Twenty FUN

I apologize for falling behind on posting, but now that it’s (finally) fall break I can catch up!  Back to the first week of October, which was, of course, my birthday week!  Unfortunately it was also the week that I had two midterm exams and a presentation, and I was struck with some kind of plague!  But it cheered me so much to come home to a mailbox full of brightly-colored cards and well-wishing emails, texts, and Snapchats all day.  The sparkling wine, Mamma Mia birthday card, and millefoglie (thousand layer) cake that my friends surprised me with at dinner didn’t hurt either! Thank you from the bottom of my heart to everyone who helped make my day feel so special, despite everything! It means so much to me.

The week really started with a visit to the Domus Aurea, Emperor Nero’s Golden Palace.  Now buried and suffering from substantial water damage, the site is still absolutely magnificent.  Ceilings soaring twenty, thirty feet into the gloom; hallways that stretch as far as a soccer field; wall paintings and mosaics that still sparkle and entrance, two millennia later.  These fourth-style designs would be a great inspiration for Renaissance artists like Raphael and Pinturicchio after the palace’s rediscovery in the late 1400s.  Called grotesques, it’s not hard to see why they made such an impact: even though some of them are difficult to make out after centuries in this damp, underground cavern, the remaining paintings are absolutely delightful, seeming both simple and elaborate at once.  Seeing them made it worth the hideous hairnets and hard hats we had to wear to enter the site!

On our full-day field trip this week we started at Nemi, an old Roman settlement an hour or so outside the city.  There used to be an impressive sanctuary dedicated to Diana here, but the most remarkable part of the site for me is the story of Emperor Caligula’s pleasure boats.  These massive barges were equipped with marble porticoes, extensive banquet halls, plumbing for the on-board bath complexes, and stunning sculptures, paintings, and mosaics.  In antiquity the boats sank (or were purposefully sunk? unclear) but the lake is shallow and clear enough that the remains of these gorgeous relics were visible for centuries.  Over the years many different attempts were made to excavate the ships, but none were successful (and mostly just damaged the pieces) until Mussolini pumped the lake fully dry starting in 1929.  The two boats were successfully recovered and housed in a special museum built specifically for them, but tragically only on display for a few years before the building and the ships inside were destroyed in May of 1944 in a fire set by retreating German troops.  At the museum today are one-fifth scale models of the ships, a reconstruction of their unique steering system, and a few metal and stone relics that survived the fire.  Although the actual boats have been lost, seeing the size of the twin rooms in the museum (rebuilt to the same dimensions after the fire) still gave us an impression of just how colossal these ships would have been.

That afternoon we made it back to Rome to see the Porta Maggiore, a major gate in the city walls that also carried three separate aqueducts above its opening.  This is also the site of the Tomb of a Baker, which is exactly what it sounds like.  In antiquity no one could be buried within the city limits, but this freeman baker made sure his final resting place would be well-visited by placing it just outside the Porta Maggiore.  How do we know he was a baker?  Not only is there an inscription saying so and relief carvings around the tomb illustrating scenes of baking and selling bread, but the cylindrical holes cut into the sides are meant to resemble the tools used to knead bread in Roman times.  This kind of personalized, over-the-top tomb reminds me of some of the quirkier gravestones at Hope Cemetery near the granite quarries in Barre, Vermont!

To end our Tuesday we went to the Palazzo Massimo, a museum that exceeded all my expectations.  Adding to the list of pieces of art I never thought I’d be able to see in person is the beautifully tragic Boxer and deeply important Augustus As Pontifex Maximus.  Plus, acrobats! Dying Niobids! A nude Venus with actual tummy rolls! Silver coins from Jesus’ lifetime! And so many mosaics!

On Thursday for class we went to Ostia and saw the remains of Emperor Claudius’s artificial harbor and the surrounding warehouses, as well as the hexagonal harbor encompassing almost 100 acres added by Emperor Trajan in 103 AD that remains today.  So cool! Then to one of the necropoles of Ostia, which is this labyrinthine community of brick “houses” where sarcophagi and funeral urns would have been placed.  Some have benches for visitors, ovens for cooking meals for celebration or offerings, and/or Latin inscriptions detailing the life of the deceased.  All the tombs were just open for us to wander through, exploring the alleyways and finding surprising treasures: mosaics, wall paintings, relief carvings showing the occupation of the deceased.

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And to close out the week, on Friday we visited two separate churches for my art history class.  First was San Pietro in Vincoli, an old church founded in Byzantine times and later a favorite of the Della Rovere family, also the site of the (supposed) chains of Saint Peter.  Here I gave my presentation about Michelangelo’s Moses on the tomb of Pope Julius II, and the significance of connecting the figure of Moses to the Papacy.  (To me, with the horns and the beard he looks something like the ancient shepherd-god Pan, but maybe that’s just because I am so thoroughly saturated in the Classics this semester!)  I still feel like I don’t know much about art history, but I think it went well!  Cannot wait to drag my family to this church in December when they visit.

Tomb of Pope Julius II

The chains of Saint Peter

Then to the Basilica of St. John the Lateran, which is truly a spectacular building with the biggest and oldest obelisk in Rome just in front of it!

Obelisk from the Karnak temples in Egypt.

Bronze doors rom the Curia Julia!!!

A bit of time to recuperate from a big week and pack for our weeklong trip to SICILY! Thanks again to everyone who sent birthday wishes, it was a great way to bring in a new year. Here’s to Mom having to give me champagne now instead of sparkling cider for New Year’s Eve toasts!