Rome in the dark? Bike tours of buried quarry offer new view of city.

|
Nick Squires
Guides and visitors ride their bikes in the Great Roman Quarry, located just a few miles from the Colosseum, near the ancient Appian Way Roman road.
  • Quick Read
  • Deep Read ( 3 Min. )

Guides have recently started taking small groups of visitors on bike tours of the Great Quarry of Rome, just outside the ancient city walls.

The 22-mile labyrinth is well suited to two wheels – the tunnels are lined with hard-packed earth which forms a relatively flat surface to negotiate by bicycle.

Why We Wrote This

Even the most popular tourist sites can still hold secrets. In the case of Rome, an underground bike tour offers a new perspective on the Eternal City and its history.

The origins of the quarry lie with the Romans’ quest for a much-prized building material. The area is rich with pozzolana, a volcanic rock which the Romans pulverized and mixed with lime to create a type of ancient concrete. It was used in the construction of vast edifices such as the Pantheon temple.

The bike tours, which can include around 40 cyclists, travel through tunnels that are normally pitch black. If a tour guide asks his group to turn off all bike lights and mobile phones, the darkness is absolute; not a single shape or shadow can be made out.

“It’s a pretty unusual experience, even for Rome,” says Luigi Plos, a guide. “It is the only underground tour by bike in Rome.”

In a tract of countryside outside the ancient walls of Rome, amid verdant fields and hedgerows reminiscent of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Shire, a mossy sunken lane overhung with alder trees leads down to a metal gate.

Beyond it is one of Rome’s largest but least known wonders: a labyrinth of tunnels that were hacked out of solid rock by the Romans 2,000 years ago. And this subterranean realm can now be explored by bicycle.

Guides have recently started taking small groups of visitors on bike tours of the Great Quarry of Rome, which holds 22 miles of twisting, underground passageways.

Why We Wrote This

Even the most popular tourist sites can still hold secrets. In the case of Rome, an underground bike tour offers a new perspective on the Eternal City and its history.

The labyrinth is well suited to two wheels – the tunnels are lined with hard-packed earth which forms a relatively flat surface to negotiate by bicycle. A mountain bike is ideal but even a city bike will do the job.

“It’s a pretty unusual experience, even for Rome,” says Luigi Plos, a guide with Sotterranei di Roma (Underground Places of Rome), a group of speleologists and historians who specialize in exploring the city’s subterranean places. “It is the only underground tour by bike in Rome.”

Biking in the dark

The Great Quarry of Rome, which is unknown to most Romans, lies beneath the Parco della Caffarella (Caffarella Park), a large wedge of countryside located just a few miles from the Colosseum, near the ancient Appian Way Roman road.

The origins of the quarry lie with the Romans’ quest for a much-prized building material. The area is rich with pozzolana, a volcanic rock which the Romans pulverized and mixed with lime to create a type of ancient concrete.

It was used in the construction of vast edifices such as the Pantheon temple and several huge baths complexes, including the Baths of Caracalla, located close to the Circus Maximus chariot-racing track of “Ben-Hur” fame.

Nick Squires
Cyclists' headlamps illuminate tunnels winding through an underground, Roman quarry. Without the artificial light, darkness would be total.

“The reason the Romans dug this underground quarry so close to the city was because transportation was so expensive. Building materials are heavy and if you want to bring them from far away, you have to pay the workers, you need to feed the beasts of burden, [and] there is the danger of brigands. It was much cheaper to excavate right here, close to the city,” says Alessandro Placidi, another guide with Sotterranei di Roma.

The bike tours, which can include around 40 cyclists, travel through tunnels that were used to grow mushrooms as recently as the mid-1990s. Strands of electrical lighting dangle from the ceilings and sheets of translucent plastic are still attached to the walls – the sheets enabled the mushroom growers to create just the right temperature and humidity for the cultivation of fungi.

Visitors cycle past a chamber in which there is a long table and benches – it was the underground canteen of the mushroom growers. At one point, Mr. Placidi asks the tour group to turn off all bike lights and mobile phones. The darkness is absolute – not a single shape or shadow can be made out.

One section of the quarry was burrowed beneath a large catacomb that was dug by the early Christians to bury their dead. Holes have been hacked in the walls of the quarry to try to access the catacombs.

“It was the 1920s, and the mushroom growers who worked down here had heard of the amazing finds made by archeologists in ancient Egypt,” says Mr. Placidi, referring to the discovery of King Tutankhamen’s tomb by Howard Carter. “They thought there might be similar treasures waiting to be discovered in the catacombs. But they found nothing – just skeletons.”

Mushroom cultivation was abandoned in the 1990s, and the quarry was largely forgotten, until being opened to the public recently.

Beneath Claudius’ temple

Along with Sotterranei di Roma, the similarly named Roma Sotterranea (Underground Rome) is also trying to open up Rome’s many intriguing subterranean spaces to exploration. The two maintain a friendly rivalry.

This summer, Roma Sotterranea began taking visitors to another subterranean quarry, this one burrowed into a hill just a few minutes’ walk from the Roman Forum and the Colosseum.

The quarry, which is accessed by a tiny door, lies beneath the remains of a huge temple that was built in honor of Claudius, the emperor who invaded Britain in A.D. 43.

The extraction of stone began after the fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th century and continued for more than 1,000 years, until the 17th century. In places, workers dug beneath the water table, and some chambers now contain limpid pools of pure, crystalline water.

“To have underground pools and quarries just a few hundred meters from the Colosseum is an incredible thing,” says Marco Gradozzi, a Roma Sotterranea guide.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Rome in the dark? Bike tours of buried quarry offer new view of city.
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2022/0104/Rome-in-the-dark-Bike-tours-of-buried-quarry-offer-new-view-of-city
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe