In Dog Days, writer Tony Perrottet explains that “the ideal place to be writing about imperial Rome, from an imaginative point of view, is right here in New York”:
In fact, every time I wake up in my cramped East Village apartment, all I have to do is squint and I might as well be back in the Subura, Rome’s feistiest neighborhood in the days of the Caesars. The Subura (nobody knows where the name comes from) was the original gritty downtown: Located conveniently close to the Forum, it was jammed full of tenement houses, each six stories high, called insulae or “islands,” and broken into rental apartments that were touchingly familiar — notorious, one historian says, for “the fragility of their construction, the scantiness of their furniture, insufficient light and heat, and the absence of sanitation.” In those days, harassed Roman tenants would climb 200 steps to their top-floor garrets, whose walls were so thin they could overhear the most intimate sounds of their neighbors (and this before stereos). They battled rapacious landlords, who ignored the most basic building repairs: “The agents propped up a tottering wall,” notes one historian, “or painted a huge (ceiling) rift over, and assured the occupants that they could sleep at their ease, all the time that their home was crumbling over their heads.” Adding insult to injury, they paid extortionate prices for the privilege.