Imperial Forum and Ostia

April 22, 2007

Rome, Italy

Yesterday was another longish day for us, and I think that everyone is starting to get burned out with all of the traveling, the crowds and the heat. I could not focus at all wherever we went and only recovered in time to go to the mass last night at the Pantheon, which was fortunate because I would have sincerely regretted only being half awake at that experience.

During the day we went to the Imperial Forum, which was a series of public spaces added under Caesar and later emperors to expand public space in the center of the city. Unfortunately, most of it is now covered by the modern road plowed through by Mussolini, looking for a way to link the Colosseum at the end of a big road to the other great monuments of the city, and obliterated everything in his way. As a result, the forums might have columns or walls here and there on either side of the huge road, but not much else.

On the opposite end of the forum was the other famous column of the Roman period, the Column of Trajan, upon which the column of Marcus Aurelius is modeled, with smaller and lower bands of relief showing his two greatest campaigns against the barbarians. The column was originally topped with a statue of Trajan himself, but in the later periods this was replaced with a bronze of some saint or another, which still exists today. Some of the bottom was encased in scaffolding, but the building itself was quite impressive—a massive width and a huge white shaft standing high above all of the other buildings in the remains of the forum. We walked around this column, down into the one part of the forum that was still preserved: a honeycomb of arches and vaults all done in brick.

This part of the forum was actually called Trajan’s Markets, and although it abutted the forum, in antiquity it did not actually connect. However, the walls separating the more commercial parts of the forum from the rest of the place have since fallen in, revealing a massive hemicycle of brick facing. The Markets look like an inverted Colosseum—several stories of arched colonnades looking outward from a concave curve—over 150 shops carved out of the side of the hill on the back of the forum. This structure was huge and very impressive—we got to walk inside the tall arched vaulting and admire the uniform rows of brick work as it swung around in a massive arc. It was cool on the inside, and the shops, now long empty, stood barren and shadowed in the early afternoon light.

It was around 2:00, and I was so tired I could barely keep one foot in front of the other. After the presentation had finished on the markets, I walked over on the other side of the forum to inspect an exhibition that I had considered visiting, one on Marc Chagall, a 20th century artist. However, the cost of the museum was incredibly high, and I was so tired that I knew I would be unable to appreciate the artwork, however fine it was. So, I decided to walk back toward the Colosseum to take the metro home.

I arrived back at the hotel just in time to watch an episode of Desperate Housewives and catch up a little bit on my blog (as you can see by the lateness of this entry, I am still way behind), and tried to take a nap. Just as I was about to nod off, Jess Eisenberg excitedly burst into the room, panting from the effort to get there in time, and asked if everyone had left to go to the mass in the Pantehon. Since I was planning on going, I replied that no, everyone had not, and after struggling to rise to my feet, I put back on my shoes, grabbed a scarf to cover my shoulders, and walked into the hall, where Vincoli and Scott were waiting. We took the number 84 bus as close as we could get to the Pantheon, and walked the rest of the way there, racing the clock to arrive on time.

But arrive we did, coming into the plaza just in time to stop and appreciate the weathered façade of the great building, the portico with its immortal insciption of Marcus Agrippa across the top, and the massive widely spaced columns leading into a huge door that opened onto the even bigger space of the dome, lavishly enriched with the marble that the outside completely lacked—all fancy stone had been stripped sometime in the middle ages, leaving the rough brick on the rotunda, and a series of holes—puncture wounds, on the pediment of the porch where the statues used to be.

We walked through the slanting afternoon light and the bustling noise of the street before coming into the relative calm of the Pantheon, still swarming with tourists. We took our seats in the folding chairs past the ropes, and settled in to wait until the mass began. The mass itself was long but very beautiful, conducted completely in Italian and Latin, so none of us understood much, but the magic of the moment and of the place struck us all. I looked around at the beautiful statuary and the magnificent dome, unsurpassed in its scope and majesty, and when the priest began to sing series after series of arpeggioed hallelujahs I could not help but feel moved.

We all emerged from the mass feeling incredibly elated, and stepped out from that sanctuary back into the real world. I wanted to let the feeling stay with me, so I didn’t talk much for the first few minutes, holding the memories of the echoing hymns close to the chest until the real world intruded too far and I was forced to return to the practicality of what to do next. So we decided to get gelato, of course, moving up the street on the side of the Pantheon to a famous gelateria that had over 100 flavors. Already having maxed out my gelato quota for the day, I opted for some gummis instead, but Scott, Chris and Jess all got some, and let me try a bit as we meandered our way over to the Trevi Fountain.

The Trevi fountain looked even more lovely in the fading light of the afternoon, the water bubbling out of the niches, supervised closely by the imposing figure of Triton, striding over the rocks on the backs of fierce dolphins. It was not nearly as mobbed as it was the day that Lily and I visited, and we had less of a problem getting down to the water this time. I threw in another coin, a fervent wish to return to Rome again, and we stood gazing at the burbling water before we finally walked back to the nearet metro, and returned to the hotel, just in time to share our experiences with the group. Some folks had gone to the Opera that night, and told us their stories about how it was. We hung out for a while, talking and comparing notes before turning in.

The next day was a long travel day; we had to take the metro all of the way out of Rome to Ostia, which was the ancient Roman harbor. The shoreline has silted up since then, and Ostia Antica is a good few kilometers inland from the beach now, but we spotted lots of Europeans in their bathing attire, headed out to the beach. We all listened to our iPods or read as the train sped out of the city and into the rolling hills, before dropping us off in a wooded park complete with fragmented walls and scattered marble.

Ostia was a huge town in antiquity—virtually every good that went to Rome went through the port first, and two emperors carved harbors directly out of the earth—Claudius digging a shallow one that turned out to be very dangerous for the ships, and Trajan digging a regular hexagonal harbor that was much deeper and more sheltered, protecting the ships from the wind and waves that turned the other harbor into a graveyard.

The town contained a large number of public baths, including the Baths of Neptune, a large complex with some wonderful black and white mosaics with the god leading a quartet of horses, mermaids and dolphins arcing in the white tesserae. We walked around the fragments of walls that surrounded the mosaics, climbing up to view them from the top, and coming around and down to walk amongst the walls.

Then we were off, to the next place—the barracks of the firemen. It was growing hot, and the red bricks rose up to our necks and surrounded us. Jarrett gave us an assignment, to figure out what the function of the building was, so we spread out, walking in and out of ancient rooms, peering over walls and through windows, some of us deciphering inscriptions set into ancient blocks of marble. I entered a curious room with high brick walls and a floor completely surrounded on four sides by a deeply cut channel about a foot wide, the rest of the floor rising up in an island around it. Underneath was a tunnel, presumably to lead the water from wherever it was to here, and walking back along the narrow paths to the wide open space where we started the trip, we noticed tall cisterns for water and a set of steps decorated with marble and littered with what looked like statue bases.

Jarrett told us that this was, indeed, a barracks that surrounded a central courtyard, and the curious appearance of all of the water was so that the community firemen could practice putting out fires. The set of steps and marble decoration facing onto the courtyard was a small shrine to the emperor, and there were in addition two sets of toilets, one public and one private. Evidently the firemen were kind of a big deal in antiquity.

And as the day wore on, we saw many of the areas of the ancient town. We saw what amounted to an ancient shopping mall—the so-called Piazzali de la Corporazoni, an open square lined with stalls for everything from ropemakers to fruit sellers. Each of the shop types was indicated by the image inlaid in mosaic in the floor. At the back of this square was a theater, a small one dedicated by Caracalla and so inscribed in a huge plaque on the sides of the seating area. We stopped there for lunch, and when we were finished, the bravest of us ventured down to the stage to enact something for the benefit of everyone there. Katie went down and read a selection of The Wasteland, by TS Eliot, and Sam graced us with a song, sung with much reluctance but sung well.

After the break, we took a brief stop by the Mithraeum, the site of a mystery cult in the Roman empire, one centering on this eastern sun god, who was worshipped in a cave like setting by the sharing of a ritual meal among his followers. The walls of this strange temple were bounded by low seating, and the far end contained a carved medallion with the god himself, cloak flying behind him, surrounded on one side by a great bull.

Finally, we visited an ancient taverna and the Roman version of a tenement building—evidence for city housing, buildings several stories high surrounding a communal courtyard and garden, before, tired and more than a little sunburned, we took a long walk back to the metro station and endured a rather unpleasant hot and sweaty ride back to Rome. Stewart and I and Scott all got off at the Spanish Steps—I had lost my pair of sandals a while back and my feet were screaming for air, so we found a Northface store and I bought a pair of turqoise flip flops and Scott a pair of heavier sandals with several straps. He was so happy about his purchase that I think he sung the whole way home.

We still got home when it was light outside, so I decided to combat the worst of my fatigue by going for a run, venturing out of the hotel and to a nearby park and villa, complete with an art museum (which I did not visit in my sweaty state, but would have liked to), a crumbling romantic temple-like structure, an obelisk, and sweeping hills of vegetation. I ran around this park for a while, weaving up and down the paths and in and out of groups of people lounging in the late afternoon cool. I greeted other runners on the paths, happy to finally see exercising Europeans, a rarity over here. It felt great to be doing something athletic again, and my run was further extended when I got a little bit lost on the way home and ended jogging over to the next stop on the metro before realizing that I was heading the wrong direction and turning around, getting back to the hotel much later than I said I would picnic.

Still, I managed to have a great little salad for dinner, and Ambrice and Chris and Jess Bradshaw and Jess Eisenberg and I chatted for a long time about the trip and how close it was to being over, surprised that all our travels would come to an end soon, but happy that the madness would end as well. Being in such a small group with such an eccentric professor for so long is never easy. And then I had a much needed, but wonderful shower, before reading more of my new Caravaggio book and heading off to bed.

I had meant to go to bed early to get a bunch of sleep before the Vatican the next day, but Jess Bradshaw ended up coming in and talking to me for a long time, and when she left I was almost settled into sleep, but Katie, who I was rooming with, came in and we ended up having a long heart to heart until my answers faded to grunts and then to whispers and silence.

