If you travel into the centre of Rome from where I live, your route takes you along a fast-moving dual carriageway known as the Cassia Bis. Fast-moving, that is, except for one point, known locally as Val Baccano, where the road narrows to a single lane for half a kilometre as it twists around an unexpected S-bend.
The effect of this road-narrowing is all too obvious, forcing traffic to slow down and causing huge traffic jams at peak times such as Saturday mornings when Roman day-trippers are on their way out of town or Sunday evenings when they are on their way back home again.
If you live in outer Lazio, you soon learn that if you have to travel into Rome on a Sunday afternoon, you do so before four o'clock. Otherwise, a journey that would normally take one hour can be more than doubled because of the time lost at Val Baccano.
There is, of course, a good reason for this frustrating interruption in an otherwise fast 30km stretch of dual carriageway: the archaeological remains of an ancient Roman site unearthed during the road-building operations many years ago. Not for the first time in and around Rome, the needs of modern, car-bound man find themselves at loggerheads with the safeguarding of the Eternal City's immense historical and archaeological heritage.
Val Baccano came to mind a month ago when news first leaked of the discovery of a potentially interesting ancient Roman villa, unearthed by diggers working on the construction of a feeder ramp between the Lungotevere, the road that runs alongside the Tiber, and a new huge car-park under the Gianicolo (Janiculum) hill in the Vatican. This latter car-park is a Jubilee project, intended to help absorb the 30 million-plus tourists expected to come to Rome and the Vatican next year.
Experts believe that the villa unearthed by the digging is the domus of Agrippina, no less, mother of the Emperor Caius Caligula who ruled from AD37 to AD41 and who, if historians are to be believed, was little more than a crazed megalomaniac. Caligula, of course, was the emperor who appointed his horse a Roman consul, just to annoy the senate of the day. There are those who argue, however, that this particular appointment marked a high point for the political classes, in sorry decline ever since.
Jokes aside, though, the discovery of Agrippina's domus has prompted the inevitable public row between archaeologists, conservationists and environmental lobbyists on the one hand and government, the Vatican and Rome city authorities on the other. While the archaeologists and environmentalists want all building work to stop in order for the site to be thoroughly investigated and analysed, the city (and Vatican) authorities are willing to consider only a temporary pause for the removal of the most interesting artefacts (frescoes, pillars and anything else portable) so that the car-park project will be finished by next month, in time for the new millennium.
The discovery of Agrippina's villa serves as a further reminder of the difficulties of almost any building work in and around Rome. Put simply, where you dig in the Roman palimpsest, there you are likely to stumble upon ancient remains. For that reason, projects such as this Vatican car-park tend to meet with immediate, initial opposition and to take a very long time to be realised. The Gianicolo car park was first proposed in October 1991.
Furthermore, environmentalist groups such as Italia Nostra suspect that all manner of archaeological remains may well have already been unearthed and then, perhaps, quickly forgotten. Accused of having "wreaked havoc" on the car-park site, the Vatican was prompted to reply last week, pointing out that no archaeological remains had been unearthed during the work on Vatican territory. For the record, Agrippina's villa is situated just outside Vatican state territory.
The Vatican's denial does not convince everyone. Writing last February in the religious affairs magazine, 30 Days, Prof Lorenzo Bianchi of the Institute for Technology Applied to Cultural Heritage had argued that the Gianicolo car-park would inevitably bury important remains from the classical, early Christian and medieval periods.
Discussing the car-park, situated in the garden of the building that houses the Vatican Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples (Propaganda Fide), Prof Bianchi wrote:
"It would appear that no ancient remains have been found during the work, but I think one may legitimately doubt that, given the wealth of ancient remains around about . . ."
Prof Bianchi is not alone with his doubts. In the meantime, the city fathers are sure to find that the almost impossible task of reconciling radical modernisation (in particular regarding traffic) with the safeguarding of Rome's cultural patrimony is one that will engage them and their successors well into the next millennium.