Rome: The Underground

S300 train at Conca d'Oro station (photo Daniele Brundu)

When you think about it Rome’s Metro should be one of the seven wonders of the world. It’s actually hard to believe that the city’s fathers (and mothers a la Mamma Roma) had the chutzpah to build tunnels which would have to compete with all the archeology. In fact, during the building of line A, the second built in the system (there are also lines B and C) which began in l964 and ended in l980 that construction had to be stopped because of the archeological discoveries that were made in the area where the tunneling was taking place. In the case of New York for instance the only thing you might find were the remnants of the $24 Peter Minuit paid to the Indians for New Amsterdam, but building a Rome underground is a little like trying to pave streets at rush hour. Rome has often born comparisons with the human mind to the extent that a lot of what is going on in the city, takes place underground. Romans are like sleepwalkers who are unwittingly walking on consecrated ground. The artifacts of the past are so ubiquitous that you could easily be walking on the hallowed ground where Augustus or even the exiled Ovid once paraded. The Largo di Torre Argentina adjacent to the Theatre of Pompey where Julius Caesar was stabbed on March 15, 44 is, in fact, now a tram stop. Rome was itself one of Freud’s favorite stops and much has been written about psychoanalysis and Rome, but the city also hosts an Underground whose stations might be compared to circles of Dante’s Inferno in the significance of the signposts they represent.