A series on a very Italian habit: not demolishing, but building on top, inside, beside. Each instalment reads a place like an excavation, one layer at a time. It begins on the Appian Way, at the tomb of Caecilia Metella, and moves on to Ninfa and the Caetani.
Strata
Almost nothing of the Appian Way we carry in our heads is ancient. The fragments on the walls, the road dug out and given back, the enclosure, the pines: someone decided all of it, between 1808 and the twentieth century.
Strata
On the Appian Way you ride higher than the fields. It isn't an impression: you are on the back of a lava flow that stopped exactly where the tomb of Caecilia Metella stands.