Gabii, Praeneste, and Nemi, oh my!

In writing this particular post I've realized that it's not the post content that takes all the time to come up with, it's sorting through all of the pictures! We see a lot of classical sites that most people have at least heard of, but today's sites were a little on the obscure side--let's see if I can still make them interesting for you all.

In addition to being a little obscure, this Tuesday's sites were primarily archaeological. Our first stop was at Gabii, which looks a little like this:

Gabii was a Latin town, urbanized in the Iron Age--when I say Latin in the context of the Ancient City course, I'm referring to the pre-Roman Italic peoples. Gabii, along with the rest of Italy, was eaten up by Rome by the 6th century BCE, but it was still fairly historically significant to the Romans, particularly in religious matters. This particular sanctuary complex was built somewhere around 160 BCE, and as you can see, it's not been very well excavated yet. There's been some magnetometry done to start planning the best spots to dig, and they've found some wonderfully promising sites...but other than this building here, none of that work has been done yet. Apparently Centro students get first dibs at joining the dig, but I'm not quite that interested in archaeology. We didn't stay very long at Gabii, but I did get some nice pictures of the site:

Here is the mysterious tunnel of mystery--there's no scholarly agreement on what the heck it was for. It's kinda cool though!

Here you can see the ongoing excavation that Centro students could theoretically join.

After Gabii, we got back on the bus to head to Praeneste, another Latin town. The main point of interest in Praeneste was a huge sanctuary on multiple levels. Little of the sanctuary remains today, but what is still around is pretty impressive. The museum there (I found out that you're not allowed to take pictures after I got this picture, so I didn't get a chance to get a clearer photo) has what is supposedly a very accurate model of the original sanctuary:

As you can see, it's very large, with multiple levels and tons of arches--after the Romans developed a particularly strong and fast-drying concrete, they could build some pretty spectacular architecture. The sanctuary was built into a hill, and rises quite a distance--the view is incredible:

After we had seen the museum (which included a small statue of the Capitoline Triad--Minerva, Jupiter, and Juno--with their symbolic birds, which made this mythology geek very happy), we got to go down some of the steps that were still around. I should note here in regards to the Roman concrete that it was really strong--the sanctuary area was bombed in WWII, and while the medieval structures in the area were leveled, the concrete structures still remain.

I'm standing between about three levels here, as you can see, up on one of the higher levels of the sanctuary. Lots of stairs!

Here's a clearer view of the actual arches, with Bob nearby to give you a sense of scale. This place was huge.

This is a nice example of how the Romans were so confident in their skill with concrete that they could build a vault (here an anular vault, which curves around) with freestanding columns in the place of a supporting wall. You can also see the pattern in the ceiling.

Here are Lauren and Sarah posing as caryatids (statues in the place of columns). I love my goofy friends.

We ate lunch in Praeneste, then headed off toward Lake Nemi and the museum there, a volcanic crater lake which is very large and quite gorgeous:

I nabbed this picture right before our bus turned to head out of the mountains to go back to Rome, so it's a bit blurry, but it's the best shot of the lake as a whole that I have.

This is the Museum of Roman Ships--it's remarkably light and airy, and very big, as you can see (there's another room this size on the other side, with another area about half as large inbetween). After the museum at Praeneste, which is all corridors and narrow passageways, I really enjoyed the freedom to wander around. The reason this museum was originally built was to house two huge pleasure barges built in 39 CE, for the emperor Caligula. Amusing anecdote time--we do roll-call every time we get on the bus, but since we're classics students, rather than using our own names, we're each assigned an emperor. Our professor-in-charge decided to go against convention, and assigned them in reverse alphabetical order--so I'm the third person from the beginning, and thus my emperor is Caligula. Yes, yes, go ahead and laugh. At least I didn't end up with Pupianus Maximus (who has been nicknamed P Max so that we'll all stop giggling like idiots when we do roll-call). Anyway, back to the museum, and the ships--Caligula was killed in 41 CE, and the ships sank to the bottom of Lake Nemi not long afterward. They were covered in a fine layer of silt and preserved incredibly well, until they were finally unearthed and brought to the surface by Mussolini. Unfortunately, the museum (with the ships in it) was burnt down in WWII, and so despite managing to survive underwater for over a thousand years, all that is currently left of the ships are a few charred timbers. The rebuilt museum now instead has models of the two ships:

I'm standing next to this one for scale--as you all know, I'm five feet tall, and you can see that the models (which only show the hull) are pretty long. Well, the models are one-fifth the size of the original barges--when I say huge, I really mean friggin ginormous.

