Ostia Antica

Historic · Ostia Antica (Municipio X)Rome,Italy

A whole Roman port town at the Tiber's mouth, its streets, flats, bars and shipping offices standing, each office advertised in mosaic on the pavement.

Ostia Antica is an entire Roman town left standing at the mouth of the Tiber, twenty kilometres downriver from the city. It was Rome's port, and the grain that fed a million people came through it. What survives is the plan of a whole working town, not only its monuments. A paved main street runs with kerbs and crossings, and blocks of flats stand two and three storeys high with staircases and balconies. There are warehouses, public latrines with the seats in a row, and a bar with a marble counter and a painted menu on the wall behind it. The strangest space is a rectangular portico behind the theatre. More than seventy small offices open off it, and in front of each one a black-and-white mosaic advertises what the firm inside did: grain from Africa, timber, rope, an elephant for the shipping line that brought them. One belonged to a guild of divers whose job was recovering cargo from the harbour bottom. It is the only place where the trading offices of an ancient port still carry their own signs. The town emptied as the harbour silted up, and nobody was left to carry off its stone.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Start early and plan a whole morning here — the site is large, flat and almost shadeless, and by two in the afternoon in summer the brick is radiating heat back at you.
Walk the main street to the end first — The Decumanus shows how the whole town was laid out, and the side streets only make sense once you know where you are.
Look at floors, not walls — the mosaics in the offices, the baths and the houses are where the information is, and most of them are still where they were laid.
Do not confuse this with Ostiense inside Rome — that is a gasworks quarter in the city, and this is a Roman town twenty kilometres downriver from it.

Things to do

1
Read the mosaics in the shipping offices
Go behind the theatre into the long rectangular portico and walk it slowly, looking down at the threshold of each small room. The floors show ships, lighthouses, dolphins, an elephant and place names in Latin. Each one is the sign of a firm that traded here, and you can work out what most of them did without knowing the language.
2
Sit at the counter of a Roman bar
The snack bar on the main street, which the Romans called a thermopolium, has a marble serving counter, a basin, shelves, a small courtyard behind and a painted panel of food on the wall. Stand where the customer stood, then step behind the counter. It is furnished exactly like a bar you could walk into today.
3
Climb the stairs of an apartment block
Several of the brick blocks still have their staircases and upper floors. Take one up and look out of a window at the street. This is what an ordinary tenant of a Roman port saw every day, and almost nowhere else in the Roman world are the upper floors still standing to show it.