 shopping in the ancient world. Well, on the occasion of the Saturnalia, let's explore where people went throughout the city of Rome in the Imperial times. So you have the festival of Saturnalia, celebrating Saturn, whose temple is behind me on the slopes of the Capitoline Hill. And on the last day of the Saturnalia, which ran from December 17th to December 23rd, the Sigillaria day was celebrated on the 23rd. And what did you do? You gave gifts. And this gift giving focused around the exchange of gifts, little sigilla, little terracotta figurines, little wax figurines, and you give it to all the members of your family. And of course, there is a place known somewhere in the city of Rome, possibly in the campus marshes, partially even part of the Sipta or next to it, where vendors would set up temporary booths to sell these little figurines. And so part of the campus marshes became known as the Sigillaria. And some people want to associate it looking at the ancient sources as the portico of the Argonauts, that's part of the Sipta Julia. But that's not the only place to go shopping in ancient Rome. Let's consider a whole bunch of places throughout the city. You know, you can go shopping in a lot of different places, and I just want to touch upon some of the main areas that we're going to be covering today. There's the Aventine Hill and beyond it down there at the bottom of the screen. It says Testaccio, which is a huge dump of amphorae. Some of you may be familiar with it. It is enormous. It is an artificial hill. It's a dump of discarded amphorae that were smashed up and purposefully stacked to make a rather large hill in what neighborhood? The low land right there, all around there, known as Testaccio today because of that hill was one of the emporium areas. It was a place filled with warehouses, which are called Horia. And they were in every region of the city, all 14 regions. And it is a place that when you're going shopping in antiquity as today, you can go retail, you can go wholesale. Do you want to go to a Sam's Club? Do you want to go to the mom and pop shop? Do you want to go right to the supplier? Or do you want to go to that specialty boutique store? So there are all kinds of options when you are buying in ancient Rome, just like we have today. So you can go to the exclusive shops in the Roman form and we'll go there. Or you can buy it from the street vendor. So famously you walk into Rome and you have Via De Condotti and you have all these famous shops. So you have certain districts where you have the high end goods. Everyone has their Michigan Avenue or Madison Avenue or whatnot. So did Rome. But then also you have the street vendor selling the knockoffs right there. A few steps away from the shops, the exclusive shops. And that's kind of what you get in Rome as well. You have people selling knockoff fancy bags and purses or whatever. So you've got that whole social class that's on display in the streets, in the porticoes, in the open piazzas where then you the buyer can make your purchase. And here's a plan then of the city of Rome. In the upper part of the image, it's Centro Astorico, we'll eventually get to the campus marshes area with the Pantheon and Piazza Navona and so on. But you can see the red area that shaded in is that photograph of what we're looking at. It's essentially Aventine Hill and then the Emporium Warehouse District with Distaccio. So if we're looking at the bottom of that plan of Rome, that little yellow dot, green dot, excuse me, is Distaccio. So that's a huge area that an Aventine Hill mostly residential. But as you're coming off that hill beyond towards Distaccio, it's warehouse after warehouse after warehouse where you're gonna buy all kinds of goods. So it's a place to get the grain or get in the raw product before then it's gonna be worked marble, for example, frequently brought to that particular area. And of course, these docks are gonna be on both sides of the Tiber River, also on the Tristevite side and going all the way up past Tiber Island, going all the way beyond the mausoleum of Hadrian and even the mausoleum of Augustus. So stretching on for miles and miles and miles, different produce, different products were being offloaded. Again, you as the buyer, shopping can go to the source if you want as opposed to going to the place with the refined final product. Okay, another place to look at, we're just taking a peek at, is the Roman Forum. And here are two monuments that we're gonna be taking a close look at when we get to the video, the Temple of Saturn. Maybe you saw my, I do my own videos as well on Darius Aria YouTube channel and I did a fun one on the Saturnalia. The Saturnalia celebrates the God Saturn. There's this temple, starts off with a public festival, honoring the dedication of the temple on December 17th. The days are extended and finally, it goes all the way to December 23rd. Think about the solstice, it's tomorrow, the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. And of course, beyond that, you're getting close to the new year. So it's a time of revelry and gift exchange for everyone's shopping. And we're gonna get to that as well on the video, but I just wanted to locate you then, there's the Roman Forum, temporarily closed. And then another monument, just off the area of the Forum, Hode Gripiana, where I had the good fortune to explain many years ago with American Institute for Roman Culture. And there's the best preserved warehouse in the city of Rome. And it's just a stone's throw away from the central piazza of the Forum. It was a place with high end luxury goods, dyes, and dyed fabrics. So just to give an idea, one of the great places to shop in Rome, of course, in antiquity was around the Roman Forum area. And of course, it extended into the other Forum spaces of the Imperial times. Okay, we're also gonna be covering the Forum Boarium area. And here is a little bit of an idea where exactly is the Forum Boarium area and the Forum Hulitorium area, the vegetable market in the beef or cattle market. It's just next to the Roman Forum. It's basically between the Roman Forum and the Tiber River, which is at the bottom of the screen. You can see the Boca de la Verita. There's the round temple of Hercules. And if we look at it on the plan, a little more clearly, letter B is the round temple, the famous marble temple, the oldest one in antiquity still preserved in Rome because it becomes a church. C is the temple of Portunis. And then G, F and E are the three temples that get incorporated into the church of San Nicola. And then beyond is the theater of Marcellus. But everything else we're pretty much looking at in this image are warehouses. So between the three Republican temples where you had the vegetable market, G, F and E, and then temple B and C, those are warehouses. And their goods are being stored, having just been dropped off from delivered on a boat on the Tiber River. And then ultimately, these Horia spaces are also places