The Forum, the Pantheon, the Colosseum

April 20, 2007

Rome, Italy

The past few days have been totally exhilarating but completely exhausting at the same time. We have been to the Forum, the Colosseum, and the Pantheon, and done tons and tons of walking around the city, seeing a lot of the sights and doing tons and tons of exploring. This is why I have been pretty lax in updating the blog, I have been so busy seeing everything that I fall asleep on my reading before midnight. Its been tough to keep up with everything in Rome, the more I see the more I want to see it all, and we are only here a week. This is definitely a city I would love to come back to, but in the meantime I am going to spend as much time as possible seeing what I can see with the limited time I have.

Two days ago was Day 2 of the Forum, where we got to see the later monuments, ones that were still in fairly good condition. It was a long, busy busy day and it was super hot by the late afternoon. We sat in the sun and baked, getting funny backpack strap tan lines as we wandered around through the tumbled bricks and bits of columns in the center of the old city. We started out at the arch of Trajan, which arches over the Via Sacra, the triumphal procession for most of the religious festivals in the city. It is only a single arch, somewhat less elaborate than the more famous Arch of Constantine but no less impressive in its decoration. The most famous part of this arch is a frieze on the interior, where the spoils from the sack of Jerusalem, including a huge menorah held above the soldiers as they turn to head toward the interior of the arch itself.

Then it was up that ceremonial road and to the Forum itself. We walked through the brick ruins of arches and columns until we reached the far side, which backed right up to the Capitoline Hill, from which I had seen the hail storm the previous day. Backing onto the hill were three temples, the remains of which varied from a full set of colonnades on the porch to at the very least a tufa (a type of volcanic stone that the Romans were fond of using for the cores of their buildings) and concrete mound indicating a temple platform. The farthest of these, and the least well preserved was the temple of Concordia Augusta, “imperial harmony,” erected under the reign of Trajan in the early 1st centuries AD, and consisted of an oddly shaped cella, wider than it was long, fronted by a narrower porch that projected out from the hill into the forum proper. This temple also doubled as a speakers platform, and was colonnaded, but all of it has been lost to medieval and renaissance stone scavengers. To the side of this was another temple, the temple to Vespasian, erected after the emperor’s death by Caracalla, some 200 years later and wedged in between the temple of Concordia and the much older temple of Saturn on the other side.

This temple was better preserved, but not by much: three lonely columns, the corners of the porch in white marble, the details picked out with the dark stain of time, standing on a much humbler platform. The entablature above the columns still contains some degree of decoration—objects of sacrifice, ram’s skulls, knives, jars, etc….

The temple that is best preserved on that side is the temple of Saturn, a much older one than the other two and completely constructed of this stuff called spolia—bits and pieces of other monuments appropriated and incorporated in to this one. Mostly the stuff stolen is the huge monolithic column capitals, made up of a reddish type of marble and mushed together from fallen parts. Some of them have clear lines where two broken pieces of column have been stitched together to form anew. However, the re-use seems to have been largely successful, the porch stands completely intact, a collonade that embraces the empty sky instead of the cella of the temple which should have existed behind it. According to legend, the cult of Saturn was a very old and very strange one in the empire, one associated with crop farming and fertility, in which an old statue of the god would remain with his feet tied with wool every part of the year except for during the Saturnalia festival, when his feet would finally come untied. Jarrett seemed to indicate that bizarre stuff like this was about par for the course for the Romans, who liked to do strange inexplicable things for their religion.

In any event, we moved on to look at the arch of Septimius Severus, which was constructed in the 3rd C AD and from which Constantine closely modeled his arch by the Colosseum. This is a more elaborate triple arch, and is elaborately sculptured. Unlike the Greeks, who liked to show more mythological scenes of battles, the Romans wanted to show their own victories and their conquests, here the many scenes show the emperor himself going out to fight the barbarian hordes. The Romans, ever successful, mowed down the barbarians and commemorated their victories by memorializing the defeat of their enemies, placing them under the feet of the conquering monarch, thoroughly subdued.

Then we moved on, out of that small part of the forum and into the larger area, a place where a single column stood proudly against the sky. This was the column of Phocas, erected by one of his supporters in honor of Phocas’ supposed greatness, when in actuality Phocas himself was somewhat of a barbarian, a military commander who took power that was not quite his and who was disposed of rather quickly.

Then we kept going, to the sides of the forum where stood a great Basilica of Julia, pressed into another one of the hills surrounding the forum, a series of squat brick arches sat in a row, surrounding a courtyard with a huge peristyle. Basilicas in the Roman period were not churches as we now think of them, although they generally retain the three aisled shape that the Christians would later appropriate and add an apse at the end of. The basilica in the Roman period was used for law courts and meeting places, this particular basilica was primarily used as a law court dealing with inheritance and wills. The brick arches and apses we saw now are the results of years and years of stone pillaging. The basilica was originally huge, and while the remains are quite impressive now, I can only imagine what it would have been like in its heyday.

On the opposite side from the Julian basilica was another basilica, of which much less remains, only the scattered pieces of a few marble columns. However, next to it is a building almost fully constructed of a rough brick core. This was called the Curia, the place where the senate would meet and vote. We could not go inside, but Jarrett told us that inside could be found a ring of seats for each of the senators, and voting would take place by moving to one or another side of the big room. The outside was rather plain, originally stuccoed and colonnaded on the exterior, leading up to a massive set of iron clad doors, and three windows above brought light and air into the space.

But we had more to see, so we moved on to the center of the forum itself, where a temple and an altar to Julius Caesar once stood, and where after his assassination in 44 BC, the funeral procession carrying his body rioted and burned him on the spot in the middle of the forum. Nothing really remains except for the greyed remains of a tufa and concrete platform and three columns, standing alone on the tops of the platform. Just in front was the semicircular remains of the altar, which was erected over the spot where Caesar was burned. The sun by now was blazing and we were getting warm and impatient to move on. We kept walking, coming to the nearby temple of Castor and Pollux, a cult imported from the Greeks, which was imported to Rome after the mysterious images of the twins were seen simultaneously at a battle field and in the forum itself. So, the temple was erected, the same type we have seen all over the place—with a steep staircase, a high platform, and a deep porch with embedded walls around the outside of the cella.

We kept going, past the temple remains and into the best preserved part of the forum, the sanctuary of the vestal virgins, which stood—a few curved walls and columns on top of that typical platform that we have become so familiar with. The vestal virgins were a special class of women in Rome, chosen at a young age to keep the sacred flame of Vesta permanently lit. These virgins had special privelages, they could get front seats at the gladiator games, and could ride carriages throughout the city, where no one else could. In return, they lived in this special precinct just off of the forum and were kept segregated from the rest of society… all that now remains are the few walls and the columns at the very end of the forum.

And again, away from the open space of the forum, to the Temple of Antoninus Pius and Faustina, a church that was converted from an earlier temple—brick faced with marble columns on the porch, elaborately carved and inscribed with the names of the emperor and his wife. And then on and on, to another temple, this one different from the rest—a circular central hall with a series of doors framed by purple marble columns, the marble exterior missing but the door frame elaborately wrought with egg and dart moulding, and the spolia of the columns fitted to the doorframe with the help of a little marble padding. This was one of my favorite temples, because it was different from all of the others—a circle instead of the tall squares that filled up the rest of the forum. This temple was called the Temple of Romulus, not the one of Roman antiquity, but the temple of the deified son of the emperor Maxentius, constructed in the 4th C AD, although all of the marble parts date from some time earlier.

The last stop of the day was at the so-called New Basilica, begun by Maxentius and finished by Constantine himself. It was huge, a vaulted space with arches 35 meters high, lit from above by a clerestory of windows and arched collonade around the exterior of the building. Although nothing now remains of the marble veneering that originally covered the interior in its multitude of colors, the brick still left with some of the coffered patterns in the ceiling, incised hexagons that retreat back into the huge arches over head. Although only one side of this originally huge building remains, it was so impressive to see, I could not believe how much went into the construction of such a buiding. And to think that Constantine constructed it just in time to move the capital to Byzantium is even more astounding, it would have stood as a functional law court for only a few years before being abandoned for the new capital.

And we were done, ready to go but eager to explore more of Rome itself. Jess Dwyer and I decided to go to the Villa Borgese, another of Rome’s fine art museums, one that contains a number of Renaissance works including paintings by Raphael, Caravaggio, and tons and tons of sculptures, Apollo and Daphne, a lounging lady, a faun… all of it was set in a magnificent park and garden area which led to a white neoclassical building, the inside of which was marbled and gilded and every ceiling was covered with a fabulous painting of mythology. We could only stay for about an hour, but we made the most of the time, wandering through the magnificent halls and staring in wonder at everything before us. It was one of the best museum experiences I have had yet, and if it didn’t cost so much to enter the museum I would definitely go back. Perhaps the next time (hopefully) I am in Rome I can come and appreciate the wonders of the Villa. Even the grounds were beautiful, well landscaped with winding paths through the trees and fountains sending up shoots of water into the bright sky.

But we eventually had to head back, it was Jess Eisenberg’s birthday so we all went out to dinner, taking the metro to the Spanish Steps and having a very nice, but very expensive dinner there. We all enjoyed ourselves, talking a whole bunch and relaxing, before heading back to the hotel before I headed to Vincoli and Scott’s room to watch Gladiator, again, stopping where the scenes flew over a construction of the city and pausing to try to identify the buildings…. Such a dorky/classics kid move! And we got sucked into watching the whole thing, talking about Roman history and books and such until it got way too late and we went to bed.

I also in that time converted a pair of jeans I had ripped into a skirt, which I was really excited about wearing, and I got to showcase the next day, which I greatly enjoyed.

