The Oldest Sewer in the World (Part 1)
“You have made a very big mistake!” Here I was being chewed out, in English no less, by a homeless Gypsy fisherman with a neatly trimmed mustache on the east bank of the Tiber River. My crime? Trying to visit the Cloaca Maxima - the world’s oldest sewer.
Ancient Rome had a problem - a lot of people, even more animals, and no way to get rid of all their poop. To cope with this problem, a rudimentary sewage system was dug around 600 BC, flowing through town out to the Tiber river. It’s so old, nobody really knows if it started as a tunnel, or ditch, or even a natural river. It’s been in use in some form or another ever since, although in modern times its remaining passages were consolidated with the rest of the sewer system of Rome.
I wasn’t quite sure of the big mistake I had made. A little research had led us to the approximate location of the outflow of the Cloaca Maxima. I decided to head over there and see if we could get in. One possible entrance had a couple of guys camped out in front of it, obviously making it their home. I asked one of them (as best I could), if it was the Cloaca Maxima. He gestured to keep walking down the path by the river - or so I thought. A little further downstream I found another possible entrance. Happy with my scouting, I headed back the way I came. After passing the first entrance and about to head back up the stairs to the street, I heard someone yelling at me in Italian. After repeated “No Parlo Italiano,” he says “you speak English? - you have made a very big mistake!” Apparently I had in some way offended some sensibility of his when asking about the Cloaca. He further went on to berate a non-existent German friend of mine (”no, I think you know who the German is!”), and eventually took my apologies and walked away.
Well, here was another obstacle I’d put in our way. Instead of manholes and fences, now we had angry Gypsies to contend with. The next morning Steve and I, armed with our peace offerings of pastries and beer , went down to try and talk our way in.
Upon our walk down the banks of the Tiber river we ran into a lot of makeshift campsites. It didn’t seem like just homeless Gypsies either - I wouldn’t have been surprised if a tent or two belonged to some Australian backpacker. Rome is an expensive place to visit after all.
We had determined earlier that day that the first site, by the Gypsy campsite was almost certainly the actual outflow of the Cloaca. The guy who had yelled at me wasn’t there, but his friend was. Since he only spoke Italian, Romany, and Russian fluently (God bless Europe, where the homeless speak more languages than the millionaires in America), Steve managed a mangled conversation with him in French. 10 minutes and a couple beers later and we were in. Imagine our disappointment when the tunnel ended in a brick wall after 10 feet.
Undaunted, we decided to see if we could find out way to the Cloaca from the other entrance a little further down. There was a heavy gate in front of the entrance, but it wasn’t locked. This time it took a little bit of mechanical ingenuity and a lot of elbow grease instead of two beers and decent French to make it in.
This one was big, looked relatively new (which in Europe means less than a few hundred years), and was obviously not the Cloaca. It began to curve toward the direction of the first entrance, giving us hope that it would eventually lead us to the Cloaca, but stopped at a flood gate before very long.
With the Cloaca this close, we had to go on. Luckily for us, there was a ladder. Up the ladder, into the gatehouse, across a catwalk, and down another (much rustier) ladder and we found ourselves in the sewers beneath the Capolitine hill. On we went.
Tags: Cloaca Maxima, Italy, Rome, Sewers, Tiber
