Looking for medicine in the centre of Rome: Arabian and Egyptian spices in the horrea Piperataria

Different literary sources demonstrated a centuries-old medical vocation of the ancient city extended along the via Sacra on the slopes of the Velia: from the first public clinic installed in 219 BC by the doctor Arcagato in the area of the compitum Acilium, this vocation survived uninterruptedly until the fifteenth century with the foundation of the Universitas Aromatorium, which settled in the San Lorenzo complex in Miranda. For the ancient city, particularly significant it is the numerous testimonies of Galen from Pergamon, which just down the Via Sacra had his apotheca, located near shops specialized in the resale of surgical materials. The area in question must in fact have been assiduously frequented by the doctors of Rome, since along the same road was the complex of the Horrea Piperataria, the warehouses of the "Egyptian and Arabic spices", produced mainly (but not only) used for medical and pharmaceutical purposes. The warehouses, according to the chronograph of 354, would be included among the operae publicae fabricatae by Domitian: the building only partially identified by the excavations conducted by Giacomo Boni below the Basilica of Massenzio, would have been obliterated precisely following the intense construction activity promoted by the emperor to the slopes of the Velia. Nowadays the knowledge of the planimetric articulation and the functioning of these warehouses is rather limited: the basilica, in fact, reused at least in part the walls of the horrea as foundations favouring the orography of the hill and deeply affecting the building; in the same way, the different building phases of the complex are not entirely clear, marked by numerous restorations still observable in situ. Starting from the archaeological datas, we propose here an analysis of the complex that aims to understand the different functional, chronological and topographical problems, extending the field of investigation to the problem of the horrea functioning and to the relationship between the control of the goods hosted here and the central power. Through the comparison with similar examples, now better documented, and the systematic screening of literary sources, it is thus proposed to investigate the multiple issues underlying the storage, distribution and management of goods in the public Horrea in order to assess the incidence of these phenomena on the urban landscape and understand the possible different ways in which certain types of goods, such as spices, were managed and controlled by the central power.