Ostia Antica

While in Morocco last March, we visited the extensive ruins of Volubilis, the far southwestern frontier of Rome's over-extended empire. It is stunningly located at the base of a mountain overlooking a fertile plain, but now grass and wildflowers crowd the gray stones, and storks build giant nests on top of the remaining columns. Alone among the ruins, one feels very far from Rome in both space and time. The site is a poetic reminder of greatness and its inevitable demise.

Storks on columns

Two weeks later, we were at the heart of the Roman Empire, surrounded by the grandest Roman monuments: the Coliseum, the Pantheon, the Forum and Palantine Hill. More greatness, more demise, but less poetic.

But then we day-tripped from Rome to Rome's very first colony, Ostia Antica. Back in the day, this was where the Tiber River widened out into the sea, making Ostia both Rome's de facto port and its first line of defense. I thought Volubilus was impressive in size and state of general intactness. But Ostia is bigger (we only saw a fraction of it) and even better preserved (from the temples down to the tenements).

The amphitheater is still there, unsurprisingly, but so are the public latrines (next to the public baths), mosaics advertising shops, mill stones, a tavern with a honest-to-goodness bar, a small synagogue, and multi-story apartment buildings. Perhaps it was all the reminders of the normalcy of life, a theme echoed even in the surrounding countryside's pleasant but undifferentiated scenery - but Ostia was the closest I've come yet to imagining what it was like to live in a Roman city.

This was not a feeling I felt while touring Rome's Forum or Coliseum, with cars and buildings all around and crowds of tourists in the hot afternoon sun. Or in Volubilus, where Rome felt so distant and nature had a stronger narrative than the stones. But out in the Roman countryside, with the wind in the trees of neighboring orchards and the walls of everyday houses still standing, timelessness set in, and the ancient felt that much closer.