Wherein Katie Takes Too Many Pictures, As Always

It was a very long day, one of those days where by the end of it you've done so much you've forgotten what you did that morning. No, seriously--I had to go scrolling through my (almost 200!) pictures of the day to make sure I remembered everything. But there are pictures of cats, and wolves, and way, way too many statues. And maybe a column or two just for consistency's sake ;)

Today was another "running around Rome" day, so we all made our way to the Largo Argentina, a large piazza...except that most of the piazza was taken up with the giant hole in the center, in which were the ruins of four republican-era temples. You'll see these holes in lots of places in Rome--the ground level has risen drastically since ancient times, so any time you want to see Roman ruins, you'll be heading down some stairs. One of the very cool things about the temples at Largo Argentina is that the area also happens to be home to one of Rome's cat sanctuaries, so in addition to nifty Roman architecture, there were lots of cats hanging out in the ruins. I overheard one of my friends make an amusing comment, and naturally had to do this:

Yes, I made an archaeology LOLcat. No, I'm not sorry :P

Here's a cute picture to make it up to you though--it was adorable to see the cats just casually walking around the ruins.

On the academic side, on the other hand, we were mainly studying these two temples, since they're the most complete:

Since we don't know what gods these are dedicated to, these temples are called, very creatively, Temple A and Temple B. The large white blocks that you can see at the bottom of the picture of Temple A are chunks of travertine.

There's a lot of them! The ones toward the top are wrapped in plastic, which is why they're so much whiter--the lower ones are the actual color. These are here because the temples and this whole area went through several phases in ancient times--these travertine blocks paved the area in the most recent phase, and had to be removed to get to the tufa pavement and further ruins below.

Right across the road from these temples (you can see the columns from Temple B) is a yellowish block of apartments currently standing where the portico of Pompey's Theater was in ancient times. This is primarily of interest (although the Theater is pretty cool in its own right) as the spot where Julius Caesar was killed. Yay, history! As long as I'm on the subject of the Theater (which you can look up if you're curious--I don't know enough about it to be comfortable giving the background here), it was huge--that dome you can see in the distance is one of the largest domes in Rome, and it's standing in what was about the half-way point between the portico and the cavea, the seating area of the Theater.

Speaking of the cavea--you all probably know what it looks like, think of an amphitheater with its semi-circle of tiered seating--there's still evidence of it today. The picture above isn't a weird camera angle--the building is curved around the area where the cavea would have been. You can actually still see the outline of Pompey's Theater in an overhead map of Rome. We also got a chance to go down into a restaurant that has seating in a lower chamber that was once part of the theater, with one of the earliest and most clear examples of opus reticulatum, but unless you're interested in Roman concrete techniques, I'll spare you the pictures :)

We had a few more brief lectures, then had a few hours on our own before we had to meet up again for the rest of our lectures. As usual, I latched myself onto the nearest small group to avoid getting lost, and we meandered toward our meeting point, stopping at various shops along the way. We dropped by a coffee shop, where I had the best cappuccino of my life...I love Italy. We also managed to find a store we'd heard a bit about from some of our professors. It must have a name, but I didn't see it, so we just call it the replica store:

Unlike most souvenir shops, where you can get cheap, tacky "reconstructions" of pseudo-Roman artifacts, this store has some gorgeous (and expensive) pieces of bronze work, jewelry, and marble. It's my new favorite store, and I will definitely be coming back!

We sat to eat our lunches near the wedding cake--which I have since discovered is actually called the Vittorio Emmanuel Monument, and it is a museum to Italian reunification. There had been a little bit of drizzle through the morning, and the sky was doing all sorts of interesting things. I just had to indulge myself in at least one artsy-fartsy shot:

Just be glad I didn't start playing with the sepia filter :)

Anyway, we still had an hour or so to burn before we had to meet up at our next destination, so we headed over to see Trajan's column up close, finally.

Isn't it lovely? I took a series of shots to stitch together into a panorama, but it turned out badly. I'll try again later--the best part about being here for the whole semester is that I can actually go back to see things again!

Trajan's column actually has a really cool base which you rarely see in pictures, so here it is--of course that's not just an excuse to pose with the column!

The panoramic shot didn't work out, but here's a closeup of the detail on the base of the column proper. The whole column is just stunning.

We meandered a bit more toward the forum, and happened upon one of the "goofy gladiators" that dress up in terrible gladiator costumes to attempt to swindle naive tourists into paying for pictures with them. I had to take this picture (from a safe distance away), because of the hilarious incongruity between his gladiator costume and the rainbow umbrella.

I don't really have any excuse for this one--I looked at this section of an ancient brick wall, turned to my friends, and said "Is it just me, or does that look like a giraffe?" Embarrassingly, I don't even know what the original building was.

