There's More to That
A Smithsonian magazine special report
The Joys of Discovering the Roman Underground, From the Colosseum to What’s Beneath the Trevi Foundation
To escape the crowds of the Eternal City, head below ground and enter a portal into Rome’s past
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Tourism is surging in many places around the world—swarmed national parks, throngs of visitors amassing in churches and museums, and sidewalk cafes overburdened with diners. In this episode, we’d like to offer a less crowded way to be a tourist: consider going underground.
This summer is a Jubilee Year in Rome, so the city will be more packed than ever. But below the traffic jams and bustle of pedestrians in the streets of Rome lie its subterranean sites, which include ancient aqueducts, pagan shrines and even apartment complexes built centuries ago. While tourists pound the pavement visiting the iconic landmarks aboveground, explorers can search beneath the streets of the Eternal City for a different perspective on ancient—and modern—Roman life.
Host Ari Daniel speaks with Smithsonian contributing writer Tony Perrottet, who wrote recently about Rome’s underworld—the city lurking beneath the city. And he offers numerous tips to listeners who want to explore these fascinating and tranquil sites for themselves.
A transcript is below. To subscribe to “There’s More to That,” and to listen to past episodes about the use of Italian Renaissance paintings to improve the farming of tomorrow, a special baseball field at a Japanese internment camp and the use of artificial intelligence to make ancient scrolls readable again, find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
Ari Daniel: Rome receives millions of visitors each year.
Tony Perrottet: Every time we go, the volume of tourists doubles. The historical center gets so crowded now that even Romans have given up on going there.
Daniel: This is Tony Perrottet. He often writes about his travels for Smithsonian magazine.
Perrottet: It’s getting worse this year because it’s the Jubilee Year. Every 25 years, Catholics around the world converge on Rome, so it’s extra crowded.
Daniel: Oh, the Jubilee signifies a religious pilgrimage?
Perrottet: Yeah, it’s the Catholic—every 25 years, the Vatican celebrates an extra 25 years since the birth of Christ, I think. And yeah, every 25 years is even more insane than usual.
Daniel: Of course, this year, the passing of Pope Francis has brought additional crowds of pilgrims and mourners.
Perrottet: The last time I went, they’re also doing this terrible thing where they’re doing all these construction projects that are happening all at once. Really, there’s these human traffic jams, so it’s become quite annoying.
Daniel: Locals aren’t thrilled with tourist overcrowding either. That’s evident in the protests that have been held across some of Europe’s most popular destination cities over the past year. So if you’re reluctant to spend your precious afternoon in Rome standing in line with several thousand like-minded individuals waiting to get close enough to the Trevi Fountain to toss a coin into its aquamarine waters, you’re not alone. In fact, Tony spent his last trip to the Eternal City looking for places you won’t find in your average travel guide. Places like the McDonald’s in the Termini train station, where you can actually see remnants of the ancient Servian Wall sticking up out of the middle of the restaurant.
Perrottet: Rome was just built like lasagna. It’s like all these layers built on top of each other, and you can pick which era you want to visit. But also, that’s a slightly deceptive analogy because there’s other ones where all eras exist at once. So that’s why Sigmund Freud famously used Rome as a metaphor for the human memory—that you can go and see something, and if you look at it one way, it’s like it’s a certain era of your life. You look at it another way, it’s another. It’s the same thing. It’s the same space, but all these different things are going on.
Daniel: And speaking of layers, Tony’s best advice: If you really want to see Rome, you’ve got to go underground. Literally, beneath the city. From Smithsonian magazine and PRX Productions, this is “There’s More to That,” the show where all roads lead to … stories about history, science and culture. In this episode, when in Rome, do as some Romans do and see the wonders underneath one of the most popular tourist destinations on Earth. Keep listening.
Perrottet: I’ve always been interested in the underground things in Rome. There’s churches, catacombs, there’s aqueducts. And the story I did for Smithsonian, I joined this speleo-archaeological group.
Daniel: Speleo-archaeology, so that’s what exactly?
