On my way to the colosseum ...

• Author: Beard, Mary
• Position: Whispering City: Rome and Its Histories - Book review

R. J. B. Bosworth, Whispering City: Rome and Its Histories (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 368 pp., $35.00.

Whispering City begins at the Colosseum metro station in central Rome, where a couple of tired "Roman legionaries" are taking a break and enjoying a cup of coffee at the station bar. Dressed up in hot, sweaty leather uniforms, with shiny helmets and unwieldy swords, these hucksters seem to make a reasonable living by selling themselves as a photo opportunity to weary tourists at the vast Roman amphitheater that still stands in the middle of one of the city's busiest traffic islands, just across the road from the station. In fact, alongside the banks of souvenir stalls and the touts flogging what must be some of the most expensive bottled water in the Western world, these fancy-dress soldiers have become--over the last twenty years or so--a distinctive part of the landscape around Rome's most iconic ancient monument.

Their presence has not been entirely trouble free. Some years ago, the "legionary business" got very nasty, when rival gangs tried to oust each other from the most visible and profitable pitches on the tourist route. The authorities were forced to step in with regulations: no more than fifty legionary licenses were to be issued at any one time, no one with a criminal record could be accredited and, as a precautionary measure, all swords were to be made of plastic. But there was no move to ban the trade entirely. This was largely because these characters were--and remain--very popular with the public. The truth is that the Colosseum is a stunning monument from the outside; on the inside, it is sadly disappointing. Over the last century of modern archaeology, it has been turned from a picturesque "site of memory" to an unattractively dilapidated ruin--hard for anyone to imagine in its original lavish form, and even harder to picture complete with the violent shows of fighting men and beasts that once took place there. The legionaries (or are they meant to be gladiators?) are one of the few things that can still bring it to life.

R. J. B. Bosworth's Whispering City focuses on the religious, political and cultural disputes that have surrounded these monuments of the city of Rome over the last two centuries ("the jangling histories that clamor to be acknowledged in the Rome of the third millennium after Christ"). In the case of the Colosseum, one of these disputes has been about its sacred status. Is this a monument of the Catholic Church and a hallowed place of Christian martyrdom, or is it an archaeological site and symbol of the secular city? Across several chapters, Bosworth nicely tracks the swings of influence backward and forward between church and state by charting the appearance and disappearance of the prominent cross in the Colosseum's arena. First installed in the mid-eighteenth century, it was removed by the Napoleonic regime in Rome at the very end of the 1700s; a replacement was installed after the fall of the French and then taken down again when Rome became capital of Italy (and the pope was more or less penned up in the Vatican) in the 1870s. Mussolini had a cross put back again in 1927 (and it is still there, though to one side of the arena, and goes largely unnoticed).

In fact, Mussolini had other, secular ambitions for the Colosseum. For, in one of his bravest, or most shameless, interventions into the Roman cityscape, he also turned it into the landmark at one end of his new arterial road, the Via dell'Impero ("Empire Street")--which plowed through swaths of the idyllic old city (or slums, depending on your point of view) to end up in the Piazza Venezia at...