The Tiber Island is a river island and the only urban island of the Tiber in the centre of Rome. In the Forma Urbis of the Severan age it is referred to as “inter duos pontes”: it is in fact connected to the two banks of the Tiber by Ponte Cestio and Ponte Fabricio.
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The legends about Tiber Island
According to an ancient legend, the Tiber Island arose from the heaps of sheaves of wheat, belonging to the Tarquins, that the Romans threw into the river when they were driven out of Rome. The quantity was such that the sheaves, piled on top of each other, formed the embankment that was the first nucleus of the island. Such a late origin of the Tiber Island seems difficult to sustain: at the time of the great work on the Tiber, which took place at the end of the 19th century, it was possible to examine its nucleus, which turned out to be made of volcanic rock, on which a considerable mass caused by the floods was later superimposed.
The truth is that if the fundamental reason for the birth and development of Rome is due to its topographical location on the river, it is also true that thanks to the Tiber Island, which has always been a sort of natural bridge with its sandbanks emerging from the water and therefore a point of exchange at the crossroads of the two most important roads from the commercial point of view, the ‘via Salaria’ and the ‘via Campana’, a real emporium was born for the city that was being built behind it.
There is also another legend about the birth of the Tiber Island, perhaps even more famous than the first one: it tells of a ship that, in 291 BC, a serious epidemic having broken out in Rome, sailed to Epidaurus, a city sacred to Aesculapius, the most important healer god of Greece, with a commission of Roman scholars to ask the deity of medicine for help. But while the propitiatory rites were taking place, a huge snake came out of the temple and took refuge on the Roman ship.
Certain that Aesculapius had turned into a snake, the ship hurried back to Rome. When the ship reached the island, the snake descended into the river and swam to the Tiber Island, where it disappeared, thus indicating the location where the temple was to be built: construction started soon afterwards and was inaugurated in 289.
The location of the temple would coincide with the church of St Bartholomew: the medieval well, which still exists near the altar of the church, would correspond to the fountain with which the temple was certainly endowed. The temple was a real hospital: several inscriptions have survived testifying to miraculous healings, votive offerings and dedications to the deity. The sick were cured ‘especially with water’, as a 4th-century grammarian, Pompeius Festus, writes. In memory of the miraculous event, the island took the form of a trireme, with a prow, stern and even a mast, represented, originally, by an obelisk (two fragments of which are in the National Museum in Naples, while the third is in Munich) and later by a column with a cross. This column was called ‘the infamous column’ because a table was posted here (the custom lasted until after 1870) in which the ‘bandits who did not attend the Eucharistic mass on Easter Day’ were indicated.
The Tiber Island today
The island’s tradition as a place of healing did not end with the demise of the Temple of Aesculapius: in the 16th century, a hospital was built here run by the Congregation of St John of God, the ‘Fatebenefratelli’ a nickname derived from its founder, St John of God himself, a Portuguese friar who, dressed in his habit, in front of the hospital he had organised, used to address an unusual call to passers-by in the streets of Granada: “Do well, brothers!” It was an invitation to do charity, but also good for one’s soul. The Congregation also had the concession to open pharmacies and so they opened one next to the hospital.
The hospital complex is also called St John Calibita, from the church attached to the hospital, which has an old cloister with lunettes painted in the 18th century.