Perrottet: Speleo-archaeology is doing archaeology and speleology at once. They’re going underground into tunnels, into aqueducts, into all these sort of underground places.
Daniel: An aqueduct underground?
Perrottet: Yes. Often they were underground. The famous ones are the ones that you see the arches and they’re aboveground, but most of the length was actually underground. So there were 11 aqueducts that were built in ancient times. Only one of them still works, sort of, because the Goths destroyed them after the fall of the Great Empire.
Daniel: With determined planning, lucky travelers can visit this ancient working aqueduct.
Perrottet: The only part that’s accessible is the Roman water company called Acea. They’re very bureaucratic, and it took me months to get permission. So you go into the Villa Medici, which is this beautiful thing run by the French cultural institute, and there’s a door. Water company guy turns up and he’s like, “Hey, I got the key. Here we are.” And you put on this plastic fisherman’s overalls and the hard hat and you go down this amazing spiral staircase.
And then you end up down there in the aqueduct, and the water is flowing along up to waist high, and it’s freezing. This is the water that’s come from the mountains nearby, and it ends up the water in the Fontana di Trevi, one of the most famous fountains in Rome. It’s much more fun for me, more excited to go wading through the aqueduct than to go look at the Fontana di Trevi. It’s like a million people there taking selfies, but it’s much more exciting to go down into this ancient aqueduct that was hewn by Marcus Agrippa. So yeah, the whole thing has just this major, very exciting production.
Daniel: A speleo-archaeology group helped get Tony permission to access this site. The group’s name translates to “Undergrounds of Rome.” It’s headquartered in the center of the city and leads its own subterranean tours.
Perrottet: And they have a clubhouse. It’s called “the cave,” this labyrinth that was dug as a quarry in the first century B.C. And then in the Middle Ages, they grew mushrooms down there. It was used as bomb shelters during the Second World War, and they do tours down there. You can go visit, you can wander around. I went there. They had a pizza night down there in this thing, and we went down and had pizza and beer.
And then they were like, “OK, let’s go have a look at the catacombs.” It turned out that these tunnels had been built underneath Christian catacombs where people were buried for century after century. But tomb robbers had dug upward to try and find treasure, and they’d built a ladder. And so you’re climbing up this ladder and you climb into these catacombs, and there’s bones everywhere and bits of mosaic and skulls. And we were just sitting there going like, “Oh, wow.” After the pizza, the bones.
Daniel: I see. Part one was the pizza, then you went up the ladder to look at the bones.
Perrottet: Yes. Pizza first, bones after, definitely. They’ve got a little bar they set up called the Bat Cave. They really just love the underground.
Daniel: So it’s not just a place for specialist archaeologists to go exploring. They’re increasingly becoming available for tourists to explore.
Perrottet: Yes, that’s right.
Daniel: The group’s founder, Marco Placidi, started the tours in response to his own frustrations with Italy’s crowds of tourists. He’s not an archaeologist. He’s just a weekend warrior who loves this stuff.
Perrottet: They started their group because he took a friend to the Vatican and it was so crowded and so annoying. And in the Vatican they wouldn’t even let him take photos. He was outraged. He wanted to explore places that other people weren’t going. And then he realized that there’s tons of places that you can discover.
Daniel: Tony says that once you know to look, you’ll start to notice more and more signs of exciting adventures awaiting beneath the city streets.
Perrottet: If you go to Piazza Navona, which is one of the great, probably the most popular piazza in central Rome, you realize that it’s actually shaped like a stadium because originally they built it over the Stadium of Domitian, and there’d be runners and Olympic-style games. But if you wander around, you can see the foundations down certain gaps.
Daniel: There’s actually a museum some 15 feet down.
