The Crypta Balbi Museum in Rome, with its numerous floors (including the underground one), manages to make us understand how the city is completely stratified! This is one of the secrets of Rome: digging and digging you can travel back in time, discovering different realities and temporal layers belonging to different eras... something like the immense collection visible today in the museum, which tells us about the rich stratification and evolution of a small patch of land, the one that up to now corresponds to Via delle Botteghe Oscure. I already spoke some time ago, as you can read here. Following a tour here, to all intents and purposes, means taking a journey through time that will lead you to discover the hidden, mysterious but no less fascinating sides of Rome.

Think about the very long historical and architectural evolution of what was the ancient Theater of Balbo, an exceptional monument that rivals other similar buildings, such as that of Pompeo. Well, after many centuries and vicissitudes, raids and looting, the ancient and splendid place dedicated to fun and entertainment became something more. From a masonry theater to a meeting place for stragglers, from a quarry for materials to a church. And, among other things, even a necropolis... And already, because once upon a time there was not much for the subtle and, either for economic reasons or simply for space, necropolis could appear in unsuspected places. And here, where once there was the cavea of the great masonry theater, containing thousands of spectators since the first century b.C., numerous human remains were found. By now, we are already in the early Middle Ages, it was customary to burial bodies, keeping them in tombs dug into the ground or, again to save space and effort, perhaps in terracotta pots or containers! People, men, women and even children, belonging to the populace and without the economic availability to have sumptuous tombs built, were buried here, almost anonymously.

After all, the underground areas of the monumental building, defined in medieval times as cryptae, were undoubtedly reused for numerous uses, by people of different social backgrounds. What was once a monument to the architectural grandeur of the city of yesteryear is transformed into something else, even into a sort of cemetery. There were no real regulations on the burial of the dead, as it was often the Catholic churches that lent their work to better organize this important activity. But after all Rome is also something like that, as seen in the Crypta Balbi Museum, a museum that is certainly interesting and curious, capable like few others of making visible one of the liveliest characteristics of the Eternal City: its ability to evolve while preserving its own historical memory…