where you can indeed do your buying and shopping and trading. And then beyond that, we have all the covered walkways of Rome. We've talked about so many of them and they line the forum spaces and they line the temples and they line pretty much anything of grand distinction. Every theater had a covered porticoes. And we're gonna talk about it extensively when we do the Crypto Bobble Museum because the Crypto Bobble Museum has the excavation is of the portico where there were lots of shops in antiquity and they remained shops in the Middle Ages all the way through the Renaissance times. That's why the street in front of it is called the street of the Bottega, the dark shops. So as the ground level came up, those original shops then became subterranean and still in existence. So the porticoes were places to buy and sell and trade as well. And everyone's a consumer in ancient Rome. Finally, the Pantheon you see here and the Larga Gentina we're now in the campus marshes. Here's the plan, pretty much corresponds. And the last place we'll talk about at this site to Julia, it was an enclosure for voting right next to the Pantheon, precedes the Pantheon's fifth century BC structure. We line up to vote. And then in the imperial period, it's beautiful faced with marble. And it says there, portico of the Argonauts and portico of Melieger. So there were two large, either frescoes or statuary groups already in the time of Agrippa. We built in the time of Hadron because the site to burn down in a fire. That's when the Pantheon gets built the last time. And again, it's known for being a place where you could shop, particularly we think putting together little pieces and little references in some ancient sources but the Scolese Juvenile that it was in the portico of the Argonauts that a lot of temporary stands were set up and people sold their trinkets in the time of the Saturnalia. So just temporarily set up. That seems to be the case. Shopping in the ancient world took place everywhere really in the city. And one of the focal points of course is the Roman Forum. In near the Roman Forum, around the vicinity of the Basilica Emilia and the later Forum of Peace, there was the McKellum for selling spices, for selling meat, for selling fish. And McKellum occurred at all Greco-Roman cities. A McKellum is an elusive structure in the city of Rome. The Republican one, we haven't found, remains of it in the form of a station. Of course, the McKellum built by Nero is somewhere on the Kylian Hill by the Temple of Divine Claudius. What's another place for shopping? You go to the Taverni. They're going to be a part of the houses, just go over to Pompeii, for an example, of those little shops that are part of the Doma structure. Of course, we can see plenty of Taverni as you walk through the city of Pompeii, of Ostia, of Herculaneum, and making a sense of these small shops. Sometimes in the loft up above, the family would actually live. So those are smaller areas where people can come and buy their wares. And we also have to think about the ancient world in the city of Rome as wholesale and retail. So the Horia spaces, like the Horia Cartaria by the Temple of Telus for selling paper, or the Horia Vigraria, which is eventually going to be buried over by the construction of the Basilica of Maxentius, but it was originally used in the imperial period for selling spices and incense. We can go over to the base of the Palatine Hill along the Vigus Tuscus, the Etruscan Quarter, and we can see the Horia Agrippiana, where there probably were sold dyes and dyed textiles. So we have a lot of specialized areas in and around the forum area, and then we can consider all the imperial forum area. For example, the Forum of Nerva was used for the booksellers, even before the construction of that particular forum. We can go over to the Forum Holatorium, the vegetable market. We can go to the Forum Boarium for the cattle market and traders. And nearby the Velabram, again known for having stockades. And of course, the connection for all those areas, the Holatorium, the Forum Boarium, and the Velabram is the proximity to the forum, but also the proximity to the Tiber River. And all along, for kilometers, you had wares disembarking and going to particular docks. So there's the Forum for the wine, there's the Forum Suare for the pork, and et cetera, all the way through up and down the Tiber River. Of course, the Emporium is by the Ponsublicius and the Forum Boarium area. So we have so much of the city where you're not just offloading goods, but ultimately there are places where you can socialize and you can also have the opportunity to buy things. So we wanna think about these as dynamic spaces, not just for the wholesale, but also for the retail. We also wanna think about not just fixed structures, but we wanna think about itinerant sellers. So we wanna think about the people in the streets that we have recorded in the sources like Juvenile and Marshall. They're going through the streets, they're selling their wares. And you think about the various population, you think about the various population that's purchasing goods. Not everyone can go to the fancy shop. Not everyone is going to a coppersmith, or a silversmith, or a goldsmith. There are jeweler shops in the Forum. There are the really high-end kind of products. What about the everybody? Commoners, most of the people are commerce. Where are they getting their goods? Where are they getting the lesser products? So you're going directly to the source and they're also itinerant sellers on the street. Selling food, selling trinkets, setting up their stalls temporarily. We see this in big cities today. You walk on the sidewalks of Rome and we see people that set down something and sell their things and pick up and leave when the day is done with their little cardboard contraption or what not. So we think about the porticoes. All the porticoes that surrounded spaces all had some sort of opportunity to buy or to sell their wares in the covered shade of the porticoes surrounding piazzas, surrounding temples, surrounding many grand structures in the city of Rome. And that's an important thing to consider when we think about where you're buying and selling things throughout the city of Rome everywhere in the city center. In the campus marshes, on the hills, it was an opportunity to buy and sell. I'm standing in the Republican portico across the street from the Forum Holdatorium. Three temples were over there. Space, Juno and Janus now incorporated into the church of San Nicola. And behind it is the Tiber River. So it was a place for trade and commerce of vegetables. It's the Forum Holdatorium. I'm standing in this Republican portico down the street adjacent is the Forum Boarium. And this is the Vecchia Surgatius. You go up through it in the Velabram. There were stockades here as well as the Forum Holdatorium and the Forum Boarium. And it culminated in the Roman Forum. All great places to shop in the ancient city.