The next day was another one of the WOW days, the very first thing we saw was one of the most famous pieces of ancient art in Rome, the Ara Pacis. This building is most famous for its intricate reliefs, and was constructed by Augstus in commemoration of a triumphal return into the city, after winning another huge battle campaign. We took the metro to the Piazza de Spagna and walked past all of the designer shops to get there, until we came upon the back side of the altar, framed by a modern white and widely windowed modernist building. Through the huge panes of glass we could see the tendrils of stone curving around the walls of the altar, and above the processional collonade of the emperor and his attendants, lit in bars by the shades high overhead. It was a beautiful building to house another beautiful building, and we stepped inside the light glass structure to contemplate the brilliant white marble carved altar.

The Ara Pacis is an altar dedicated to peace, and the altar part itself is enclosed in a delicate curtain wall of marble, decorated on the bottom register by an elaborate floral decoration, vines and florals in elaborate spirals, flanked by flying swans and enlivened with all kinds of insects and lizards, peeking out of the foliage. The upper portion, however, is the most famous. On the short sides it has one of the first depictions of Roma, an amazon warrior queen who sits majestically on top of the spoils of war, and on another side Pax, the incarnation of peace who lounged back in regal style, holding two children and flanked by the elements of nature. These scenes are done in excellent shallow relief; the drapery swirls about these lovely women in their Olympian calm, very reminiscent of the Parthenonian sculpture, and they watch as the worshipper passes through the marble palisade to sacrifice upon the altar itself. Another short side contains figures of heroic men—Aeneas, the mythological founder of Rome, together with Ulus, the founder of the Julian line, and a fourth panel with the mythological figure of Mars, both of the male figures impressive in their strength and their majesty. However, on the long sides of the curtain wall are a series of figures in procession, including the emperor himself and his right hand man Agrippa, interspersed with high priests and women, children looking on as the procession for the dedication of the altar wound itself permanently in stone around the altar.

We finally finished our tour of the outside, and entered the middle, where a mock palisade erected itself in stone, topped with garlands of vines and objects of sacrifice. The altar itself was rather plain, but the top contained a very small delicate frieze of sacrificial processions and at the very top scrolled volutes flanked by heraldic lions. It was a wonderful thing to see, lit by the bright morning sky streaming in through the tall windows, and set up on a marble platform so that we could move all around and through it, appreciating the altar from every angle.

The basement contained a small art gallery with photographs, and the view out of the modern building looked out to a square with 16th and 17th century churches, brick and marble and scrolled, while this white spare and glassed museum sat holding one of the finest pieces of some of Rome’s earliest history. The juxtaposition of it all was impressive, and the museum itself was very well designed, the architect’s name is Richard Meyer, and I intend to find out more about him. He seems to have done a lot of museums, well versed in guiding people through and around a visual space, which is an idea that intrigues me. My thoughts about the Ara Pacis were definitely enhanced by the spare, clean, and well lit space that he provided for it…

On the other side of the gleaming white museum, was an old moss and brick cylinder, sunk several meters into the ground and completely covered in shrubs and trees, the grizzled counterpart to the marble and steel and glass austerity of the Ara Pacis and its museum. This was the mausoleum of Augustus, constructed around the same time as his shining altar but looking completely different. Because much of the upper sections have disappeared and been overgrown, it is difficult to reconstruct, but contained the burials of many members of Augustus’ family, and may have been modeled on the huge tholos tombs that Macedonians like the much-admired Alexander the Great might have used.

In the pavement in front, faint etchings in the stone show plans for another huge monument in antiquity, the Pantheon. Apparently Roman architects and engineers used whatever open pavement space was available to scratch their flooplans, leaving a much more durable set of blueprints than would have been found. We found them—small shadows in triangles and rectangles in the sidewalk, outlining the plans for the pediment of that grand building that we would see later that day.

And we were off, to the next monuments, moving to an area of Rome called the Campus Martias—a flat low lying field where the army would drill, but was later used to hold public assemblies and a number of important monuments.

Moving through the bustling modern city, we would stumble upon glimpses back in time—an obelisk in the middle of a piazza, containing the hieroglyphs from when it was stolen from Egypt, topped by a bronze globe from where it was converted by Augustus into a huge sundial and calendar, laid out in bronze and travertine in a huge public square. However, the obelisk was set on insufficient foundations, and in the swampy area of the campus it began to tilt, so much so that Domitian repaved and rebuilt the foundations, where it remained until its collapse in the medieval period. Roman engineering like this impresses me—they could predict seasons, the day, and the time by the lines in bronze cast by the old needle of stone.

And we were off, to the next part of the ancient city, to the column of Marcus Aurelius, set into one of the biggest commercial streets of Rome, backed by a huge mall on one side and a number of shops on the other. This column has also been set on new foundations, to make up for the rise in ground level since the area has been continuously inhabited for hundreds and hundreds of years. The Column of Marcus Aurelius is carved in a spiral pattern to the top where the figures become intelligible and dissolve into blobs of light and shadow at the neck craning height of 29 meters, which is close to 100 feet. The reliefs themselves show the emperor’s campaigns against the barbarian hordes, fighting and surrendering, up the length of the whole block of stone. Interestingly enough, the interior of the column is not of solid stone, but has a staircase pierced here and there with windows at intervals until it reaches an observatory deck so many feet into the air. We could no longer go inside because the column drums have shifted place, but it seems like a pretty neat idea.

And then another tour de force—THE PANTHEON! We stopped in front of here for our lunch, and ate our peanut butter and jelly sandwiches watching the crowds swarm like ants over the base of the building. The building itself consists of two parts—a huge domed rotunda in the back, spanning the largest volume until it was surpassed sometime in the 18th century (I thought Hagia Sophia might have surpassed it, but I was wrong, this building is much much bigger inside), with a porch that looks very much like the front of a temple stuck onto it.

Apparently the porch was supposed to be much taller than it is now, but the columns for its construction could not make the long transit from Aswan, Egypt, and the Pantheon now contains not one set, but two sets of raking cornices, stacked atop one another like open books. Nonetheless, the play of geometry inside and outside the building is enough to leave our jaws hanging out of our mouths. Walking in the huge columns, which even at their short lengths towered high overhead, and entering the massive domed space was a religious experience in itself. The dome rises in a patterned series of coffers up to the oculus—a hole at the apex of the dome that let in light and sun. The Pantheon is so big that a little bit of rainfall in the 30 ft diameter hole does not make much of a difference; a few drains lead from the marble floor to get rid of any wetness on the floor, but the space is so big that it makes very little difference.

The inside is one huge play on geometry: niches of squares and circles alternate, separated by pairs of richly colored columns, above that a decorative motif and above another set of niches, all originally set with antique statuary, but now replaced with Renaissance era stuff as the building to all the gods was converted into a house of Christ. The ceiling is almost too perfect to be believed, a series of rectangles that rise up and up to the circle in the roof, from which a beam of light projected out onto the walls high above our heads. I just stood in awe, turning around and around, looking at this fabulous building, standing, an example of the genius of Roman engineering--- it has not been supported by anything in all of its long years of existence, where the Parthenon, Hagia Sophia, and so many temples we have seen have been buttressed by ugly imposing scaffolding. The inside looks pristine, blocks of marble in different shapes, the front apse gilded and erected with an altar, where masses are still held.

Rahael is buried here, and Vittorio Emmanuel, one of the princes of Italy, and the building has captured the imaginations of so many for years and years. Its easy to see why.

Everything else that day seemed to fade in comparison. We kept walking through the city, stopping at the baths of Agrippa, the first set of public baths erected, with very little remaining besides the curved arches of brick projecting from modern office buildings, and on to what was once the Stadium of Domitian, erected by the huge hellenophile in his attempt to bring a 5th festival to the Panhellenic cycle, that of the Capitoline Games. Unfortunately for him, the Romans were too prudish about the notion of athletic nudity to embrace the games, and the stadium was probably just left until a use could be found for the big space. It still remains preserved in the city fabric, however much the actual building is missing, because it forms the outer edges of the Piazza Navona, one of the more famous piazzas in Italy, ringed by beautiful sandy colored buildings and punctuated by a fabulous fountain in the center.

The other things we saw the rest of the day were much the same—a curve in the road where the Theater of Pompey used to be—the place where Caesar was stabbed in 44 BC, now just another glitch in Rome’s ever so curvy road system. The Odeion of Domitian was the same, a rapid turn in the building and a single standing column and we were at the site of another of his great building projects.

And we were finally finished! Hungry and tired, but still wanting to see the city, Katie and I broke up from the rapidly disappearing group and set out ourselves to find some English language bookshops I had identified in the area. The first, by the Piazza Navona, was stacked at random with tons and tons of volumes that we had a great time sorting through, and then we walked along the Piazza of St Augustine and ran into a gem. The small bookshop was crammed with boxes and stacks of books, with space barely wide enough for one person to fit between, and realizing that there was no way to really browse, we asked the bookkeeper, a young woman with limited, accented English if there were any books in our language. When she said no, Katie asked if there were any in Latin and was rewarded to come upon a number of leather bound volumes, stamped with the SPQR that denoted “the Senate and the Roman people” with the classics in Latin and Italian. Best of all these books were old, so much that the title pages looked like woodblocks picked out in red and black, and some of the pages had to be cut with scissors to be read. Katie and I were enthralled—she started hopping up and down in the limited space that we had, her big eyes completely aglow. After much deliberation, she settled on Cicero, I think, and we left the store with huge smiles on our faces.

Across the street we happened on a small gallery exhibiting early German woodcuts, and some more obscure works by Klimt, and we both perused the gallery, still hopped up on our fabulous book finds, and impressed by what we had seen. Then we continued on, finding a huge English language bookstore called, appropriately enough, the Anglo American Bookshop, where we browsed until they almost closed the shop on us and bought a book—I bought one called The Lost Painting, which deals in the quest for a missing Caravaggio masterpiece, although I was tempted by many others.

That night, Katie and I had a very nice picnic—tuna-apple-carrot-salad, before talking about how wonderful our book hunt had been, and went to bed. These days are so full I was definitely asleep before the clock struck midnight.

But today was no less exciting! We got to see the Colosseum today, and many other cool monuments, this time on the Palatine Hill, which stands overlooking the Circus Maximus and in the imperial period contained some of the biggest and most elaborate palaces in all of Rome. Unfortunately, there is not much to see anymore, besides scattered concrete and tufa temple podiums, broken, decayed walls, and tantalizing remnants of what might have been. Some of the stuff that WAS still there had been closed for the day, leaving us to peer at the gates that blocked our entrance and grind our teeth in frustration.

We did, however, see the most important complex on the Palatine, the Palace of Domitian. This sprawling space was separated by a series of oblong fountained and forested courtyards, each one more private than the next, marked out by patches of green grass and low walls of brick. In places we could see where the walls reached all of the way up to the next level, making the huge audience halls, but elsewhere the Palace completely faded into the grass and it was up to our imaginations to reconstruct what must have been quite impressive. On the far side of one of the courtyards, the so-called “hippodrome” due to its similarity in shape contained a deep set apse, radical shadows picked out by the late morning sun, with walls extending at least three levels down into a vast open space. Moving to the last courtyard we could see two levels of apartments that all looked onto a long rather oblong space, complicated by a fountain in the center. From the far side of this courtyard, in the blazing heat, we could look out to the actual hippodrome, the Circus Maximus, spreading out below us. Like the Stadium of Domitian, not much remains except the outline in the fabric of the city, in this case preserved in the form of a long narrow grassy park.

And then we were off of the Palatine Hill, through the cool fountained air and the shade where the palaces have been coopted by the Papal families and turned into a garden, romantic with the nostalgia for a Rome in the overgrown columns of ancient grandeur. But neither the cool nor the shade were to last, it was out into the blazing sun and dust of the Piazza del Coloseo, and the Arch of Constantine.

This arch is the one that makes it into all of the history books, both because of its size and complexity in decoration, and because almost none of the complexity is concurrent with its financier. Constantine pillaged, (or if you prefer a less negative point of view, recycled) bits and pieces of other monuments, probably a number of friezes from a bygone Arch of Marcus Aurelius, and others from a monument to Hadrian. The mismash of styles and scenes all have the pervading theme of warfare, and glory to the emperor—all emperor’s heads later modified to resemble Constantine, of course. It is a triple arch, each side enhanced by borrowed columns topped with the figures of bound captives, and the entire thing is sculpted in and out with figures of all periods.

Then it was on to the last, and the best event—the Colosseum. The Colosseum was originally flanked by a whole gladiatorial complex that included a smaller arena for training, barracks, and a big fountain. The arena itself takes its name from another surrounding monument, that of the Colossus of Nero, a statue that depicts the sun god with the emperor’s face and stood somewhere in the neighborhood of 120 Roman feet tall. The actual arena itself was called the Flavian Amphitheater, but it was colossal in its own right, with a seating capacity not to be surpassed in the ancient world, topping out at about 80,000 spectators at the greatest. It contains 4 tiers of arched colonnades, and entrace into the arena was regulated by four axial entrances, 2 reserved for entering and exiting gladiators, and the others for spectators. Elsewhere, at each of the 76 others, numbers and a type of token would regulate who sat where and how they got in. According to Jarrett, in the case of emergency the building could be cleared in as little as three minutes, a tribute to Roman efficiency in movement of personnel.

The four sections were divided along lines of class and rank, with the emperor and the vestal virgins each occupying special platforms in the stands, with high ranking senators closest to the action, equites, or knights next, and the lower classes up in the nosebleed sections at the top. It is a remarkable construction of brick and tufa, arched vaults providing all of its internal structuring, with a maze of passages underneath the floor itself to allow for the sudden appearance of beasts or fighters, enhancing the spectacle on the floor. Now it stands with its ribs exposed; all of the seats are missing and most of the lower levels of ceiling, leaving the arch fragments open to the sun. We moved into the outer ring of tall vaults, from which we could either go up or farther in, which we did, moving to where we could overlay the whole guts of the building, the bowl removed of its travertine seats and naked. After surveying the lower level, we went outwards and moved back up, to the second level to see the bowl from a greater height, even more impressed at the engineering skills of these ancient people. I myself would like to get my hands on some good plans of the Colosseum, as best it can be constructed, so I can look at how the movement of personnel was accomplished.

We walked around for a while, stopping to admire the Arch of Constantine and the remnants of the palace structures from our privelaged perch. We were dismissed from “class” that day at around five, but Vincoli and myself and Jarrett went over to the side of the Colosseum to see what was called the Ludus Magnus, the training ground for gladiators, where we could see the semi circle of stands hidden under the foundations of the modern street, and nearby the barracks for the gladiators, where they lived and trained in the shadow of the Colosseum, where so many of them would meet their deaths. As a last interesting note, I should mention that the Colosseum has been discovered to have a few underground tunnels, one leading directly from this training ground to the arena floor, another for the protected entrance and exit of the emperor, and a third, perhaps for the Vestal Virgins. Not unlike the way modern competitors are ushered into arenas, through separate, enclosed passages…

And spent, we returned to the hotel where I got some much needed down time. But we had also heard rumors about a potential opera that night, so at around 7 Vincoli, Scott and I ventured out into the city again, to the Piazza della Republica, only to find out that the opera in question was completely sold out. We made the most of it, wandering around the night-lit city, going to Santa Maria Maggiore, and a park with what looked like the remains of an old bath complex, now dedicated to Vittorio Emmanuel. Santa Maria Maggiore was quite impressive, we saw the back apse of it and moved around to the front where we could see the stepped series of columns and the broken façade, coming forward to embrace us where we stood in the darkening night. Behind the columns was a glittering mosaic, the golds picked out by artificial lights, and a wonderful surprise for us after the disappointment of the opera.

We returned to the hotel to sleep, too tired to do anything else. Rome is an exhausting, exhilarating, enchanting city.

Hail in the Forum

April 17, 2007

Rome, Italy

Today was our first real academic day in Rome, and we spent all of it walking archaeological sites, and going around the Captoline Museum, one of the most famous museums in the city, second only to the Vatican. It was a long day, but the sun was shining and we were all happy to finally be seeing all of the monuments that we had explored over Easter Break.

The first thing we did was to go to the Roman Forum. Jarrett gave us a lecture about the archaic sites in Rome, places that were now buried under as many as 9 meters of accretions. The forum is an incredible mess of buildings, columns in marble, arches and valleys of brick, huge flagstones big enough to accidentally fit a whole foot into, and everything was of monumental proportions, even if it was broken down in its old age.

We stopped and looked at the bases of things, looking at the lowest levels for the oldest of the old, but most of it was built over by new temples with newer shapes and designs, in shiny white marble. We did manage to see the Reglia, or what was left of it, pavestones in the patches of grass. This building was in continuous use for a thousand years and after a few experiments with its layout and plan, it settled into the shape of a broad triangle, very little of which remains besides the low lying stones in the grass. This may have been an administrative storeroom, but not much besides that is known.

Continuing on, we walked all of the way down to the far edge of the forum, right where the back of the Capitoline Museum overlooked the maze of slumped brick, to a place called the lapis niger—a black stone set several feet down into the pavement of the forum and surrounded by a protective wall of stones. Although lots of other stuff is buried underneath the pavement, including the remains of an altar and possibly a shrine to Vulcan, later Roman forgot the original buildings underneath and began to regard the area as a spot of bad luck, and possibly the burial site of Romulus Faustilius, the grandfather of one of the early dynasties in Rome. And we moved on, avoiding some of the larger remains that we would see the following day, and going out of the forum and up, to where underneath a large yellow colored building we could see the corner of smaller foundations sticking out, like a stack of giant books ill aligned.

These rough blocks constituted another once important huge building, called the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, or the Jupiter-who-was-really-really-cool. Lots of buildings in Rome are like this, built upon the shadows of their ancient predecessors, this one is no different. The next set of temples we saw were much the same—walking up over the hill we came down and the road swing and we saw the Temples under St. Omobono, a catholic church that partially obscures the low temple foundations underneath. Not much is known about these temples at all except for the fact that they do exist, and the foundations give a little bit of clues to their plan and orientation. Other than that they just formed little shadows in the grassy enclosure that surrounded them, leaving nothing but a few reminders of their presence.

The next temples we saw, however, had luckily been turned into churches, instead of being built over, and sat in a grassy area within view of the Tiber river, surving in its green swollenness in the stone lined banks, and bounded by many different aged bridges. This was the sight of the former Forum Boarium, the so-called cattle market, which was also home to two spectacularly well preserved Roman temples. They stand next to each other, both in their white austerity, one a circular type now roofed with an odd looking wooden roofed, peaked like a very shallow party hat, and the other a long rectangle of the so-called Italic type, with a few full columns on the deep front porch and the rest built into the walls of the cella itself.

The round one, called the Temple of Nesta, is missing above the column capitals, but what is visible is elaborate scrollwork of Corinthian capitals in fine sparkline white marble, and all of the interior walls are still there. In the bright light of the morning the flutes played in light and shade, and the temple sat in its abruptly truncated splendor in front of a roaring modern street, with the scrolled triangular façade of Catholic churches right across the street. Its juxtapositions like this that we found all over the city.

The rectangular temple nearby was stained dark with pollution, but was preserved all of the way up to the rafters and stood on its high platform, calmly surveying the zooming street in front of it. The temple was beautiful, and the top contained an elaborate frieze of florals, running right above the scrolling capitals. Right across the bridge, we came to yet another site, the Tiber island, one of the few places where the Tiber itself can be crossed. The island was made from the constant deposits of silt made by the Tiber itself slinging around a curve and depositing sand deposit after sand deposit in the same place. Its not very big, but it has been growing every year and over time the Romans decided to use it to house a cult that was imported from Greece after a disastrous plague struck in 291 BC. According to legend, the oracle told the Romans to import the cult of Asklepius, a healing god, whose temple is now obscured by St Bartholomew’s church and a hospital—clearly everyone following these early Romans decided that the island would make a good healing center also.

