Secrets of the circus, part 2: Antiquity at the antiques shop

In a rather unassuming antiques shop in Tarragona, located on the impressively named Baixada de la Misericordia (´Slope of Mercy´) - a curvy, cobbled, sloping street of barely 100 metres that connects the Plaça de la Font with the Carrer Major and all the way up to the Cathedral - antiquing meets Antiquity with a capital A. Castellarnau Antiguitats is the name of the shop. Castellarnau is the surname of a powerful family of urban notables in Tarragona whose city residence is now the seat of the city history museum.

But back to the antiques dealer. This is not your usual bric-à-bracy type place. What makes the difference is the workshop, the antiquarian´s back office where apparently he also runs restoration techniques classes. The workshop is built into one of the many vaults that in Roman times were designed to support the circus stands. There are quite a number of such places around this street and on the Plaça de la Font where bits of Roman history continue to shape the look and layout of cellars, backrooms, cafés and restaurants.

This is living, breathing history. This is not just amazing because the circus vault is virtually perfectly intact but also because there is a morality tale here. A tale of how, once abandoned (around 500AD), the circus was partly destroyed but also partly reused. What happened to many of the vaults is a piece of ingenuous engineering by the masses. These strong cement caverns were converted into dwellings. For many centuries (till the early 20th century?) there were people who called these walls their home, who lived, ate and drank here, who had children here. That´s why even more than the remains of the circus that are exposed to the naked eye, out in the open air, I prefer to gaze at this place - its walls have history written all over them: the history of Great Men and the history of small men, Roman history as well as medieval and modern history, from sports show cum political performance to pots and pans hanging from the walls, from the devil´s playground (which is how early Christians saw the Roman circus) all the way to domestic bliss.