‘There is love and there is respect for the material,’ writes Melotti in a little book of aphorisms entitled Linee (Lines), published by Adelphi in its Piccola Biblioteca Adelphi series. ‘Love is a passion, it can turn into hate: this is a revitalizing drama for an artisan-artist. Respect is like a legal separation: the material demands its rights and everything finishes in a frosty relationship. The true artist does not love or respect his material: it is always “on trial” and everything can go completely wrong (Leonardo, Michelangelo and his works in marble).’
[1981]
The Pig and the Archaeologist
The big news this year, in the excavations at the Roman villa at Settefinestre near Orbetello, is the pig-sty. This is a courtyard which on each of its four sides has many separate compartments separated by little walls and with hollowed-out areas on the ground for the troughs: these were covered by a portico, the only remains of which now are the bases for the supports. As soon as this structure came to light, the first idea was that in each compartment a pig was kept for fattening; and a pig-farmer, asked about this, recognized it as a structure not unlike those used nowadays. But a reading of the classical sources instantly scotched this hypothesis.
Columella’s treatise on agriculture, which belongs to the same period as the villa (first century BC), has a chapter on the rearing of pigs but it never mentions pigs being fattened: it lists the best foods for pigs, but it always refers to their eating while in pasture in the woods. Instead the location of this pig-sty made it clear that it was for sows during pregnancy, as well as for the birth and suckling of the young.
‘Pigs should not to be housed together, in the manner of other herd animals,’ writes Columella. ‘Their sties should be built in the fashion of colonnades, in which the sows can be contained after farrowing and even while pregnant; for sows, more than any other animals, when they are packed together tightly in a disorderly fashion, can lie on top of each other, thus causing abortions. Therefore, as I have said, sties should be constructed with party walls between them, each four feet in height, so that the sow cannot jump over them. They should not have roofs, so that the swineherd can look in from above to count the number of piglets or to check whether any sow is lying on top of her litter and crushing one of them, in which case he can pull it from under her’ (Columella, On Agriculture, 7.9.9–10).
The excavations at Settefinestre have thus brought to light a pig-sty that corresponds exactly to the description in Columella, that is to say a huge labour ward for the production of piglets, each sow having a pen (in Latin hara-harae) to herself. In fact a fundamental difference distinguishes modern pig-rearing, which aims primarily at fattened pigs, from its Roman equivalent, which was geared primarily towards high numbers of pigs and their ability to move around. The reason for this was that the pigs were not slaughtered at the villa: they had to reach the city on their own legs, in huge groups (just like cattle in the Far West, which were accompanied by cowboys all the way to the abattoirs in Chicago, before the invention of freezer wagons). Thus while the male pigs always lived and fed in the open, the pens or harae were reserved for the sows during the four months of their gestation period and the three weeks of suckling. In the pig-sty at Settefinestre there are twenty-seven such harae: counting twenty-seven sows capable of bearing eight piglets each time they are brought to birth, and the fact that they give birth twice a year, one can work out that the production rate here was around 400 head of pigs a year.
However, suckling the young presented problems: not only for the Roman pig-rearers but also for today’s archaeologists. Columella recommends that each sow should suckle only her own young, because when the piglets get mixed up, they start sucking the teats of any sow, and since the mothers also make no distinction between their own young and those of others, some sows would have been absolutely exhausted, and the more greedy piglets would have been hyper-nourished while others would be dying from lack of food. So the most precious skill the guardian possessed, according to Columella, was memory: the ability to recognize the young of each sow and avoid confusion. An extremely difficult task: one can be helped by placing a sign made with pitch on each suckling pig from the same brood, but ‘the most convenient solution is to equip the sties (that is, the harae, or the individual pens) with thresholds that are low enough for the sow to step over but too high for the suckling pig to climb’ (Columella, On Agriculture, 7.9.13).
Here Columella no longer agrees with the site at Settefinestre, where they discovered low thresholds; and he does not agree even with Varro (whose treatise De re rustica is no less detailed and precise than Columella’s), for Varro says that the thresholds have to be low, otherwise the pregnant sows would crash into them with their bellies and abort. (But Varro did not agree even with himself since a few lines later he too mentions a high threshold to prevent the piglets escaping.)
There is only one way to solve all these contradictions: to excavate and carefully bring to light even the smallest details. In fact it turns out that the thresholds of these harae have a groove running along them that is not found in the stone of any other threshold here. What else could this rut be for except for inserting a barrier made of vertical planks, a sliding door that the guardian could lift up to let the sow through but then lower in order to keep the piglets from escaping. Thus the thresholds were low or high according to needs. Thus also, by wielding the trowel with respect for every trace of life as it is lived, archaeological tests show that the facts are not in contradiction with the classics, and not only this but also that the classics are not in contradiction with themselves.
