Italica: a Roman Town in Andalusia, January 22, 2014

Italica, a Roman Town in Andalusia January 22, 2014

Thanks to a PBS series on Rome a few years ago, Bruce has been intrigued by the Roman culture for some time.   When he saw that the largest Roman ruins in Spain were near Sevilla, he wanted to visit them.  After several damp, sometimes rainy days, Saturday, the 18th, looked promising, with blue skies when we awoke.   The plan was put into action:  catch a bus from the local station to nearby Santiponce, where Italica is located.  Off we went, surviving the Spanish-only directions from the information guy in the bus station and setting off in the first motorized transport that we’d used in a whole week.  Black clouds gathered as we rode out of town, and it was drizzling by the time that we arrived in Italica.  Oh, well.  As Alex, my colleague at Breakwater used to say, “There’s no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing”.  Unfortunately, we were dressed in bad clothing!  The good news was that there was no entrance fee.  And before long, the rain stopped.  

Italica was begun by the Romans in the year 206 BC.  So, it’s more than 2000 years old! Hard to imagine.  It was a city of 10,000 people, the most important city outside of the Italian peninsula - and the birthplace of Trajan, the first Roman emperor born “in the provinces”.  Trajan was the father of Hadrian, who built the wall in England.  

The first impressive site at Italica was the huge amphitheater with an estimated capacity of 20,000 spectators!  It has an oval shape - similar in shape to present-day bullrings - with a similar covered “gallery” under the viewing stadium.  The tunnel-like gallery  encircling the amphitheater is intact and can be explored.  

The Roman amphitheater

The gallery surrounding the amphitheater

Bruce is standing in the amphitheater

The other fascinating area at Italica was the neighborhood of houses, accessed by intact streets, with many of the smoothly worn paving stones still in place so that you could see how this part of the town was laid out.  The houses themselves are gone, their cut stones having been recycled over the centuries and used for subsequent buildings.  But the amazing thing is that lots of their mosaic floors have survived and are in great shape!  One of the floors depicts more than 30 birds in mosaic!  Another house mosaic features the seven Roman gods whose names are related to the days of the week.  Considering the antiquity of these creations, their exposure to 2000 years of weather, as well as to marauders over the centuries, they are in unbelievably fantastic condition.   We had actually visited a “palace/museum” in Seville in which many of the artifacts, including beautiful floor mosaics, had been taken from Italica by an archeologist in the early 1900’s - when presumably there were no laws prohibiting such a thing.  

The floor tiles of a Roman home, depicting Roman gods

             

                          close up of the mosaic of Jupiter

All of Andalusia (from Al-Andalus, the Muslim word for this region) has such a many-layered history, with the Romans, the Visigoths, the Jews, the Muslims, the Christians - and probably others - having left their legacies.  There is so much to learn about here!  

Nice Roman buns!