The island is also the site of two of the oldest bridges over the Tiber. One is the oldest standing bridge, with a single arch in the middle of the rushing water, and another arch that goes from the island to the far bank, which is called the Pons Fubricus and is the oldest functional bridge in Rome, dating to 62 BC. Because the two spans of the bridges come out from the sides of the long and narrow island, the ancient Romans thought the island itself looked like a big ship, and carved the tip of the island into the shape of a prow, complete with the snakes of Asklepius on the prow as a part of the figurehead. The prow has subsequently been topped with a police station, and has been silted in with the gradual build up of sand, but walking down near the shoreline we could see the clean lines in the Travertine stone.

But the day was not even close to being over, and after stopping to enjoy the brilliant sunlight and a view down the Tiber and through the old arches of the bridges, we moved on, up back across the river to see our next set of temples.

These temples were arranged in a grand set of three—victory temples each constructed by a different general promising that if he won a certain battle he would construct a temple in thanks to his favorite god. Rome was expanding, and won a good deal of battles in the 4th and 3rd Centuries BC, and so many of the generals came back victorious. Sometimes they would erect a couple of temples side by side, expanding from a victory temple to an entire unified complex, which is exactly what happened in this complex of three that have been incorporated into the modern church of St Nicholas.

The outer colonnades of the outer two temples have been incorporated into the church walls, emerging like an exoskeleton from the flesh of the church walls. The central temple has been completely incorporated, and the rest of the flanking temples sit exposed, like wings extending on each side from the body of the church and left to dry in the sun. The other three walls of the outer temples have suffered from time—they stand in broken colonnades and short foundation walls, sticking up out of the sea of wildflowers that surround the church. However, the inside of the church has places where the stucco has been removed, revealing the inside edges of the temple colonnades, supporting the newer building. Other than that, the interior of the church looked rather normal—three aisles separated by columns pillaged from other buildings; mismatched columns parading down to the aspe and the altar at the far end. The entire inside was gilded and painted, not all over in panels of blue like the Byzantine churches, but edged at the lines of the building and curved in the dome of the apse, where frescoes showed scenes of the divine family with flowing garments picked out in gold edging.

Nearing the apse, we walked down to right in front of the altar and descended a narrow staircase underneath the church floor, emerging in the dark and cramped aisles of the subterranean passages. A woman from the church led us on the tour, pointing out in her sing-song accented English “here you see the temple of Juno, 194 years Before Christ, columns Corinthian and foundations here….” We wandered around, following her song as we watched the walls of the church rise up out of the bases of the old temples, vaulted and segmented in brick arches. We wandered around for a good while, as we entered the bodies of each of the temples and stepped into the imaginary space in between now covered with the floor of the church, before moving onto the next temple, in and out of the shadows of history all around us.

And then it was back into the light of the sun and onto our next stop, the theater of Marcellus, embedded into the walls of a nearby apartment complex, part of a building that originally held 20,000 people and now is full of extra walls and floors to make it a place for people. The modern windows poke out of the top of the curved arch substructure, faced with travertine and resembling in form and construction the Colosseum. Next to it, standing all alone, are three reconstructed columns from the original temple of Apollo Medicus Sogianus, which were moved by Mussolini as a part of a “lets showcase Rome” project. This is part of some of the most extravagant building periods in Rome, when the columns had fluting of alternating sizes, elaborate scrolls in the column capitals and bases, and a superstructure of every different type of floral imaginable. The corner stands, what is left of it, proud to be where it is, and boldly indifferent to the fact that it is completely out of its original location. We stood and took pictures, and then marched on in the heat of the early afternoon.

Then it was a lunch break, once we had reached the place of the Largo Argentina, a piazza with the central feature of not one, but four temple platforms sitting side by side in the pavement. We sat in a bench by the sun and had our sandwiches, and a gust of wind brought a local newspaper flying our way. We picked it up; another nuisance a big city, and were about to throw it away when I noticed the front page. It was a huge picture of police carrying out a person with bloodstained legs and the headline which read something about shooting and the USA. It was Virginia Tech, splashed across the front pages of the newspapers. We were more than a little unsettled that it had made it as far as the front pages of the free newspapers that they hand out on the way to the metro, but there it was, plain as day.

We all clustered around Vincoli as he tried to read the Italian article, and while it basically repeated everything that we had learned the night before in our frantic attempt to receive any news, it still unsettled us. We had a brief lecture about the four temples, which were much of the same—temples vowed to be built if the god were to be kind enough to let the general win the given battle he is fighting. If the general did win, the spoils of war were used to construct a temple befitting thanks to that particular god. In this instance, 4 different gods of unknown name were thanked by various generals, resulting in a complex of 3 rectangular and one circular temple, all dedicated and built at different times but later incorporated into one complex.

By this time, however, we were all incredibly tired and ready to go, so we did not spend much time looking at the ancient ruins of foundations here… we walked out of the square and kept going toward one of the most famous museums in Rome, the Capitoline Museums. The entire complex was designed and modified by Michelangelo, with a wide and shallow flight of steps leading up to three Renaissance looking gold buildings surrounding a wide plaza with the grand statue of Marcus Aurelius in the center. Rathen impressive. There were throngs and throngs of people milling around but we were ready to go see the inside of the museum.

This museum contains some of the best finds from around the Greek and Roman world, statues such as the Dying Gaul, a young barbarian distinguished by the massive torc around his neck and his thick thatch of hair, in a state of utter exhaustion, his fallen weapons and shield scattered undearneath him. Elsewhere were the fragments of a colossal statue of Constantine, of which the head and arm are the only thing still in existence, sitting in a wall in the courtyard, surveying our liliputian group as we walked around, barely coming up to the great head’s nostrils. Other great works in the museum included an Aphrodite coming out of the bath, modestly covering herself with her hands as she emerged from the water. The museum was huge, filled to the brim with marble statuary.

We wandered throughout the tall, echoing halls and drawing bits and pieces of the bronzes and the marbles. The walls were not left blank either—they were filled with huge renaissance era paintings depicting scenes both mythological and biblical. Some people went back early, but I stayed for hours and hours, walking among familiar and unfamiliar sculpture. As I was walking from one wing of the museum down underground to the next, I heard a tremendous crash outside and a boom. Emerging out of the back of the museum, I came to the part where the Capitoline Museum overlooked the Forum, and saw a tremendous hailstorm coming down upon the ruins, pinging off of the ancient brick and marble structures. It was a spectacular sight—the magnificence of nature and the old glories of the ancient city, merged in a single shining moment that I could view safely from the wings of the museum. It was positively wonderful, and I sat and watched it for a long time, as the small balls of ice pinging down.

We finally emerged from the museum at 6:00, utterly tired but exhilarated by what we had seen, coming back to the hotel to eat, do some reading and sleep. We had another long day ahead of us.

Capri

April 16, 2007

Rome, Italy

Yesterday was the last free day on the classics trip. Now we have ahead of us 30 whole days of exploration without a single break, until we have exams and are free to go. I did enjoy having time to myself without being dragged to an archeological site, but knowing that it was the last one made the whole experience kind of bittersweet. From now on, its just go go go!

We woke up early, our bodies will not let us sleep in anymore, even if we wanted to, and had breakfast before heading out into the bright Sorrento morning and boarding the ferry to the nearby island of Capri. This place is famous for its beautiful rocky beaches, lovely little villas set into the cliffsides, and majestic clear blue water, that skirts the island in a brilliant wash of blue color. We stepped off of the ferry and into what looked like a movie set. All around us were tourists in brightly colored shirts, street vendors hawked their wares, and little white rowboats stood at the ready in the narrow stretch of the bay. However, according to Ambrice, the best part of Capri was the view from the top, which was only accessible by taking what looked like an elaborate skilift up the mountainside and into the other part of the island.

We bought tickets and waited in line for a while before stepping into what looked like a short subway car that had been stretched in photoshop so that its parallels were all out of wack. Nothing was at right angles at all—we stood on a level floor but the windows, and ceiling all had a crazy slant to conform with the slope of the hillside. And with a jerk, we were off, moving out of the station and up over the slopes filled with lemon groves and the clusters of white houses that shone in the late morning sunlight. And past the craggy steep cliffs, the ocean glowed in the distance. It was absolutely breathtaking, and I was so happy to be there. This was one of the few days that the Classics Trip has felt like a vacation…

We stepped out of the station and into the little town at the top of the cliffs and into a square packed with cream and yellow covered buildings, decorated with intricate scrollwork at the top and packed with designer stores at the bottom. Over the terrace, Capri stretched below us in all of its Hollywood glory, and ahead of us in the streets stretched all of Italy’s upscale fashion. Within five minutes we had spotted a Prada, Gucci and Dolce and Gabbana were not much farther away.

The streets were tightly packed, and hung with awnings of white and dotted here and there with a stand selling gelato or lemony ice drinks, and we wandered around and around for hours, stopping in at this or that ridiculously unaffordable shop. After a while, I grew tired of it, and the only place I was truly excited about visiting was a (still rather upscale) specialty bookshop that contained antique volumes and original pieces of art but along one wall contained a number of history books dealing with Capri and its origins. I saw one very unusual book called Venus in the Kitchen, a collection of recipes put together by an eccentric European who had lived on Capri for a number of years and published a good deal of travel/adventure novels taking place on the island. This, his last work, was a cookbook with recipes ranging from the mundane to the highly impractical, all designed to aid in the procurement of love. It was written in both Italian and English, and sometimes at the bottom of the recipe the old gentleman would add a comment like “my good friend Mr.-So-and-so tried this a few years ago, and he swore it made him feel 10 years younger!” I decided that such an unusual book would be worth the weight it added to my suitcase, and bought it.

I enjoyed the morning, but after a long and expensive sit down lunch I really wanted to see the beaches and the water that Capri is so famous for. Unfortunately, I never got the chance—the girls I was with wanted to keep shopping at the designer stores and with no other recourse at my hand I followed them until at the last 5 minutes I could see the water on the way to the ferry. Kind of disappointing. I think if I got the chance I would avoid that upper town on Capri entirely, and devote my whole day to hiking, seeing the famous blue grotto—a cave filled with limestone that reflects the blue in the water all around the walls, making the whole place glow (I did not see it in person, but the pictures looked wonderful), and a natural arch of limestone that arcs down over the water. Hopefully I will get the chance to return and rectify my mistake.

