L’ultimo legionario*

Chris and Kate went back to the UK yesterday after a ten day visit. They’d come to keep me out of mischief while Pat was at Candy’s (4th - 15th). Despite the awful weather - Chris seems to specialise in choosing meteorologically unpropitious times to come to Italy - we managed to get out and about, visiting Ascoli as well as the Smerillo chestnut festival. For me, the highlight of our excursions was the visit to Fermo. I thought Chris and Kate would be interested in seeing the Mappa Mundi and the ancient library which houses it. They were, but Kate also managed to get us tickets to the Roman cisterns. This is a monument which I’ve always wanted to visit but had never previously managed to.

   Built in the reign of  Augustus, the huge cisterns supplied water to Porto San Giorgio as well as Fermo. With the collapse of the Empire they fell in to disuse. In the middle ages two of the chambers were rediscovered by Dominican friars and used as a wine cellar. But the really interesting thing comes next. In the nineteenth century the whole complex was rediscovered and re-used as a cistern until the 1980s. But human knowledge and technology have advanced since the days of the Romans. Those primitive people had built huge chambers around twenty feet high but stupidly only allowed the water to fill them to a depth of four feet, the height of the waterproof concrete lining. So modern man being much wiser filled the chambers almost to the top. Oh dear! Too late he discovered that there was a reason for the vast amount of ‘wasted’ space. It had been full of fresh air in the precise proportion, relative to the water, required to keep the latter fresh. Lacking this fresh air, the water stored there in modern times became foul and unfit to drink.

   Most people are aware that, years after the end of the Second World War, Japanese soldiers were discovered on remote islands, unaware that the conflict had ended and still preserving their loyalty to the Emperor. Just as Italy has nothing to match the UK in the survival rate of aborted fœtuses, so the Far East cannot equal either the West’s longevity or its devotion to duty. I was able to photograph (see top of page), lurking in the bowels of the cisterns a centurion of  Legio XII, one Christophorus Bellum, and inform the startled creature that Romulus Augustulus had been deposed in AD 476, that the Roman Empire was no more and he was therefore free to resign his commission and return home to the bosom of his family. He refused to believe me, adding that  even if I were right, who would want to venture out and live in one of the petty squabbling statelets which I’d informed him currently occupy the territory of the Empire. I think he’s probably got a point.

With apologies to Manfredi.