Porta Salaria
Salarian Gate, Rome Buses, scooters and Smart Fortwos roll through a breach in Aurelian's wall as wide as any made by the 19th century artillery that ended the last vestige of the Papal States . Their drivers meet only a little less resistance than the Italian army did when they blasted through , a few hundred feet to the east. The Salarian Gate didn't survive the onslaught, and when they cleared the rubble, it revealed the tomb of an 11-year-old poet laureate. In 94, Sulpicius Maximus won a poetry contest held in honor of Jupiter Capitolinus, but the light of his fame burned too briefly to prevent him from being lost under a pylon two centuries later. His monument was whisked off to the Capitoline Museum, and a replacement for the old gate was erected soon after. It, in turn, gave way to the march of progress in 1921; room had to be made for bigger things than salt merchants' carts. Now there's an enormous gap that would have horrified the city's anc...