Old Rome: A Handbook to the Ruins of the City and the CampagnaBurn, Robert
History
Old Rome: A Handbook to the Ruins of the City and the Campagna
Burn, Robert
Rome (Italy) -- Antiquities; Rome (Italy) -- Description and travel
The second group of strata found on the site of Rome is one which is not
confined to the neighbourhood of Rome, but is most extensively spread over
the whole of the Campagna, the district of Campania, and a considerable
part of southern Italy. The great mass of the Capitoline, Palatine,
Aventine, Esquiline, Cælian, Viminal, Quirinal, and Pincian Hills, is
composed of this formation. Geologists give it the general name of tufa,
and divide it into two kinds, the stony and the granular. It is
distinguished from lava by not having flowed in a liquid state from the
volcano, and is a mechanical conglomerate of scoriæ, ashes, and other
volcanic products which have been carried to some distance from the crater
of eruption, and then consolidated by some chemical re-arrangement of
their constituent elements. The harder kind of tufa, the tufa litoide, is
a reddish brown, or tawny stone, with orange-coloured spots. These spots
are embedded fragments of scoriaceous lava. It is hard enough to be used
as a building stone, and has been quarried largely under the Aventine Hill
near S. Saba, at Monte Verde, on the southern end of the Janiculum, and at
other places near Rome, as at Torre Pignatara on the Via Labicana, at the
bridge over the Anio, on the Via Nomentana, and at the Tarpeian rock.
This tufaceous stone presents itself in very thick banks, traversed by
long vertical and oblique fissures, probably produced by the contraction
of the mass on passing from a humid and soft to a dry and hard state. The
Arch of the Cloaca Maxima, near S. Giorgio in Velabro, is built of this
stone, and the inner part of the substruction of the so-called tabularium
on the Capitol. Portions of the Servian wall were also built of it, and
many stones which were taken from this wall are to be seen at the present
day in the walls of Aurelian, near the gate of S. Lorenzo; and others have
been laid bare by the railway excavations in the Servian Agger.
Brick-shaped masses of it are found in the ambulacra of the Theatre of
Marcellus, so that the use of it must not be restricted to the earliest
times of Roman architecture. In fact, several buildings of the Middle Ages
in or near Rome consist of this stone, as may be seen at the Fortress
Gaetani, near the Tomb of Cæcilia Metella, and in the large tower at the
side of the palace of the Senator.
[Sidenote: Freshwater formation.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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