We returned to Sorrento in the late afternoon, and I came to the hotel room and stayed just long enough to put on my running clothes, and venture out into the town. Moving away from the coast this time, I headed back toward the cliffs and out, away from the bustle of the shops and the people and into a more remote neighborhood. Gradually the crowds cleared away and the streets faded into smaller roads, and then I finally came to what looked like the end: a hotel perched on the edge of the mountainside, and the road curved around and headed back toward town, on the right a small path continued down into a park. I went down here for a while, but the path to the park faded into a crowded residential district so I headed back up, reaching the hotel again.

I noticed on the left hand side a staircase leading up into the mountain, a sign in Italian spitting out a lot of text, all of it indecipherable, but the sign itself was topped by a cross, and looking above I could see a small turret, so I guessed that the staircase must lead up to the church. It seemed like as good a place to run as any, and was utterly without any people to gawk at the crazy American actually exercising, so I started up the stairs. The stairs turned into a rough stone-paved path that swtichbacked all of the way up the mountain. At each of the turns on the path was a small ceramic shrine, painted with depictions of the stages of the cross—Jesus in each carrying it, stumbling, falling, getting picked up, being crucified, etc. And at each of the turns in the trail, in the steep ascent, the buildings stopped obscuring the view and I could look over Sorrento itself—the straight but narrow streets and peach and cream colored buildings dotted with trees, and then in the distance the sweep of mountains and that wonderful colored ocean.

I reached the church, stopping briefly to stop and savor the view. I could now see the whole city almost in its entirety, and was halfway up the mountain. The church itself was really more of an open chapel—statues of Mary filled niches to the left and right, and in the center, now closed with an iron gate, a crucifix stood, honored by lit candles and watched by a row of empty wooden chairs.

And then I noticed to the side of the church the winding path continued on, up and up, where the stairs faded out and I entered a narrow road, wide enough for only one car to pass and flanked on each side by orange and lemon groves and small houses. I continued up the steep path, huffing and puffing as I slowly passed villa after villa, until I reached what looked like a good stopping point and turned around to head back down the mountain. It took half as long to get to the bottom as it did to labor all of the way up to the top, but the view was just as good going down. I headed back to the noise and bustle of the city, returning to the room for a good hot shower.

That night we had dinner on the patio of one of the rooms. Scott and I split a salad we made with my newly decorated bowl, a good one with tuna and fresh fruits and vegetables, and we watched as the sun stained the clouds a bright orange and the light faded from the sky. Chris Vincoli brought out his laptop for music, and we ate and talked until it grew dark. It was a wonderful end to the freeday, a nice dinner on a patio with some of my favorite people on the trip—Jess Bradshaw, eating a peanut butter and jelly and banana sandwich, Vincoli with yogurt and cereal, Dan reading the Anead and Scott and I sharing a salad. We talked about our favorite books, and languages, and the craziness that is the Classics Trip until we all realized that we still had a lot of work to do and reatreated, reluctantly, to our own rooms to do our work, pack, and sleep. On to Rome in the morning.

Today we spent the whole day on the train, traveling to Rome, hauling our stuff up the stairs and down the stairs, through the heat and the noise and the bustle before we finally go to the familiar hotel Silva. We were going to go out to see some of Archaic Rome that day but it looked like rain and there wasn’t that much to see so Jarrett just gave us a lecture on the patio of the hotel, and we took notes there. Just at the end of his lecture, the skies opened up and the rain poured down, leaving us very happy that we did not venture out into the forum. Instead, Katie and I hung out in the room for a while, we all had a picnic dinner.

Then, when we were all about to do work, Chris Vincoli came in the room with a strange bit of news—he had seen Italian headlines featuring a shooting at Virginia Tech. We didn’t know what to make of it, or how serious it was, until Stewart checked her email and the details started to come out—many many students had been injured, and her sister had been witnesses to the ambulances coming into to survey the scene. We all sat in stunned silence, and suddenly everyone sprang into action, bringing the computers out and calling friends and relatives to make sure everyone was ok.

We stayed glued to the computer and email for the rest of the night, checking and talking about the horrors we were uncovering. 50 people shot, and 30 dead, by some crazed gunman apparently on a quest to avenge some perceived slight by his girlfriend. We all thought school was a safe place, and VT could have been any college campus. It could have happened. It was us out there, getting shot—college students put in a position that no college student should have to face. Katie knew someone in the classroom who played dead and was the only one to get out alive. A kid our age, in a school just like ours. I think we will all remember exactly how we found this out… where we were, and what will unfold in the coming weeks. This hits too close to home for all of us for it to be any other way, even when we are all of the way over here in Europe. I just cannot believe that it happened.

We all went to bed tonight with a feeling of unease; feeling a little bit sick to our stomachs.

Naples

April 14, 2007

Sorrento, Italy

Yesterday we went to Naples, to see the national archaeological museum, one of the biggest and best archaeological museums in Italy. Naples itself, however, was less than enjoyable—a big ugly dirty and loud city that I was very happy to get out of at the end of the day. I did, however, get the chance to see the Capidimonte Museum, an art museum dedicated to the renaissance and just afterward. It was a beautiful, wonderful place, but walking there from the archaeological museum felt highly dangerous, and we were happy to take a cab back to the train station for our return to Sorrento. The two cities are on complete opposite spectrums from each other—I think that Naples is one of the first places I have seen where I definitely would NOT want to return to.

The archaeological museum was a sprawling place set into an old university building, with all of the old world charm. Inside, the tall galleries contained some of the most famous works of Greek and Roman sculpture, including the Doryphoros, the canon of sculpture by Polykleitos—the best Roman copy of the original Greek work which is now lost. He stood in a sunlit gallery together with another famous copy, that of the Tyrannicides, an early classical work which depicted two warriors rising up in rebellion against the tyrants in Athens, which was later erected in the agora.

Walking in these vast echoing spaces I came upon other humungous and very famous statues, the statue of the Farnese Herakles, a massively muscle bound giant of a statue who rested his huge arms upon a tree, the apples of the Hesperides behind his back. There were a number of over-lifesize statues of gods and goddesses, Aphrodite, Athena, and various men in heroic pose. Moving around these marble giants made me feel very small, and very fragile. These things had withstood the test of time. Moving into the basement, I encountered a small Egyptian collection, complete with small statuary and tons of relief sculpture, and then it was up a massive double staircase with niches for statues and onto the second story, which held two very interesting parts of the museum.

One of these is called the Secret Cabinet—finds from Pompeii that included all of the erotic art we found in the brothel the previous day, and then more and more. Apparently the exavators at the time were scandalized by the apparent immorality of the Romans living here and had all of the finds herded together and locked safely away from prying eyes. In reality both the Greeks and Romans were highly aware of sexuality and took the opportunity to portray it in a lot of settings—on vases, walls, statues, etc. Walking into the cabinet was a very strange experience, but worthwhile—most of the images of these ancient cultures are highly santitized, pictures of gods and such, but it is important to remember that they were real people with real feelings and desires. Even some of the mythology has been watered down for modern consumption, and looking back on the originals, or even of some of the translations of early Greek comedy indicates a different picture from the stately robed figures we typically see. They were a raucous bunch. It kind of reminded me of an old National Geographic arcticle about the original Grimm’s fairy tales—read old versions of them and you will be startled at how different they are from the modern versions, changed during the Victorian period to make them more palatable to the prevailing tastes. The original Repunzel did not get cast out of her lonely tower by the witch because she remarked to the witch how much heavier she was than the young prince; she got cast out because she herself was expanding at the waistline…

The other objects on the second floor were no less interesting, the most important of which included the famous Alexander mosaic, originally in Pompeii, which shows Alexander attacking Darius’ Persian troops. The piece is huge—it occupies an entire wall of the museum, and is made up of tiny tiny tesserae pieces, small enough to trace the highlights on the horses’ flanks. It’s a big concfusion of people, weapons, flying horses, and although some of the central part of the mosaic has been destroyed, time was kind and spared the head of Alexander and the figure of Darius in retreat.

This was not the only mosaic in the museum, however. There were a number of fine examples from all different time periods, some showing banquet scenes and drama masks, others showing hunts, in varying sizes of tesserae. One in particular was made up of the smallest pieces I have seen, tesserae as big as a pencil point, depicting a portrait of a young girl. I can only imagine how long it would have taken to make one of these.

Elsewhere on that floor were a bunch of bronzes, portrait heads, lounging satyrs and curious boys, and a number of jars of glass and bronze, everyday objects from the people that lived in Pompeii. One of the more unexpected things about the museum, however, was walking up the grand staircase and into a huge vaulted room, complete with an elaborate illusionisitic ceiling and filled with huge oil paintings. At the far end of the room stood a statue of Atlas holding the world on his shoulders. This was a complete jump from all of the ancient Greek and Roman stuff we had seen before, perhaps a holdover from the original function of the building. On the floor, laid out at an odd angle to the room, was a glass-covered line of stone, inscribed with the signs of the zodiac. I had no idea what it meant at the time, but I later discovered the whole place is called the Sundial room, and the strange line is one that is used to mark time. The walls contain oil paintings by the Genovese painter Draghi and illustrate the life of Alexander Farnese, the collector of many of the museum’s marble masterworks. Very interesting…

We stayed at the museum wandering around and doing some sketching until 2 pm, when the group met and split off. Ambrice, Katie, Jess Eisenberg, and I decided to continue on to the Capodimonte museum, a large museum dedicated to renaissance art. The walk was long and a bit scary, but we made it to the entrance all in one piece and walked out of the dirt of Naples and into another world. The Capodimonte museum was originally a royal palace, and walking into the gates led us to gardens of verdant green, and an imposing red and grey building several tall stories. Walking into one of the openings at the bottom we entered into a big courtyard, surrounded on four sides by the rich façade. We walked inside to buy our tickets and enter the museum, ascending a wide staircase and then coming into the heart of the museum itself.