Beneath the ground nothing is lost, or at least the maximum amount of information is preserved; but it is in the act of digging that one risks destroying what the centuries have preserved for us, if the correct technique is not used. Italian archaeology has always had a tendency to privilege the architectural and monumental: it is inspired only by triumphal arches, columns, theatres, baths, and it considers all the rest as unimportant fragments. In countries which are less rich in monumental remains a different school has emerged which has now spread throughout the world and which in Italy has a passionate apostle in Andrea Carandini: archaeology as the search in every layer of the earth for minimal signs and clues from which we can reconstruct daily, practical life, business, agriculture, the phases of the history of society. This is an approach that consists entirely of hypotheses and tests, which proceeds by trial and error, by enigmas and deductions and inductions, as in the case of the pig-sty.
Every summer for the last five years about fifty young Italian and British students have been helping with the excavations at Settefinestre under the direction of Andrea Carandini. They are male and female archaeology or conservation students who are volunteers completing a placement. Every morning you see them working with picks and shovels and brushing shards of pottery under the sun for eight hours (on site the working day goes from six in the morning until half past two in the afternoon), working with the kind of enthusiasm in the face of hard labour that one usually finds only in activities that offer immediate gratification. To be precise I have to say that the first thing that strikes you is that it is the girls who are hammering with picks and spades and pushing laden wheelbarrows, while it seems as if the boys prefer calmer, lighter work. However that may be, seeing them all together, one has an impression of young people today that is different from the one usually offered by newspapers, but which perhaps best represents the many things towards which people aspire today: collective effort and individual accomplishment, concentration and nonchalance, alacrity and relaxation.
The secret weapon or symbolic emblem of the new archaeology is a trowel that is much smaller than the on
e used by Italian builders but which is currently favoured by British ones. The technique of digging without causing disasters, favoured by British archaeologists, perhaps stems from the fact that they had this simple tool to hand. Not having an Italian verb as handy as this tool, at Settefinestre they have coined a verb ‘trowelare’, from the English word trowel.
The fragments that are the result of the collapses that have occurred over the centuries are brought to light layer by layer, then drawn and photographed just as they have been found, described on meticulous index-cards, then taken away and placed on plastic trays in the arrangement in which they were discovered. They might be bits of tiles from a collapsed roof, pieces of frescoed plaster from the walls or ceiling, broken crockery, all the way down to mosaics from floors. Then in a laboratory (at the University of Siena) they are classified and numbered, and they start piecing the puzzle together again.
The villa at Settefinestre has very many things to tell us about Roman society and economy in the republican and imperial eras, and not all of them were even hidden underground. What has remained visible for twenty-one centuries must have been the first thing that one saw even then, travelling along the Roman road at the bottom of the valley: a surrounding wall crowned with towers (fake towers to provide an almost theatrical illusion that these were the walls of a city in the distance). This wall surrounded a garden at the end of which rose up a monumental façade, with a portico and above it a loggia with a panoramic outlook (the loggia had collapsed and the columns had been removed, but the arches of the portico were still visible: that was why this mound was given the name Settefinestre, ‘seven windows’).
The monumental aspect of the villa, in a position that dominates those areas that were initially and would later still be amongst the most desolate in the Maremma, was meant to stress the importance of the family that had invested capital and slaves in a huge business producing and exporting wine and olive oil. We are near the town of Cosa (the Roman town later identified with the supposed town of Ansedonia), in whose harbour have been found huge quantities of wine amphorae with the mark of the Sestius family. The same mark can be found on amphorae found in the remains of Roman ships on the French and Spanish coasts, as well as in archaeological excavations in the Rhône and Loire valleys. Since the same initials are found on objects from Settefinestre, this seems to prove that the villa belonged to the Roman senatorial family of the Sestii. Partisans of Sulla, the Sestii benefited from the confiscation of land after the civil war between Marius and Sulla, and established themselves in the area round Cosa, where a first phase of agriculture by military settlers (this was the ‘centuriation’ of lands distributed to the soldiers) had for some time been in a state of crisis and then stagnation. The great technological revolution of intensive agriculture was made possible by the availability of slaves who were prisoners of war and belonged to a few wealthy families, thus allowing the training of a specialized workforce.
We know very little about the life of slaves from written accounts, and one of the main sources of interest in Settefinestre lies in the information we can deduce from that part of the villa that was reserved for slaves, a self-standing wing that was however joined to the core of the building and divided into cells: a layout not dissimilar to that found in soldiers’ quarters, in those sites where there are traces of Roman military camps. It is calculated that each cell could have housed four slaves, and, judging from the part of the villa that has been excavated so far, it can be said that it had about forty slaves, a figure that matches evidence from authors of the time. For the time being we cannot say whether their life was that of prisoners who were housed as in barracks without women, or whether each of these cells could hold a family with a wife and children (thus constituting a kind of slave-farm, given the huge convenience of being able to multiply this fundamental source of energy). The excavations in the slave quarters have less to ‘say’ than those in the masters’ quarters, because the walls have no frescoes or ornaments and there are very few fragments of objects. A ceramic cup with the name Encolpius in graffiti on it is one of the few messages the slaves have sent us.
