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Authors: Paul Bannister
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of narrow streets and crowded, towering tenement buildings, some of them four and five teetering storeys high.
At street level were the porticoed shop fronts and taverns with their heavy shutters that opened directly onto the cess-stinking streets. There were butchers’ shops with piled shambles of offal outside where lean, yellow dogs snarled and fought over unspeakable entrails; shoemakers who sat in their door holes tapping and stitching as clients waited, idly chatting, for repairs to be made to their footwear. Here was a barber scraping a client’s cheek as it was stretched smooth over a small apple; there a baker piling floury bran loaves on shelves; over there a dyer’s shop where jars of soapwort, tartar salt, saffron, nut-gall and madder were arrayed, ingredients to create the brilliantly-coloured silks and linens sought by fashionable ladies. Every street and dingy, dark alleyway presented a living tableau of traders and services on offer.
Patrolling the alleys and streets were dozens of food vendors who hawked cooked chicken and sausages, olives, cheeses and fruit to the throngs of pedestrians. They competed for attention with the jugglers, beggars and scribes who also made their livings on the streets, just as did the fishmongers who wheeled water carts full of live fish brought from the huge aquaria on the fifth floor of Trajan’s Market.
Above street level, the big-bayed tiers of the apartment blocks presented a standard appearance, the first level of their stone stairways chopped through the line of shops before vanishing inside the structures. The buildings’ layer after layer of brick, rubble, and timber rose above the street in a climbing series of balconies and loggias that reminded the Pict of the seabird colonies on the cliffs of his homeland. There was a difference, he noted grimly. The towering blocks of the rookery-like insulae , that housed nine of every ten of Rome’s million-plus inhabitants, looked to be of the most dangerous, tottering construction, and here and there was the proof – a tumbled, burned-out tenement that had spilled into the street.
Some of the rookeries collapsed from hugely-inferior building techniques when level after shaky level was piled up on an inadequate footprint, others were destroyed when the massive timbers needed to support the weight of the upper storeys caught fire, for none of the insulae had chimneys. People cooked on open fires and heated their rooms with primitive braziers. It was inevitable that there were several house fires in the city every day. If the building was not set afire accidentally, there was a good chance it would collapse of its own poor construction and be consumed as the cooking fires were spilled.
Candless called the guide to him and questioned the man. “There are laws, Lord,” said the guide, “but people ignore them. The buildings are not supposed to be more than 60 feet tall, with outside walls of up to a foot and a half, but many are much taller, the walls are very thin and the floors, for economy, are pathetically fragile. It just takes a bribe or two to the city inspectors, that’s enough to get it all overlooked. They look good, though, don’t they?”
The man referred to the appearance of the outside masonry, which often had a façade of marble or coloured tile, or pebbled patterns set in the brick and concrete skin, and to the flowerpot-adorned balconies and climbing plant-wrapped pillars of the loggias that stretched over their heads. “Looks solid, doesn’t it,” he said, nodding to an especially handsome structure that stretched high over their heads. “But it’s probably propped up with bed slats and straw.”
Candless would learn that almost all of Rome’s citizens lived in about 50,000 apartment blocks, and that only a few, the very wealthy, occupied the 2,000 or so single-storey houses. “You can get hundreds of people in one insula, “ said the guide casually. “But if you don’t live at ground
At street level were the porticoed shop fronts and taverns with their heavy shutters that opened directly onto the cess-stinking streets. There were butchers’ shops with piled shambles of offal outside where lean, yellow dogs snarled and fought over unspeakable entrails; shoemakers who sat in their door holes tapping and stitching as clients waited, idly chatting, for repairs to be made to their footwear. Here was a barber scraping a client’s cheek as it was stretched smooth over a small apple; there a baker piling floury bran loaves on shelves; over there a dyer’s shop where jars of soapwort, tartar salt, saffron, nut-gall and madder were arrayed, ingredients to create the brilliantly-coloured silks and linens sought by fashionable ladies. Every street and dingy, dark alleyway presented a living tableau of traders and services on offer.
Patrolling the alleys and streets were dozens of food vendors who hawked cooked chicken and sausages, olives, cheeses and fruit to the throngs of pedestrians. They competed for attention with the jugglers, beggars and scribes who also made their livings on the streets, just as did the fishmongers who wheeled water carts full of live fish brought from the huge aquaria on the fifth floor of Trajan’s Market.
Above street level, the big-bayed tiers of the apartment blocks presented a standard appearance, the first level of their stone stairways chopped through the line of shops before vanishing inside the structures. The buildings’ layer after layer of brick, rubble, and timber rose above the street in a climbing series of balconies and loggias that reminded the Pict of the seabird colonies on the cliffs of his homeland. There was a difference, he noted grimly. The towering blocks of the rookery-like insulae , that housed nine of every ten of Rome’s million-plus inhabitants, looked to be of the most dangerous, tottering construction, and here and there was the proof – a tumbled, burned-out tenement that had spilled into the street.
Some of the rookeries collapsed from hugely-inferior building techniques when level after shaky level was piled up on an inadequate footprint, others were destroyed when the massive timbers needed to support the weight of the upper storeys caught fire, for none of the insulae had chimneys. People cooked on open fires and heated their rooms with primitive braziers. It was inevitable that there were several house fires in the city every day. If the building was not set afire accidentally, there was a good chance it would collapse of its own poor construction and be consumed as the cooking fires were spilled.
Candless called the guide to him and questioned the man. “There are laws, Lord,” said the guide, “but people ignore them. The buildings are not supposed to be more than 60 feet tall, with outside walls of up to a foot and a half, but many are much taller, the walls are very thin and the floors, for economy, are pathetically fragile. It just takes a bribe or two to the city inspectors, that’s enough to get it all overlooked. They look good, though, don’t they?”
The man referred to the appearance of the outside masonry, which often had a façade of marble or coloured tile, or pebbled patterns set in the brick and concrete skin, and to the flowerpot-adorned balconies and climbing plant-wrapped pillars of the loggias that stretched over their heads. “Looks solid, doesn’t it,” he said, nodding to an especially handsome structure that stretched high over their heads. “But it’s probably propped up with bed slats and straw.”
Candless would learn that almost all of Rome’s citizens lived in about 50,000 apartment blocks, and that only a few, the very wealthy, occupied the 2,000 or so single-storey houses. “You can get hundreds of people in one insula, “ said the guide casually. “But if you don’t live at ground
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