The museum was huge and varied, and I saw so many gorgeous works that they began to blur together in my head, it was three huge stories of renaissance works. However, the few biggest works I saw were a wonderful Titian, a picture of the reclining Danae, a Caravaggio showing the Flagellation. So many of the big names from my Survey of Western art book jumped off the pages and I stood for a long time and stared at them all. They ranged greatly in subject matter from highly religious scenes: the annunciation, the deposition, dormition of Mary, the entire life of Christ in its brilliant colors. I saw faces of anguish, faces of rapture, pain and pleasure…. Other scenes were scenes from mythology—pastoral scenes with Bacchus and dancing goddesses. I saw a Masaccio, Botticelli—a lovely painting with crystalline edges and transparent clothing as is Botticelli’s wont, and El Greco’s portraits with its hint of dark twisted forms, and a number of others that are harder to remember and impossible to enumerate. It was lovely but a bit overwhelming and by 5 pm my head was pounding with all I had seen.

The other part of the museum, besides the paintings themselves, were a number of rooms decorated to look like a palace—complete with furniture, period portraits and shiny dark wood furniture. One of the rooms contained a number of ceramics affixed to the walls showing romanticized versions of the Chinese countryside. A big banquet hall complete with table settings and an elaborate inlaid marble floors. This was like stepping backward in time, but instead of the dusty street of Pompeii, we were frozen into a scene of sumptuous overdone European elegance.

Finally, after such a long day, all our feet hurt and we were ready to retreat back to our hotel. We hailed a taxi and endured the long ride through the 5 pm traffic to get on the train, which through many stops and starts finally delivered us back home, at 7:30. We only had enough time to picnic—again, a big group with lots of talking and laughing, before settling into our reading and going to bed.

This morning we got to sleep in until 7 am, a big accomplishment! I was surprisingly awake and ready to go, benefiting from my early night and half hour extra of sleeping in. Then it was breakfast and onto the bus, where we took a two hour ride over a windy steep green hillside that eventually leveled out to rolling flat green land and all of the way to Paestum. I had learned a bit about the place from my Greek Art class, this area had three notable temples and not much else.

We walked out into a dreary morning, overcast, with the moisture that hinted at rain in the air. Turns out, it wasn’t just a hint, because about halfway through our morning talk about the site and the first temple, the drizzle hit, causing all of us to groan and stuff ourselves into our raincoats, hunching over to avoid getting soaked. The first temple we saw was called a Basilica, by mistake, in actuality it is the temple to Hera I, the first of two that sit side by side in the short wet grass. This temple looks rather odd—it has very squat columns with severe entasis (the slight bulge at the middle that makes all columns have more or less of a cigar shape) that tapered upwards to meet huge pillowy capitals. Furthermore, the temple has an odd number of columns on the front, 7, and 18 along the sides, making it an exceedingly long and strangely proportioned building. On the interior, the srangeness continues, with a cella that is almost divided exactly in half by a collonade that matches the proportions of the outer peristyle. This temple may have been dedicated to Zeus and Hera, explaining the doubled interior space and two corresponding doorways. That, I think, is the only reasonable explanation that can be given.

As the rain started to fall, we moved toward the newer and better preserved Temple of Hera II, about 100 years later than the first and dated to about 470 BC. This temple is by far the largest of the three, and stands almost fully intact, from the base of the columns all of the way up to the raking cornice of the pediment. It is known for its use of many of the refinements on temples taking place simultaneously on the mainland—corner contraction (moving the corner columns closer to the others), curvature of the temple platform and of the entablature, and column inclination (all of the columns leaning inward toward the cella). All of these refinements help to relieve the solid rigidity of the Doric post and lintel construction, allowing the temple to sway and move, in a way, and to subtly relieve the heavy stone members of some of their weight. We could not go inside the temple, but walked all around the outside, surveying it from every angle and taking tons of pictures, before the rain drove us to the next temple.

The temple of Athena at Paestum is chronologically located right between the other two, at a date of right around 500 BC, and is the first example of the integration of Doric and Ionic architecture, predating the Parthenon by about 50 years. This temple is not as well preserved as the Hera II temple, but a good deal of the exterior peristyle and some of the entablature still remain, framed against the gray sky. On the way to the temple we passed the fallen down ruins of a number of oddly shaped structures; a bouleterion that is not square like most of the ones that we saw in Turkey and on the mainland, but is perfectly circular, making crop-circle like depressions in the ground. Although to me this arrangement seemed more aesthetically pleasing to me, it caused some problems for public speaking, requiring the speaker to always have his back turned to some of his audience members, which would make for awkward speeches.

And then it was on to the temple, standing in all of its limestone wonder. The temple looks rather old for its date, with really squishy column capitals and a really high pediment. The outside of the temple is ringed with the typical Doric triglyph and metope series, but inside of the outer peristyle is a small ring of Ionic columns, a feature totally unusual in a temple of this time and date. The temple also probably contained a good deal of metopal sculpture, many of which are probably still buried in the grass ground cover. It was impressive, but all of the temples were starting to look alike to me, and I was happy to retreat from the rain and eat our lunch.

We camped out underneath the canopies of the local shops and had our sandwiches, watching the rain drizzle outside of the safety of our tents. Some people got gelato and slurped them noisily as we watched the world turn greyer and greyer. Then it was into the museum, a modern building that featured slabs of grey unfinished concrete and austere white walls. Inside, we saw a number of sculptures, featuring the first known depiction of the suicide of Ajax. The museum also featured a good deal of tomb painting: the tomb of the diver, as it is called, is the earliest example of ancient Greek painting. The chambers of the tombs have been dismantled and hung piece by piece on the walls, and show animated scenes of fighting, music and dance contests, and scenes of symposium. Browned skinned men in their long skirts reclined on couches, crowned with their olive wreaths and playing lyres. They would sit and talk to one another, or watch the dancers and musicians entertain them. The paintings were essentially flat washes of color, picked out in simple lines with no shading, and scenes were more ideographic than fully illusionistic. No one was shown perspectivally—the painting was actually much more similar to vase painting in which backgrounds were non-existent and scenery was only added as an afterthought.

After the museum, we returned to the bus for a long and winding bus ride home, arriving just in time to go out and see the town! It turns out that Sorrento is a lot bigger than I intitially had thought—once we exited the big square area, Ambrice and I walked down some narrow side streets choc full of Lemoncello shops, a liquor that is famous for its production in this area. Some of the lemons we have seen are as big as my head! We wandered around and around, stopping at some shops to do a little bit of window shopping and price comparison—I want to buy something in Florence, which is supposedly the leather capital of Italy, and I wanted to scope it out while I got the chance.

Then we met up with Anne, Jess Bradshaw and Scott, and wandering down a side street went into a great local Italian restaurant for dinner, and Jess had her first real meal since breaking her tooth in Rome several days ago. Apparently, it was delicious. I had very good minestrone, different from how they make it in the states with a greenish broth and a lot more vegetables. Nonetheless, it was delicious, and we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves in the town. We capped the night off with a trip to the 60+ flavor gelato place, and strolled on home. The next day was our last off day, and Stewart’s friend Rosemary was turning 21, so we all decided that we would have a little get together for her.

It was a good night—they ran out of cups in the hotel rooms so I resorted to drinking out of a bowl, which I decorated with a pair of eyes so that it resembled the Greek kylix. (I know, I am a HUGE dork) The Greek kylix is a cup with a very wide opening that looks to be the shape of a small bowl with a short stem and two wide handles on either side. IT is usually decorated with florals and such but always the outer edge of one side of the cup is decorated with a pair of eyes, so that when you put it to your face to drink out of it looks like a monster is staring out at the rest of the symposium—a creature with a stubby round nose and a huge painted stare. And we hung out and watched the lights come out over the water, and laughed and talked late into the night. We were taking full advantage of the coming off day, and when the clock struck midnight we all sung happy birthday to Rosemary, and continued partying for another hour or so until we all got way too tired and went to bed.

Herculaneum and Pompeii

April 12, 2007

Sorrento, Italy

The past two days have been spent at some of the more well known sites of Roman antiquity: the places covered by ash and lava when that fateful day in AD 79 Vesuvius blew its top.

The night we arrived we went out to dinner at a very nice restaurant with good pizza and pasta, I had a margerita pizza with artichokes and a wonderful fruit salad that I loved. The entire group went out that night, because it was Erika’s birthday, and we all had a great time laughing and talking the night away. Then it was into the town square, Sorrento is very tourist oriented and the main square is filled with shops and restaurants. Walking down a little side street we ran into the most amazing gelateria, which contained about 60 different flavors of gelato, with bits and pieces of all kinds of European candy bars, especially those made by the Kinder brand, mixed in. I sampled a chocolate-with-stuff and another scoop of a vanilla-with-stuff flavor, both of which were delicious, but they had flavors ranging from apple pie to nutella, to strawberry and back again. By the end of my 2 scoops I was absolutely stuffed up to the neckline, but it was a special night and the gelato was amazing, probably the best I have had in Italy so far. And the variety and selection were amazing.

The next morning came entirely too early, and taking a train from Sorrento we disembarked at the archaeological site of Herculaneum. Although less famous than its counterpart, Herculaneum was another Greek-turned-Roman town in the area of Naples, which was by and large dedicated to pleasure villas for the Roman dignitaries and rich folks. Dotted here and there among the Roman mansions were a few towns, Herculaneum was one, that was a small trade and fishing town along a much-closer Italian shoreline. All of the peaceful industry of the city was obliterated in one fell swoop when in AD 79 Mount Vesuvius, which actually looks quite beautiful, soft and peaceful now, spewed up a huge column of ash and smoke into the sky. At some places, like the more famous Pompeii, which we saw the next day, this resulted in a fine layer of ash deposits throughout the city, suffocating many of the people but leaving almost all of the buildings intact.

