DAVID HEWSON on the subterranean inspiration behind the fifth Nic Costa novel
Some questions never go away. One I get constantly is, 'Why did you choose to set your books in Rome?' The honest answer is I didn't; Rome chose me, clubbing me over the head one day when I happened to be there editing a book about somewhere else entirely. Now with the fifth Nic Costa book, THE SEVENTH SACRAMENT, just out in the UK and about to appear in the US, its successor is already penned, and the one after that is in train.
So am I bored with Rome? You have to be kidding. Rome isn't a place, it's an entire universe, a limitless world of possibilities, ancient, medieval and modern. The Romans have a saying about their city: 'Non basta una vita'. One life isn't enough. You bet. Take, for example, the background to THE SEVENTH SACRAMENT, which is a city I never knew existed until I took to the streets and started asking interesting questions of interesting people.
And there are the temples, which came to form the heart of my story. SACRAMENT centres around Giorgio Bramante, an archaeologist with an obsession for the subterranean, and one element of it in particular: Mithraic temples which were usually built beneath the earth to begin with. Bramante is an expert - as much as one can be - on the cult of Mithras which was wiped out when the empire adopted Christianity as Rome's sole religion when Constantine won the Battle of the Milvian Bridge.
The literature and rites of Mithraism were largely lost after that time. But we know that the cult was popular among soldiers and civil servants, that it emphasised loyalty to the state and the empire, and that its followed were divided into seven different hierarchical ranks, with promotion depending upon some kind of sacrament, a penance, perhaps an ordeal, which had to be borne in order to gain advancement. Hence the title of my book.
You can read a lot about Mithraism these days - much of it conjecture. But I don't research books by reading alone. I needed to know what it felt like to be underground, and to talk to people who shared the same kind of interests I intended to visit upon Giorgio Bramante.
The enterprising tourist can find several interesting underground sites open to the public. The catacombs are well known - and pretty boring to me. The Basilica of San Clemente, close to the Colosseum, is altogether more interesting. Pay a small fee and you can descend into its lower levels, passing through an early Christian church, and winding up in the original subterranean Mithraeum. Just around the corner, in the ancient street known today as the Clivo Scauri, there is also a recently-opened excavation beneath the church of SS Giovanni e Paolo which has revealed shops, homes and a wealth of wall paintings.
But Giorgio Bramante would have looked down on these as mere tourist attractions. I needed more... and I soon found the place to get it. Roma Sotterranea is an organisation run by people who have permission to go places the ordinary public can't. They have an excellent web site. They run tours for the public. They also have a membership system that runs occasional visits to more out of the way sites too, some of which come close to what we in the UK would call pot holing and in the US spelunxing.
I signed up to join in the winter of 2004 and have fond if chilly memories of those months. To be honest, damp, dark underground spaces aren't my favourite places. But I wanted to try to understand what drove people to investigate them, and, more than anything, to get some feel for what they were really like. I hope that informs the finished book, much of which takes place in the caves, waterways, and hidden temples and streets that run beneath modern Rome, unseen by the millions who tramp the pavement above.
And when I felt I had enough I stopped. I write fiction, not fact. I need a solid basis on which to weave my fantasies. But I am not writing a guide. Some of the places in SACRAMENT - such as the Little Museum of Purgatory and the ossuary of the Via Veneto - are real. Most are not, or are mangled versions of the original. That is what I do for a living: invent from a basis of truth.
It was a great experience. But when I look back on writing the next book I can see I didn't spent one moment underground. Instead, that title focuses on the world and legacy of Caravaggio, a continuing obsession of my detective Nic Costa, and one I was happy to explore through a year spent largely in galleries, private, public and religious.
Non basta una vita. Dead right...
David Hewson is the author of the Nic Costa series of contemporary crime thrillers set principally in Rome. A former journalist with the London Times and Sunday Times he moved to Italy and enrolled at language school to start research for a series that is now published in multiple languages around the world... including Italian. He is a vice president of ITW and launch editor of the new ITW web-site.
