This first section is a brief explanation of my Italy blog posts, which were inspired by my 2-week trip to Italy in May, 2025. Feel free to skip this section if you’ve read it before.
Dear Reader, If you read my Italy posts in the order in which they’ve come out, it may seem as though we hopped back and forth all over the country, but I have decided not to write these posts sequentially. I want to write about the things that interest me most, as the spirit moves me. For some topics, I may even combine cities. I hope that by doing so, you’ll find it a lot more interesting than if I just give you a tedious day by day description of our itinerary, as if I were your Aunt Mabel forcing you to sit down and watch all her Super 8 films of the family road trip to Niagara Falls from 1966.
If you have any questions, comments or suggestions about how I’m approaching this travelogue-within-a-blog, please let me know in the comments below!
One of the many things I wanted to show Dear Husband during our visit to Rome was a mystery that had piqued my curiosity. If you allow yourself to get lost in some of the twisted little side streets southeast of the Pantheon (or if you cheat and use Google Maps as we did), you might just stumble across a gigantic marble foot. A left foot clad in a Roman sandal, to be more specific.
The foot isn’t attached to a leg. It’s about 4 feet long. One can assume that it was originally part of a statue, and if so, that statue was probably about 25 feet tall. But here’s what intrigues me most about this foot: Nobody knows where the rest of the statue is, or what it looked like. They can’t even be completely certain who the statue was depicting.
Oh, there are theories. Best guess is that it’s from the Temple of Serapis and Isis, which used to be nearby. But did the foot belong to Isis herself? No one knows. It is suspected that the foot was part of a statue called an acrolith, which is a type of statue that only uses expensive marble on the exposed bits. The part that is covered with draped clothing is made of wood or cheaper stone. That would explain why so much of this statue didn’t make it to modern times.
But come on. Where’s the other foot? The hands? The head? How do you misplace things that were that colossal? And they would have been heavy, too. It’s not as though someone just wandered off with them like one does with a pen from the bank. It just seems so strange to me.
Yes, Egyptian cults were frowned upon starting in the early 300’s, and I’m sure such a temple wouldn’t have survived the Christianizing of Rome and the subsequent persecution of Pagans. But so many other things from that era are still around in more recognizable states. If you were going to obliterate the rest of the statue, why leave one foot behind?
So where is the other foot? Unanswered questions like this bug me. I did talk about it with Jan, the tour guide we had for the Colosseum. To paraphrase him, in order to comprehend these strange gaps in knowledge, you have to understand that the city dropped from 2 million people to 60,000, and then was abandoned entirely. Then people only came to many areas just to pillage stuff such as the iron clamps in the walls, because in the dark ages people didn’t know how to create wrought iron and they needed it for things like weapons. Rome was a ghost town, and people forgot everything about its history.
That gave me something else to be intrigued about. During our visit, we were surrounded by all these incredible ancient Roman ruins, many of which were still impressively intact. It gives you the impression that the transition between the Roman Empire and relatively modern times was brief. Yet there were centuries when these ruins sat vigil over deserted, overgrown, steadily decaying streets, and then a time when people only came here to steal things.
In all the large buildings built before the middle ages, you can see what look like pock marks. The removal of the wrought iron clamps destabilized those structures and caused many of them to collapse, especially when encouraged to do so by periodic earthquakes. These people didn’t care about preservation. They needed the metal. From their point of view, it wasn’t like people were living there, after all. We can look back at this wanton destruction and be disgusted, but our priorities are different.
The only reason that so many ancient structures survive today is that walls were built around Rome starting in 271, around the time of the beginning of the fall of the empire. Like vultures to a dead carcass, barbarians, and later Goths, sensed an opportunity, and invasions began to increase. Without those walls, there would have been even more devastation. Before that, Rome was a wide open city, and people spread out into the countryside and felt safe living on farms and coming and going as they pleased. Back then, marauders would have had a much easier time carrying things off.
The Dark Ages began in the 5th century. Some say it ended in the 10th century. Others say it stuck around through the 15th century. For our purposes, we’ll look at Rome through the year 1500.
This rather startling graph will show you its rapid expansion between 200 BC to 50BC, and its equally shocking decline between 400 AD and 525 AD. And the population remained at an abysmal level until it finally began to rise again around 1900. (Yes. Really. That recently.)
Ancient Rome, at least in terms of its architecture, was practically intact until the 5th century. Up to that point, visitors described a metropolis full of beauty and grandeur the likes of which the world will never see again. At that time, people still knew the original names of the streets and buildings, and understood what the buildings had been used for. They even continued to use the luxurious Roman baths. But that wouldn’t always be the case.
There were a lot of factors that led Rome’s population to flat-line, taking its knowledge and the maintenance of its ancient architecture with it.
In 410, Rome was sacked by the Goths. After that, rather than being an open, sprawling community, it became a walled, isolated refuge in a hostile world. Because of this, the aqueducts couldn’t be maintained, and water became scarce. People began occupying the abandoned buildings closer to the Tiber River. Oddly enough, though, the grand palaces on the Palatine Hill were kept up, if not regularly occupied, until around the year 700. By the 12th century, the House of Augustus was still identifiable, although much of its marble had been stripped for use in churches.
