above) Alfonso Gesualdo (in 1591-1603 - S. Aurea); (right) Francesco Maria Bourbon del Monte (in 1623-1626 - courtyard of the castle); (centre-below) Domenico Ginnasi (in 1630-1639 - Spedale di S. Sebastiano near the archaeological site)

The transformation of the classic Campagna into the present waste began with the first barbarian incursions. (..) Malaria, which had been kept at bay for five centuries by sheer determination and the ingenuity of Roman farmers and villa-builders, again took possession of the doomed land, and the few survivors, helpless in their desolation, raised their hands to heaven.
Rodolfo Lanciani - Wanderings in the Roman Campagna - 1909
The Popes, on their election, if not already in orders, are consecrated by the Bishop of Ostia, Ostia being the most ancient see. On account of the poverty and desertion of the place, it is now united to that of Velletri.
Sir William Gell - The topography of Rome and its vicinity - 1834
Some accounts state that this most ancient see was founded by the apostles themselves; others consider that Pope Urban I. (a.d. 222) was its founder, and announce St. Ciriacus as its first bishop. The bishop of Ostia (..) bears the title of "Dean of the Sacred College." Hare
The key reason behind the survival of Gregoriopolis was its being the most ancient bishopric see and its being assigned to the Dean of the Sacred College, the most senior cardinal. That applies also to the survival of a tiny fortified village at Porto, another ancient see which was assigned to the second in rank cardinal.

Houses of Gregoriopolis near the gate and ancient stones and marbles which were used for building it

Pope Martin V and Cardinal d'Estouteville among others strengthened the fortifications of Gregoriopolis and brought a new population there. In 1471 Giuliano della Rovere was made cardinal by his uncle Pope Sixtus IV. In 1483, after becoming Bishop of Ostia and Velletri, he undertook a plan for a large renovation of Gregoriopolis and most of what we see today belongs to that period.

(left) S. Aurea and the Bishop's Palace to its left; (right) a relief of the façade

During the pontificate of Pope Sixtus IV, there lived in Rome one Baccio Pintelli, a Florentine, who was rewarded for the great skill that he had in architecture by being employed by that Pope in all his building enterprises. (..) He also rebuilt the structure of the new Hospital of S. Spirito in Sassia (which was burnt down almost to the foundations in the year 1471), adding to it a very long loggia and all the useful conveniences that could be desired. (..) For Cardinal Giuliano, Bishop of Ostia, he made the model of his church, with that of the facade and of the steps, in the manner wherein they are seen to-day.
Giorgio Vasari - Lives of the most eminent painters, sculptors & architects - transl. by G. Du C. De Vere
The Cathedral of S. Aurea is dedicated to a martyr of the IIIrd century, a young girl whose Greek name Chryse was latinized into Aurea (golden). Cardinal della Rovere did not find it inappropriate for a church to be decorated with Roman war symbols, similar to what he did at Abbazia di Grottaferrata. The reliefs were inspired by paintings discovered in those years at Domus Aurea in Rome. The image used as background for this page is based on the coat of arms of the della Rovere.

Interior which retains its original Renaissance design

The tiny town, huddled into the narrow fortified space, which forms as it were an outer bastion of the castle, contains the small semi-Gothic cathedral (?), a work of Baccio Pintelli, with a rose-window, but scarcely larger than a chapel, and seeming out of keeping with the historical recollections which we have of many mighty cardinal bishops. Hare
The façade of the Cathedral has the proportions of a classic temple and it was not modified after its construction. Some titular cardinals of Ostia embellished S. Aurea, but not many, because the population of Gregoriopolis was always very small (you may wish to see the rich 1698 baptismal font which was donated by Cardinal Alderano Cybo).

A view of Gregoriopolis from the gate

The present town of Ostia is a miserable fortified village, containing scarcely fifty sickly inhabitants. Such is the badness of the air, real or supposed, that none but malefactors and banditti will inhabit it.
John Chetwode Eustace - A Classical Tour through Italy in 1802
There are few inhabitants at Ostia, on account of its unwholesome air; and of all the wretched places on the coast in the vicinity of Rome, Ostia, in its present state, is one of the most melancholy. Gell
The present abandonment of Ostia is owing to its malaria , and to the opening of the other branch of the Tiber in 1612. Donovan
In 1557 an extraordinary flood caused a permanent deviation in the flow of the Tiber and Gregoriopolis and the castle lost their importance as a customs collection point. Things worsened in 1612 when Pope Paul V dug again the artificial channel which in Roman times linked the river with the artificial harbour of Porto.

Interior of the castle - from Ostia Antica: (above) a worn out sarcophagus similar to one at S. Maria Antiqua; (below) a floor mosaic similar to one near the Forum of Ostia

The desolate causeway leading to Ostia is now peopled with marble figures; heroes standing armless by the wayside, ladies reposing headless amid the luxuriant thistle-growth. Hare
The first excavations at Ostia Antica began in the late XVIIIth century with the aim of finding statues for the antiquarian market. A more structured approach was promoted in 1809 by Pope Pius VII. The castle and the houses of Gregoriopolis were used as a temporary accommodation and storeroom for most of the XIXth century. The excavations were suspended in summer.

Façade of the Bishop's Palace: (above) fragment of a cornice and front of a sarcophagus with two Victories holding the portrait of the dead in a clipeus and two genii; (below) fragments of sarcophagi

In the episcopal palace are some ancient monuments, collected on the spot by the late Card. Pacca, when bishop of Ostia. Donovan
Cardinal Bartolomeo Pacca had excavations made in Ostia at his own expense in 1830-1844; and with the objects discovered, he formed a small museum in his vineyard on Via Aurelia, the Casino of Pius V. He promoted a law prohibiting the exodus from Rome of artistic treasures preserved in private galleries.

A street of the burg

The peasants do all their field labour here in gangs, men and women together. (..) They have hard work to fight against the deep-rooted asphodels, which overrun whole pastures and destroy the grass, and they have also the constantly recurring malaria to struggle against, borne up every night by the poisonous vapours of the marsh, which renders Ostia almost uninhabitable even to the natives in summer, and death to the stranger who attempts to pass the night there. Hare
The present generation has once more conquered the evil: Rome has become the best drained, the best watered, the healthiest capital of Europe, London perhaps excepted: and cases of malaria, even near the former lagoons of Ostia, Ardea, Vaccarese, and Campo Salino, have diminished in number and in virulence. Ostia, the population of which, from the beginning of July to the end of September, was reduced to three fever-stricken caretakers, has now become a pleasant rendez-vous for Sunday excursionists. Lanciani
In 1884-1904 the marshy land around Gregoriopolis was reclaimed and this undertaking was celebrated by a little monument.

Move to page two: The Castle of Pope Julius II.