By decree of Pope Sixtus IV (who built the Sistine Chapel), most of Rome’s columned porches were walled up in the late 1470s, but many palazzi still have their medieval façades buried inside the walls, their supporting columns salvaged from ancient monuments like the Theater of Pompey, the Naumachia of Augustus, and the Stadium of Domitian, which were already half-buried beneath layer upon layer of silt from the Tiber’s frequent floods. My own porch columns-borrowed, perhaps, from the Naumachia, the great water theater that the emperor Augustus installed in Trastevere-disappeared long ago. Many older Roman buildings, like my house, also used stubs of antique columns to support an arched open porch, once a standard touch of elegance for the ground floors of medieval houses and palazzi, both public, like the Palazzo dei Conservatori on the Capitoline Hill, and private. Virtually every corner in the oldest parts of Rome has a similar protector, most of them bits of carved stone scavenged from the ruins of the ancient city.

The marble cylinder, with its worn fluting, must have been sunk into the sandy soil of Trastevere, the ancient neighborhood trans Tiberim (across the Tiber), sometime in the fourteenth century to deflect wayward carts and their heavy axles, but it deters wayward delivery trucks and wobbly tourists on electric scooters just as reliably. The single exposed corner of my house in Rome is shielded by the battered stub of an ancient column.

A single man book review