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 The Commercial Entrance
_ _ _ Second Itinerary |
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If you enter the San Lorenzo
neighborhood from Piazza San Giovanni on the street that carries its
name, Borgo San Lorenzo; you travel back in history over two thousand
years. We are at the very origins of the city. This was, in fact, the
northern limit of the Roman walls that closed off the Roman castrum, a
type of military camp, founded in 59 B.C. by veterans of Cesar's
legions. It is here that a thousand years before the Baptistery was
built that the Porta Praetoria, or Porta contra Aquilonem which means
door against the winds was situated, while behind us underneath the
current Archbishop's Palazzo was one of the city's four thermal
buildings (the remains were uncovered during the 1895 excavations).
Here the Roman and Christian worlds met and slowly overlapped each
other, like to the south in the Oltrarno neighborhood, where Via Cassia
ends at the intersection with Ponte Vecchio.
On the south side of the city the church of the martyr Santa Felicita
with its early Christian cemetery, on the north side San Lorenzo
Basilica, Roman deacon and martyr in 258 A.D. under the Emperor
Valeriano. We don't know which of the two was established first, we do
know though that the first large church to enter into history, however,
was San Lorenzo, consecrated in 393 by the great Bishop of Milan Sant
Ambrogio, only eighty years after Constantine's Edict liberalizing the
worship of Christ in the entire Empire. Christianity arrived first in
the south, perhaps it was brought by the Greek-Syrian merchants in
their caravans, but in the north it was well received in the most
popular neighborhoods. In recent decades excavations under the Duomo
have brought to light the remains of elegant Roman houses with mosaic
flooring and three wide ovens, artisans workshops and laboratories that
make one think of a working neighborhood.
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The Commercial Entrance
