Ostia Antica: The Roman City More Impressive Than Pompeii (and Nobody Goes)

Take the Roma-Lido train from Porta San Paolo station in Rome, ride thirty minutes through the suburbs, and step off at Ostia Antica. You are now in a city that was home to 100,000 people at its height in the 2nd century AD. You can walk its main street — the Decumanus Maximus — for nearly a kilometre without leaving ancient Rome. You can look up at four-storey brick apartment buildings (insulae) that are still standing. You can sit in the theatre and look at the stage. You can browse the ancient fast-food bar (thermopolium) with its terracotta counter. Compared to Pompeii, Ostia is quieter, larger, and in some ways more astonishing — and on a Tuesday in March, you may have it almost to yourself.

Ostia ('mouth' — from the Latin for the mouth of the Tiber) was Rome's original port city, founded in the 4th century BC and reaching its peak importance in the 1st and 2nd centuries AD when the Roman Empire's grain supply, oil, wine, and building materials all flowed through its docks. Unlike Pompeii, which was buried by volcanic ash in a single catastrophic day, Ostia was not destroyed but gradually abandoned as the harbour silted up, the population declined in the 3rd century, and Romans shifted their attention to Portus, the new harbour built nearby by Emperor Claudius. The buildings were simply left. The sea eventually deposited sand over everything, preserving the city.

What makes Ostia particularly fascinating is its social archaeology. Pompeii was a prosperous middle-class town of villas and gardens; Ostia was a working port city of warehouses, apartment blocks, guilds, and multiple religions. You can visit the 'Piazzale delle Corporazioni' — a large square lined with the office-mosaic floors of around 70 shipping companies and trade guilds, each decorated with a mosaic showing what they dealt in (grain, rope, ivory, exotic animals for the arena). Across the square you can read the names of the ports they traded with — Carthage, Sabratha, Narbonne. The city also had seventeen mithraeum — temples to the mystery god Mithras — more than anywhere else in the Roman Empire.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of Ostia is what it tells you about ordinary Roman life. The insulae (apartment blocks) that still stand at four stories are the physical reality behind all the Roman literary complaints about noise, smell, fire risk, and the difficulty of sleeping in a city where carts and deliveries rumbled through the streets all night. The thermopolium counters — terracotta pots built into stone counters, still stained with the residue of the food that was sold there — make the city feel not like a museum but like a place that people left a thousand years ago and might return to at any moment. The graffiti scratched into walls — names, declarations, crude drawings — is the same impulse that fills the underpasses of modern cities.