Perrottet: And you actually wander around the foundations of a stadium and all the things that they discovered, the statues and whatever. A lot of these things are totally accessible. Most visitors to Rome just don’t think of that. There’s a department store called Rinascente, very beautiful, and it’s right near the Fontana di Trevi. The aqueduct that runs the Fontana di Trevi, part of it was aboveground. But it’s now in the basement of this department store. And you go in there and there’s the elevator there. And it’s like top floor: Prada. Second floor: Gucci, Dolce & Gabbana. But then it’s got basement: aqueduct.
Daniel: Anyone can push that button?
Perrottet: Yeah, yeah, it’s open to the public. It was a condition of them running the department store. The city government says, “OK, but you’ve got to let people go see the aqueduct.” You press the button, you go down there, you go down to the basement, and it’s beautifully preserved. Eight arches there. There was some secondhand clothes on one side, and they had a Vespa display.
Daniel: Next to the aqueducts?
Perrottet: Yeah, you keep coming across these things all the time.
Daniel: It’s interesting because you talk about the layers of history that Rome kind of builds on top of itself, and that’s what you’re describing in this department store because you’ve got the latest layer of modern consumerism on top of a more ancient layer and right alongside it, too.
Perrottet: Exactly. It’s just embedded in it.
Daniel: Yeah, it’s incredible. So I’m curious, why are these types of places good alternatives for people that might be looking to escape the crowds?
Perrottet: Well, not many people know about them, for a start. I don’t really know why that is. It’s just everyone’s so spellbound by the Colosseum and by the Forum and whatever, they don’t really think about these places. And it’s a little bit of work sometimes to figure out where they are and their opening times, and it’s always quite eccentric. And maybe it’s me, I like secret things.
One of my favorites, there’s a lake underneath the Caelian Hill. It’s very Jules Verne. It costs you like 10 bucks or something. They give you the hard hat. Tours are only in Italian. You go down there and you descend down these steps. You’re shining your torch around. And that was a quarry as well, originally in the first century A.D. There’s this lake down there, the water has dripped down over the centuries, and they’re like, “Well, you could drink this.” It’s like Pellegrino. It’s that pure.
Daniel: So how do these sites compare to places like the Colosseum or the Pantheon?
Perrottet: Well, I mean you’ve got to see the Colosseum. It’s a pretty amazing thing. And in fact, if you do go to the Colosseum, ask to go on the underground.
Daniel: Go underground?
Perrottet: Because there’s a special tour with very limited access. They excavated, finally, underneath the Colosseum was where the animals were kept and the gladiators waited. And they have elevator systems to take them up to the arena. Almost everywhere it has some sort of thing like that.
Of course, you’ve got to go see the Pantheon, you’ve got to go and see these things. But you don’t really understand Rome if you only see the very grand things. It’s like going to New York and only going to the Empire State Building. It’s like, yeah, sure, it’s awesome, but the life of the city isn’t the Empire State Building.
Daniel: So it sounds like in order to really get a window into the past of Rome and of Romans, these underground places are kind of a portal into that.
Perrottet: There’s two things going on. One is you can go into places that will teach you what the daily life of ancient Rome was. And the other thing is it really gets your imagination going because it’s special and secret and it’s dark and you’re just shining a torch around.
Daniel: And you got to go through a hole or through a door or something. So you’re really like entering another world.
Perrottet: You feel like Indiana Jones, you’re entering another dimension of reality. It feels closer to the past. You feel like you’re stepping through a portal. In part, that’s why I love these places.
Daniel: And, Tony, why do these places exist? Did Rome simply build on top of itself over the centuries and so the history is simply below the ground?
Perrottet: Yeah, they would reuse places. In the United States, we would just knock it down and build another one. But there, that was too much work. And in the Middle Ages, for example, they had no money and they didn’t have building materials. So they were like, “OK, we’ll live in this.”
And what happens is debris gathers. That’s why if you go to the Colosseum, it’s like 30 feet down around it, or the Pantheon goes down because there’s so much stuff—garbage, human detritus. Over 2,000 years, this adds up. Some of them are intact underground, but others, archaeologists go in and they remove the debris and they find the structure. So then it’s excavated. So it’s a combination of all these things. But Rome is building on top of itself. It has been building on top of itself for 3,000 years.