Thus one building contained a luxury residence for the masters, barracks for the slaves and a working farm business (the cellars with the wine and oil presses have been excavated entirely and have allowed us to understand the techniques used). The Roman ‘villa’ was a productive unit: each villa was in charge of about 500 acres of arable land (roughly 125 hectares). The Sestii certainly possessed several villas in the area, but this one, it seems, had a special role as a residence and as a showcase for their wealth. The management of the land made the presence of the owners necessary for at least part of the year; for that reason the residential area had to allow them a high quality of life, one that did not make the owners long for the comforts of the city.
That is why we find the panoramic loggia which links to an internal colonnaded garden through a room called the exedra; an atrium with an impluvium to collect rain-water and a mosaic floor; three or perhaps four triclinia or dining-rooms with frescoed walls, each one used for one season of the year; six living rooms, amongst which is a rare example of a ‘Corinthian room’; four bedrooms, each with two alcoves and bases for wardrobes. As for the garden, we can work out its shape and the position of the flower-beds, since the latter were dug out from the rock and then filled with humus.
On one slope of the hill an area of about one hectare is surrounded by a high stone wall: it is probably a leporarium, that is to say a reserve for wild animals such as hares, boars, roe-deer, guarded by slaves who were also hunters. According to Varro, this kind of game-rearing was one of the luxuries of the time. It also acted as a place for displays: Varro tells of a landowner who exhibited himself on his land dressed as Orpheus, surrounded by deer and bucks.
The period in which the villa functioned, according to Andrea Carandini, lasted little more than two centuries, from the first half of the first century BC to the beginning of the second century AD; but the period of its greatest splendour was certainly shorter than that. One could say that Italy’s economic and not only economic decadence began at the zenith of the Roman Empire, when it was the most distant imperial provinces and not the Italian peninsula that created the riches that Rome absorbed. Archaeological evidence shows that at Settefinestre already in the first century AD the agricultural installations extended to parts of the villa that had once been residential, a sure sign that the owners no longer lived there. The production of wine and oil was now geared to local consumption and not for export any more. In the first century AD the large landed estate typical of the Empire incorporated the villas of the aristocracy: the cultivation of cereals and pasture land, which both require a less numerous and less specialized workforce, replaced vines and olive groves.
Bit by bit the vaulted roofs and frescoed walls collapsed, the wine-presses were dismantled, the cellars became deposits for grain. The villa was abandoned and stripped of its goods; families of shepherds took refuge in it. Two skeletons from the early Middle Ages buried beneath the portico provide evidence of a humanity now characterized by emaciated, unhealthy bones, and an existence on the brink of survival. Underdevelopment in Italy has a longer history than the phases of ‘economic miracles’, even though it leaves fewer traces in the subsoil. The archaeologist’s spade and trowel try to reconstruct the continuity of history through the long intervals of darkness.
[1980]
The Narrative of Trajan’s Column
The metal network of scaffolding and planks which for some time have been wrapped round various Roman monuments offer a rare if not unique opportunity in the case of Trajan’s Column. This is perhaps the first time in the nineteen c
enturies since the column was originally erected that there has been such an occasion: the chance to see the bas-reliefs from close up.
We are seeing them perhaps in a perilous condition, for the marble of the sculpted surface is turning to chalk, which dissolves in water, and the rain has been washing it away. The Department for Antiquities is trying to protect this thin, now crumbling layer with scaffolding, buying time while waiting for the discovery of a system to hold it in place; but we don’t know if such a system exists yet. Whether it is the fault of the smog, of the vibrations, or just the effects of time, which, millennium after millennium, erodes everything to dust, the fact is that the presumed eternity of Roman remains has perhaps come to its twilight, and our fate will be to witness its end.
When I heard this, I rushed to climb the scaffolding around Trajan’s Column, certainly the most extraordinary monument that Roman antiquity has left us, and also the least well known, despite the fact it has always been right in front of our eyes. For what makes the Column exceptional is not just its height, 40 metres, but the ‘narrativity’ of its figures (which is all about minute details of great beauty). The narrative requires a consecutive ‘reading’ of its spiral of reliefs, 200 metres in length, which tell the story of the two wars fought by Trajan in Dacia (AD 101–102 and 105). Accompanying me on this visit was Salvatore Settis, professor of classical archaeology at the University of Pisa.
The story begins by representing the situation immediately before the beginning of the campaign, when the Empire still ended at the Danube. The narrative strip opens (at first very low down then gradually rising upwards) with the landscape of a fortified Roman town on the river, with its walls, look-out towers and beacons in case of incursions by the Dacians: piles of wood for fires, piles of hay for columns of smoke. All elements that are meant to create a sense of alarm, of waiting, of danger, like in a John Ford western.