Porta Salaria
The Porta Salaria was part of the Aurelian Wall in Rome , which was built between 271 and 275 AD. Via Salaria nova ran through the gate and turned into Via Salaria vetus outside the city . The Horti Sallustiani were right by the gate on the city side.
The gate had only one passage and was flanked by two semicircular towers. According to the drawings, windows in the city wall originally opened above the eastern tower. Probably only the western tower dates from the Aurelian construction period of the gate, while the eastern tower was added later and made the former windows in the wall superfluous. At least the one-tower complex is more typical of the Aurelian era. The diameter of the western tower was 7.60 meters compared to 9.20 meters of the eastern tower. There were three large, arched window openings above the archway itself. All of this was done in opus caementitium , Roman concrete, clad with brickwork. Probably under Honorius , the towers were raised by one storey, probably the eastern one was added and the wall surfaces of the gate between the towers in the lower area were clad with travertine . The window openings above the passage were probably only allowed to break through at this time. In ancient times, a large part of the apex of the arch must have fallen and was replaced by brickwork in opus mixtum .
In 410, the Goths under Alaric penetrated the city through Porta Salaria and plundered it. Near the gate, the Goth Witigis besieged the troops of Belisarius in 537 and the porta Salaria is a place of this chapter of Roman-Gothic conflicts that Procopius often mentioned.
In contrast to most of the other city gates of the Aurelian Wall, the porta Salaria was not given a Christian name in the Middle Ages. During the conquest of the Papal States by Italian troops in 1870, the gate was so badly hit by the bombardment on September 20 that it was demolished and replaced in 1873 by a new building by Virginio Vespignani . This building finally had to give way to a street widening in 1921, so that no remains of the gate that was located in today's Piazza Fiume have survived. It is only known through descriptions, drawings and early photographs.
As part of the demolition work in 1871, the area of the gate was examined archaeologically. Under the eastern tower, the tomb of Quintus Sulpicius Maximus , an eleven-year-old participant in the competition in impromptu poetry during the third agon Capitolinus in 94 AD, and a cube-shaped tomb from the Sullan period made of tuff blocks, decorated with pilasters and a cornice made of white limestone were found. The remains of an early Augustan round grave of a Cornelia, daughter of Lucius Scipio, wife of Vatienus, Cornelia L. Scipionis f. Dad , free. The remains of this grave, a bucrania frieze, the inscription and a lion's torso are now attached to the Aurelian wall near the site. Both graves were originally on Via Salaria and were reused for the construction of the gate.
literature
- Filippo Coarelli : Rome. An archaeological guide. Herder, Freiburg (Breisgau) et al. 1981, ISBN 3-451-17247-X , SS 226.
- Samuel Ball Platner , Thomas Ashby : A Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome . Oxford University Press, London 1929, p. 416 ( online ).
- Lawrence Richardson Jr .: A New Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore MD et al. 1992, ISBN 0-8018-4300-6 , pp. 308-309.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Prokop, bellum Goticum 1, 18, 19 and 39; 19, 14; 22, 1-9; 23 continuous; 27, 6; in 1, 22, 12, however, manuscripts also name the gate Βελισαρία , i.e. porta Belisaria after the Eastern Roman general Belisarius , which, however, is not accepted and is corrected to Salaria.
- ↑ CIL 6, 33976
- ^ Siegmar Döpp: The impromptu poem of Q. Sulpicius Maximus . In: Journal of Papyrology and Epigraphy . Volume 114, 1996, pp. 99-114 ( PDF ).
- ↑ CIL 6, 1296