Daniel: It sounds like, for you, it helps to bring these places to life.
Perrottet: Indeed, indeed. Since the ’60s, ’70s, there’s been a lot of interest in social history. Before that, we’d learn about the emperors, we’d learn about Caligula. And then now, everyone started to be much more interested in the people whose names we don’t really remember, but the other million Romans. How did a city of a million people function in those days? There’s the official version, which has got the monuments, we’ve got the Forum, we’ve got the statues. Those are awesome. But what about the rest of the city?
Daniel: Tony, let me ask you, so how did these sites become part of the tourist circuit?
Perrottet: Well, they’re not really part of tourist circuit. But in the Renaissance, Michelangelo and Raphael and all the other artists would lower themselves by rope into these subterranean places that were discovered. Nero’s Golden House, and it was discovered by accident. The earth cracked open, and this farmer was like, “What’s down there?” So they went down there with torches and they were seeing all these amazing ancient frescoes, and so that was, in a sense, touristic and it had a huge influence, because then [came] this whole revival of interest in the ancient world, or the artists are using ancient imagery. So, in that sense, these places have always been part of it. But then, in this other sense, now, there’s crazy people like me.
Daniel: How does the tourism aspect of this work? It sounds like some of these sites are really special and off-limits. Others, there are regularly guided tours. Others, you kind of have to call up for permission. So there’s a whole suite of ways, but if someone were to want to go on some of these underground tours to visit these sites, what would you recommend?
Perrottet: Well, it’s done in a very eccentric way. A lot of the museums have standard hours. The churches, like San Clemente, you just turn up, pay your euros and away you go. The catacombs as well. And then there’s the next tier of places that are run by the archaeology department and they’re the ones that only open monthly. You’ve got to go onto their website and then you’ve got to call up this number and then you’ve got to book it. It’s like a strange game, because you have to know that the place exists before you can ask to get access to it. And then the last tier is when I went down into the one that was still running. It’s totally off-limits. They only take very specialized people have got an actual reason to go down there, because it’s very fragile. They don’t want to have people just traipsing up and down.
Daniel: Not just anyone can go wade waist-deep in aqueduct water.
Perrottet: It took me months to get to permission. They were finally like, “OK.” I think they just wanted to get rid of me.
Daniel: Well, sending you down into an underground aqueduct …
Perrottet: Is one way!
Daniel: … is one way to get rid of you.
Perrottet: Yeah. My buddies, Marco and the gang, they have their cave in the park and they open on weekends and you book it online and you go down and they do tours, even do mountain bike tours down there because it’s mile after mile of these tunnels.
Daniel: Mountain bike tour underground?
Perrottet: Yes. I didn’t do that because it didn’t sound that much fun. But apparently, it is fun. And they’ll have gatherings and events and lectures and the whole panoply of tourist activities. And you can do the Indiana Jones one where you climb the ladder up and go into the catacombs with the bones if you want to. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but you can do it. And it’s not expensive. They’re not, like, trying to make any money out of it. They just love to do it. And they love to share their knowledge of all this underground stuff.
Daniel: So, I’m curious to know: How can people that do go to these sites just be more responsible tourists to make sure that they’re treating these locations responsibly?
Perrottet: Well, don’t touch things. Don’t graffiti. Don’t carve your name, which is what everyone used to do up until relatively recently. So it’s really same as a national park. Leave no trace. You don’t go in there with your cappuccino and spill it on the floor on the mosaics or whatever. Remain respectful. In the cave, the one that’s in the park, the Great Quarry, those guys, they’ve set up a little bar where they can gather. They want to use parts of it. But it’s so huge, it’s only like really a few rooms that they use on a daily or weekly basis. And they’re very, very careful. Maybe more people go there than some of the archaeology sites, but they genuinely love the underground. They love their quarries, so they preserve everything. They make sure there’s not too many people. It’s all under control. So yeah, really, it’s just common sense.