However, at Herculaneum, the day was a bit wetter, and the falling ash mixed with mud and rain to form a humongous landslide of lava that came storming through the city, flattening many of the buildings and locking all of the city under a huge thick layer of molten rock. This created a protective barrier against the elements, ultimately resulting in a preserving process that worked so fast that organic material such as plants, wood, and even human remains could be preserved. The wood petrified, and so did a number of Papyrus scrolls found in a big villa in the city, which can be unrolled and decoded, giving archaeologists a good deal of new ancient literature.

In any event, bulldozers have removed the mountain of rock that covered the city, and a good deal of construction work has been done, resulting in a ghost town of sorts, one that contains wood and paintings, but in many instances no walls and certainly no furniture. The place has literally been frozen in time. Walking down to the site, we looked over a maze of walls and streets, designed along a typical Roman grid pattern, and surveyed the complication from above before descending within.

This was an entire city, and we walked through most of it that day. Luckily the sun was out, and there was a good deal to see—we saw a very well preserved bath complex area with mosaics on the floor and the cubby holes to store clothing still in place along the walls. In other places, the plaster covering the walls had fallen away, revealing to us a number of the methods of Roman wall construction, which varied quite a bit from time to time but always involved placing chunks of stone or brick of various sizes into a concrete core. It was very easy to see where the walls had been patched—the blocks were of different sizes and shapes and without the plaster to make it all look uniform it was a hodegepodge of masonry.

We walked into a number of large private villas, some still containing petrified wood in the doors, the main entryway leading to a large open atrium, surrounded by an interior collonade. In some places, where the petrified roots of the plants still remained, the ancient gardens had been replanted to give an oasis of green in all of the bleached dustiness of the ruins of the town.

In some houses the walls had been perfectly preserved—frescoes of figures in their delicate architectural frames, lounging or eating, figures of Dionysus and his followers or other standard mythological fare, or in some cases elaborate floral patterns and depictions of other houses, false windows looking into a world of opulence and grace. The entire place was a ghost town, and walking through the rooms I could feel the pulse of the inhabitants that made their homes here, so surprised when all at once the benign mountain over their heads turned into a fire-spewing monster.

We were there until well into the afternoon, as the sun grew hotter and hotter, and finally at around 3 we boarded the train to head for home. We all almost fell asleep to the rocking of the train as it roared back across the countryside to Sorrento. I returned to the hotel room, but I wanted to see the town so I went on a jog around, following the streets until I reached the shoreline, and then town through a long cobblestone road that lead from the cliffs of Sorrento down into a small port area, where above the hotels carved themselves out of the rock and hung, arms outstretched, over the thin air. Looking out into the water, I could see curved piers that thrust out into the bright blue water, and brightly colored fishing boats bobbing. It was a bright and sunny day, and everything seemed like it was out of some kind of movie—and if Sorrento today is anything like the area was back when the Romans had lived, I would have understood perfectly why the rich and famous of Rome would have wanted to make their homes here.

I jogged back along the palm-shaded streets by sumsuous hotels with wide lawns and bubbling fountains to the town square where the city was in its afternoon hubbub. Tourists milled around and looked in all of the shop windows, the aroma of gelato leaked out of the small booths, and the sun was bright. I headed back to the hotel, returning to my room to study: I had a test due that night and needed to take it.

So I studied and tested for the rest of the night, stopping only after I had finished to check my email and do some internet prawling before giving up at the slow connection, and heading off to bed.

Pompeii was today, and it was like a larger, more complicated Herculaneum. The city in the Roman period was quite a bit larger, and most of the public buildings, such as the forum, the basilica, the theater and the amphitheater have been uncovered. However, one of the more creepy things about Pompeii is that when the volcano erupted, it asphyxiated and then preserved its inhabitants. In some of the buildings we would walk into, plaster casts of human forms would be elevated up in glass cases, cowering under the fumes and dust, preserved by the ash just as they fell. In some instances we could see the impressions of belts, the folds in the garments and the grimaces on the faces impressed in the stone that formed around it. It felt more like looking at a dead body than actually observing the skeletons—these were real people, encased in the hard rock.

Elsewhere, we did much the same as we did at Herculaneum, walking through the straight well paved streets and observing the sites in the ancient city. One of the more impressive buildings was a basilica—not used for a church as the building type would be later, but a large space used for public meetings and for the practice of law. Like the modern type, it was divided into three asiles by a series of stout columns, constructed of the sturdy Roman brick but originally stuccoed to disguise its humbler construction materials. The far end of the basilica contained a huge two story engaged colonnade, some of the second story still existed and projected snaggletoothed into the sky. Unlike modern churches, this building was not entered from the far end, but had two sets of entrances half way up the long sides, that led out into the main space. And the opposite end from the snaggletoothed wall was the entrance to the forum, most of which is missing now but originally contained a wall much like the opposite end, and a doorway that led to the forum itself.

We visited a number of temples, all constructed in the roman fashion: plopped down in the middle of a colonnaded square, but not in the center as was the case with the Greeks, but near the rear so the whole thing had the feel of a procession. The temple itself was more directive than the Greek predecessor; it told the worshipper exactly where to go by erecting a large staircase in the front, with a deep front porch, and a smaller cella. The back room, because it was not part of the procession, was usually dropped entirely, giving the worshipper a straight shot to the heart of the sanctuary. The sanctuary of Isis was the big one at Pompeii—the importation of Egyptian and other western gods was big in this region, and this was one of the few temples to be repaired after the earthquake in 62 AD, many of the other temples in the city had been left in a state of semi-disrepair when Vesuvius erupted. The Isis temple still contained some of the shallow relief sculpture in stucco that would have been painted over to leave the temple in a state of wild color.

Then it was on to the exact opposite of the spectrum: a brothel, a very popular place in ancient times, and located in one of the older districts of town. This brothel was small, with claustrophobic little rooms and narrow passages, but it is most famous for its wall paintings, which depict a number of erotic scenes that acted as a type of a “menu” from which the customers could choose. This was one of the hot spots of Pompeii, many many groups were vying to get inside, and there was a guard at the door who regulated traffic flow into and out of the warren of rooms. We were ushered through quickly, and reemerged into the afternoon light happy to get out of the press of bodies.

Another big place that we saw was the amphitheater, first built in 70 BC, and the oldest known permanent one in the ancient world. The Romans loved their spectacle, but until then had been happy to erect wooden stands and stalls for the demonstration of the beast hunts and gladiatorial games, but later they realized the need to construct something permanent for the growing demand. The popularity of such games is telling: Pompeii itself has a population of about 20,000 when the volcano erupted, and the amphitheater had the same capacity, indicating just how many people would show up to watch the gladiators fight.

The amphitheater itself is shaped like an oval with two main entrances on the axial ends near ground level, one for the entrance of the gladiators, and the other for the exit of the dead and dying. Ringing the bottom of the amphitheater, underneath the seating area, is a large vaulted passage for the movement of people and to vault the stands up to the sky. Most of the spectators did not use this lower passage, but entered through two pairs of broad steps, built into the outside walls of the amphitheater and leading up over the edge and down through a series of arches into the bowl itself. The stands are divided into three sections, separated from one another by walls, the lowest were reserved for the wealthy elite. There was also a separate section for aristocratic women, called cathedra, but most of the stands were overgrown with grass and it was hard to tell where they might have been, or how close they would have been to the arena floor. Unlike the Colosseum, this amphitheater had no underground passages, but as an early example of an amphitheater it isn’t hard to imagine that the underground stuff would have been a later development.

I am curious to see just how people were moved into and around stadiums like this, the Romans seem to have organized the divisions between class, performer and performance much more firmly than the Greeks, and it can be evidenced through the use of walls and distinct barriers in the amphitheater seating. I would guess that the movement into and out of the amphitheater was regulated in the same fashion. More stuff to research!

After visiting a few more houses, we went to the final spot, the House of the Mysteries, located outside of the city walls in a rambling complex. The place is beautiful, with shady trees and walkways and reconstructed rooms all of the way up to the rafters, and one room contained a massive fresco with fauns and women engaging in some kind of Dionysiac ritual. The background of the paintings was a dusty red and the figures engaged in their strange activities, lost in their own world, completely unaware of the voyeuristic nature of our viewing. We were privy to the mysteries.

By that time of the day, however, the only mystery I was prepared to contemplate was food in my stomach. It was nearing 5 pm, and we had been out in the sun all day. We were ready to head home. So we walked back to the train station, and proceeded to fall asleep for the long ride back, wake up enough to stumble back to the hotel, and sleep for a little longer.

Later, we all woke up and had a big picnic in Stewart, Rosemary (Stewart’s friend that is visiting us on her spring break), and me all invited people in. They all came, some using the hot water heaters that some of the kids had bought to semi-cook pasta, some making huge sandwiches from the grocery store, and others like me eating a variety of leftovers, capped off with peanut butter (a rare find) and bread. But it was really fun, we all told stories about the trip and laughed at each other and talked late into the night. And then it was reading and bed.

On The Move Again

April 10, 2007

Sorrento, Italy

Today has been a big travel day. We started with a late breakfast at the hotel, and quickly boarded the metro to get on a train, using another day in our Eurial passes, to get to Naples. ON the way Ambrice and I shared a compartment with an Italian family, a woman with two young sons, and had a fairly decent broken conversation with the young man, a kid that was 17 years old. Most of the time the conversation consisted of gesturing, multiple rewordings of phrases and exasperated silences, but we did manage to get across that we were students studying archaeology in Europe, and that we were visiting Italy for about four weeks. He was a kid going home after visiting family, I was assuming for the Easter holiday, and loved to watch soccer and cheer for his Milan team. He liked American rap music, including 50 cent and Eminem, and we both agreed that Shakira was a good singer and dancer. Upon finding out that we were going to Sorrento, he strongly recommended that we try the pizza. I asked about the pasta too, but he emphatically shook his head and said again: PIZZA. So I guess I’ll have to try it here.

Then at Naples we switched to a smaller train, for another few hours, and are now here, at a very nice hotel with large rooms and brightly colored bedspreads, happy to be settled for a few days while we see the surrounding sites, which include Herculaneum and Pompeii. I am looking forward to it…