By the 6th century, people had begun using the Colosseum floor as a cemetery. Burials within city limits were unheard of before the empire’s decline. But at this point, the people had converted the vaulted spaces under the Colosseum seating into housing, so it became its own little neighborhood. This went on until around 1200, when the powerful Frangipani Family took it over, fortified it, and turned it into their private castle. But by the 14th century, the Colosseum had devolved into a den for bandits.
Between the 7th and the 14th centuries, Rome increasingly looked like vast isolated stacks of ruins amongst widening stretches of overgrowth. Cattle would graze amongst crumbling columns. But a great many fortress-like, towered Medieval churches were built over the top of ruins, and you could see their towers sticking up here and there once you breached the city’s walls. (Those Medieval churches would be altered so significantly during the Renaissance that it’s hard to find much evidence of a structure from that period in Rome today. A modern visitor shouldn’t be blamed for overlooking the fact that that 1000 year period even occurred.)
In the 10th and 11th centuries, nothing of note was built and everything increasingly decayed. Then, in 1084, the Normans destroyed Rome so thoroughly that the charred remains buried many of the ruins in 13 feet of ash. This inspired rebuilding in the 11th and 12th centuries, a renewed interest in the arts, and an increased knowledge of mosaics and marblework. This, in turn, attracted more visitors to Rome.
This is why it becomes increasingly controversial to call these later years the Dark Ages. However, by 1130, people had forgotten many of the street names, as well as the names of ancient buildings and the purposes therefor. For the sake of tourism, they made up whimsical stories based on no evidence whatsoever, and some of those stories persisted until modern scholarship proved otherwise.
This burst of artistic urban renewal wasn’t to last. Because of conflict between the Holy Roman Empire and the Byzantine Empire, and because Rome itself was becoming such a dangerous place, with rival families in their heavily defended strongholds only coming out in a violent attempt to gain more territory or to eliminate more enemies, even the papacy decided it was no longer feasible to remain in the area. From 1257 to 1305 the Popes resided in Viterbo, Orvieto and then in Perugia. From 1305 to 1377, they abandoned what is now Italy entirely, and resided in Avignon, France, even though the pope was still the Bishop of Rome.
When the pope left Rome, so did the majority of the money. Without money, there was no effort to maintain the infrastructure. Without such upkeep, people had less incentive to remain in the city. By the time the pope returned in 1377, the population was only 30,000.
From 727 to 1257, the Pope and the Catholic Church had Rome in a chokehold, despite constant rebellions. After that, everyone basically gave up on the city as there was too much violence, intrigue and powerful family stronghold battles. The papacy regained a strong foothold on Rome from the 1600’s to the mid-1800’s, and that was a time of great opulence, but very little liberty for the people, and even less intellectual progress.
Another thing that kept the population count low in the Dark Ages was the fact that there were at least 31 different years of severe plagues, pandemics, famine, pestilence or natural disasters that all but wiped out a good chunk of the citizenry.
The Justinian (Bubonic) Plague alone swept through Rome over and over again, in the years 541-544, 565-571, 590-591, and 599-600.
Then, from 1346 to 1353 the Bubonic Plague known as the “Black Death” washed across Europe, Asia and North Africa, and it killed somewhere between 25 and 50 million people. The fact that Rome was having a Jubilee in 1350 and people were coming from far and wide couldn’t have helped their attempts to avoid this plague, especially in an era when contagious disease was poorly understood.
The plague in 1449 was also spread widely thanks to a Jubilee. The closer we get to the present, the worse these health crises became, because people were beginning to travel further and arrive much more quickly than their ancestors could. These health issues were also brought on by wars, sieges, and crop failures due to floods, droughts, and volcanoes.
After all those centuries of pure chaos, it’s miraculous that any of ancient Rome still stands. We should be grateful that the big marble foot remained in place. In fact, the street it was on was named “Via del Piè di Marmo” (Marble Foot Way) in its honor.
It’s more than a little ironic that, after having been unmoved by all those things for hundreds of years, the one event that caused the foot to be uprooted from its resting place was the funeral procession for Victor Emmanuele II, the first king of Italy, in 1878. The foot had to be shunted around the corner to an alley so that it wouldn’t get in the way. Now it takes up a perfectly good parking space, and cars have to swerve around it when going down the alley.
With a better understanding of the total pandemonium of the Dark Ages, I can now accept the fact that people don’t know who this massive marble foot belongs to. But I still struggle with the fact that no one has found the other foot. I mean, seriously… where is that foot? I do get a little comfort, though, from the fact that I’m not alone in my frustration. People have most likely been asking that same question for at least 1,500 years.
Sources:
The City of Rome in the Middle Ages
What are the Mysterious Holes in the Colosseum of Rome?
Graphic of the Population of Rome Through History
Database of Pestilence in the Roman Empire
List of Epidemics and Pandemics Wikipedia
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