Here's a picture of a picture (how meta!) that they had in the museum, showing the original barge. You can see that it basically took up the entire room.

 Oh look, COLUMNS! You knew there had to be one of these pictures in here. I mostly took pictures of these because they've got some lovely striated marble, which you can see up close in the second shot. There are columns in a museum about ships because these pleasure barges were essentially outfitted with all of the decorations and amenities necessary for a really big party...and apparently that included fancy marble columns. On a ship.

A few minutes down the road from the museum is the Sanctuary of Diana (see if you can spot one of the themes for the week). Most of what's left of the sanctuary are the arches along the outside walls, which I have shots of if you're interested, but they basically look like all the other arches you can already see here.

Here's an overhead shot (the ground has risen since ancient times) of the area that we had our brief lecture in. A religious sanctuary is not the same thing as a temple--it will have a temple in it, but it's more like a large complex. Sadly, we were told that the actual Temple of Diana hasn't been found yet, just this corner of the complex.

A modern altar to Diana? I really don't know--but it was entertaining, and I noted with glee the presence of offerings (even if they were made in jest) at a pagan altar that wasn't co-opted by Christianity.

Anyway, we were headed out of the sanctuary of Diana when Franco waved us over to let us know that he had another Franco Surprise for us. We ended up a short distance away:

Can you guess where I am? I'm standing in the middle of the current excavation of the Temple of Diana! I've never had a lesson corrected literally in the middle of the lecture before. None of our professors had any idea that there was this excavation going on, or that Franco knew about it. To be fair, there's no way to be certain that it's the temple, but current evidence points pretty strongly in that direction (they're working on digging out the different phases at the moment--they've found evidence of two later ones already), and the whole thing was just incredible and awe-inspiring to be able to see.

More pictures of the excavation. It was pretty awesome to see the professors geeking out over the site just as much as we were.

Finally we headed back to Rome (the whole trip was sort of a big loop--the whole field trip took a little over eleven hours), with a brief stop at the Porta Maggiore and the Tomb of Eurysaces for site presentations--we all had to choose from a list of topics and sites, and we'll all do our presentations throughout the semester. Mine isn't until late November, fortunately, and yes, you'll hear all about it when it actually happens.

Here's the Porta Maggiore--it's essentially a monumental entrance designed to mark the crossing of two major roads. The rough-looking construction is deliberate, not wear from time and weather.

See those square holes at the top? That's part of the Anio Novus aqueduct on top, and part of the Aqua Claudia aqueduct on the bottom. Remember where I was last Tuesday? Well, one of those aqueducts we visited was the Aqua Claudia--and if we'd continued in the aqueduct tunnels for about twenty-five miles, we'd end up right on top of the Porta Maggiore. There really aren't words for how cool this class is.

This is the Tomb of Eurysaces, right in front of the Porta Maggiore. Other than the fact that it looks kinda weird, I don't actually have much to say about it--it was the tomb of a wealthy freedman baker, with some interesting baking friezes up at the top, and lots of hollow cylinders around the sides. And no, no one knows what exactly is up with those. So, have a picture of a strange looking tomb!

All of this was yesterday--today was an academic day, but without the usual free morning. Much to the distress of everyone, we had to get up even earlier than normal (breakfast at 7:00, on the bus at 7:30) to go to the quaestura, which is basically the Italian immigration office, and hang out there for about four hours going through the final paperwork, fingerprints, and passport checks that will give us our permission to be in the country. If we're lucky, we might even get the official papers by the time we leave! Needless to say, classes were very quiet today. Tomorrow is a half-day field trip, I have Italian in the evening, and then I'm done for the week!