Ancient Rome thrown into the limekiln
the Eternal City used as construction material
Most of the treasures of Antiquity can only be left to the imagination: destroyed by intolerance and greed, by accident, or by time itself, they only are fragments of stone or words. Of the list of the Seven Wonders, the only one still standing, the Great Pyramids of Egypt, only do so because of their sheer size; despite having been quarried for over 1500 years, that size has allowed them to still stand more than 4,500 years later.
As to the other six wonders, one can walk on a pier, in a field or in a desert and be lucky to find enough fragments to fall into a reverie and imagine the temple, the mausoleum or the statue that used to stand there.
No building of the Eternal City, Rome, made it to the “wonder of the world” list. What would have been the potential wonders of Rome in Antiquity? According to guidebooks of Rome as it was in the mid 4th century AD, the sights of Rome offered plenty of choice:
- 424 temples
- 304 shrines
- 80 statues of gods made of precious metal
- 64 statues of gods made of ivory
- 22 equestrian statues
- 36 triumphal arches
- 3,785 bronze statues
And no one even bothered to count the marble statues, as it was said there was at least one marble statue for each Roman, in a city were hundreds of thousands of people lived…