Daniel: When you think about this type of experience, who would you recommend it to? How might somebody know it would be a good fit for them?
Perrottet: Well, I mean anyone who’s interested in history. Most people who go to Rome are kind of interested in the Roman Empire and these extraordinary sites. Some people, maybe there just for the pasta and the wine, which is awesome.
Daniel: Which you can eat or drink underground?
Perrottet: Yeah. Or they might be interested in the Renaissance. People get a broader picture of the ancient world, this extraordinary city that was, until very recently, the largest city that ever existed in Western culture. And how did it function? You can go down the sewers. The sewers were considered one of the wonders of the ancient world. Pliny the Elder writes about the Cloaca Maxima. It was such an engineering feat. It’s extraordinary.
But even if, say, you’re interested in the Second World War, you don’t care about the ancient world, you can go to Mussolini’s bunker. He lived in a place called the Villa Torlonia, and it’s like this gorgeous Renaissance structure that’s there. You can wander through there, and that’s awesome, but you can buy a special ticket in advance. You can go down in the bunker. And this was the expansion of the wine cellar.
He had it designed when the Americans started bombing Rome, And then he set it up so him and his mistress could survive for months down there—enough food and these different access points. And they set it up as a little museum. They’ve got footage. You learn a lot about the history of fascism and Mussolini and how Rome was bombed. We think the Allies didn’t, but they did and they destroyed a lot. So that’s kind of fascinating. Anyone who’s interested in history would love it.
Daniel: Whether or not you’re willing to go exploring Rome’s bunkers, caves, and aqueducts underground, Tony advises that while visiting, you should make time for the parts of the city more regularly appreciated by its locals. In a place as old and majestic as Rome, even the mundane can contain fascinating remnants of history.
Perrottet: The whole ancient world is embedded in the texture of the city. You go to a restaurant, there’s ancient mosaic, sure, it’s part of the background. You keep coming across these things all the time. And that adds to the strange beauty of it and the beauty of Rome. Even though it’s crowded and complaining about all the crowds now, but it’s still a magical and unbeatable place. Go visit the historical center when you want it, but just brace yourself. Go early or go late at night. Late at night, you can wander around beautifully floodlit—all the fountains and plazas and no one else is there.
Daniel: And it sounds like that magic of Rome really courses throughout the city, both aboveground in maybe some more obvious places but also belowground in these unexpected places.
Perrottet: Yes, exactly. Everything in Rome has been used so much over the last 2,000 years. All of time is occurring at once in Rome. It’s all there at once. Romans could be very casual about it. It’s like, “Yeah, so what, we know this place is amazing.” But for visitors, there’s also this very casual depth of history that’s there that sometimes it’ll just make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up cause you’re like, “Oh, my God.” These are these things and they’re just there. You’re enjoying your bowl of pasta and it’s all around you. You can still have this sense of discovery, and I think that’s what keeps the magic going. You need to have this feeling that you’re finding something that not that many people can see. And I think that keeps the magic of Rome alive.
Daniel: Tony, thank you so much. This was terrific. I really enjoyed speaking with you about it.
Perrottet: Thanks for having me.
Daniel: To read more about Tony’s underground travels in Rome and even see a few pictures of the sites he mentioned in this episode, head over to SmithsonianMag.com. We’ll also put a link in our show notes. And while you’re checking out links, consider leaving us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps other listeners find our show.
“There’s More to That” is a production of Smithsonian magazine and PRX Productions. From the magazine, our team is me, Debra Rosenberg and Brian Wolly. From PRX, our team is Jessica Miller, Genevieve Sponsler, Adriana Rozas Rivera, Sandra Lopez Monsalve and Edwin Ochoa. The executive producer of PRX Productions is Jocelyn Gonzales.
Our episode artwork is by Emily Lankiewicz. Fact-checking by Stephanie Abramson. Our music is from APM Music.
I’m Ari Daniel. Thanks for listening.
Perrottet: Most people don’t know about it, maybe I’m blowing it by writing about it in The Smithsonian.
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