Finally we all ended up at the Capitoline Hill, where there's a lovely plaza designed by Michaelangelo, and the Capitoline Museum.

Here's the best picture I have of the gorgeous design in the plaza floor--sorry it's so off center, I had to hold my camera up over my head to get the shot! The equestrian statue in the center is of the emperor Marcus Aurelius...but not the original. We'll get to that one later.

Immediately inside the Capitoline Museum is a courtyard, with a few huge marble sculptures. Or, really, marble sculpture parts:

Each of these were once part of the same statue of the emperor Constantine--and they are ridiculously large. On the foot, the toenails alone are wider than my hand. You can see the doorway beside the hand for scale on that one. The head is about nine tons of marble!

This is sort of a weird one--it's a (part of a) model of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, but the model is made of clear plastic, so it's very difficult to get pictures of. However, you can at least see the top, the outlines of the columns, and the grayish-brown sections below that show the foundations, which are actually a part of the museum. The main reason I took a picture of this was to show the scale--look just to the left of the arm in the picture--see the little figures (the clearest is in white)? Those would be people. Now look at the rest of the temple again. This was definitely an important temple!

Here are a few parts of the aforementioned foundations--there are large sections throughout part of the museum, all made up of these huge tufa blocks. The picture on the right unfortunately doesn't have a good reference point, but it's a long way down.

Remember the mostly-ruined temples from last Thursday, that date back to the 6th century BCE? This little lion statue is one of the votive offerings from those temples, and while the carving isn't visible in the picture, it's the oldest example of Etruscan writing in Rome

Here's the real statue of Marcus Aurelius. Bronze equestrian statues like this were actually quite common in Rome, but they tended to be dismantled and melted down for easy sources of bronze in times of crisis, so very few survive today. This one's impressive survival is due to a mistake on the part of the later Christian rulers of Rome--they thought it was a statue of Constantine, and thus preserved it. Eventually, studies of imperial portraits revealed that not only did the figure look nothing like Constantine, it matched the face on coins of Marcus Aurelius...so the truth was out, and we have this incredible statue today. Incidentally, I just looked up in my room, and one of the posters provided in my room is of this statue--you can see the poster in one of my first Centro posts.

And here is the Capitoline Wolf! This is one of Rome's most famous symbols, going all the way back to the legendary founders Romulus and Remus and the she-wolf that found and saved them. Somewhat depressingly, there's a lot of controversy about the statue's origins--we know for certain that the statues of the twins weren't added until later, but the dating of the wolf statue is in a lot of doubt. As I'm not going into the field of archaeology, I choose to believe that the statue is of ancient origin, because I like that story better, and there's enough evidence to justify that belief.

The next area we visited is a little difficult to explain, and it's definitely more on the obscure side--basically it was a public archive. And I'm sure you're tired of pictures of rocks, but this is a pretty neat one:

In the lower left corner you can see the reddish Anio tufa, which is more local, but also softer and thus made up the inside walls of the archive. The lighter gray tufa is Lapis Gabinum (remember Gabii?), and has the distinctive property of being fireproof--a good outer wall for a place designed to store paper!

The nice part about the archive was that it was fairly high up, and the sky had cleared up and was simply gorgeous! Sometimes I like indulging myself with a bit of gratuitous artiness.

The following pictures require a bit of a callback to this photo here and the Forum Romanorum post in general. Take a good look at that picture (I'll wait). See the arches in the middle? I'd seen people walking around in those arches, but hadn't thought much about it...until we got to some of the windows in the archive and saw this lovely view:

Hello Forum! And this time, I actually managed to get the panoramic function on my camera to work properly--please click for the full version, I promise it's worth it.

Finally, there were lots of statues in the museum--I feel like I took a picture of every other statue in the place. I did my best to narrow it down to just the best pictures, or my favorites!

You've seen lots of column capitals--here's a column base, for once. They're quite fancy too!

This would have been up along the top of a building, probably a temple, right below the roof. I am constantly in awe of the detail that the Romans managed to create in marble.

This is a bust of the emperor Commodus...dressed up like Hercules. I have no idea why. But my professors all seemed to think it was a little on the silly side--and it really is.

This is the sculpture of the Dying Gaul, which is apparently a very famous statue that I never heard of until today, but I admit that my focus tends toward mythology. However famous it may be, it is an incredible statue, that really has to be seen in person--pictures could never do it justice (although obviously I've tried).

More use of more than one stone to create different "textures" in a statue--most of these are agates rather than marble. I was impressed at the variety--there's at least four different stones there, not including the marble of the face.

One of the rooms in the museum--they weren't all this ornate, but most of them were. And the vast majority of them really were this full--it would take days to see everything in this museum, and comparatively it's not that large.

This...is a creepy statue. This was not what I wanted to see, coming around a corner in the museum. So naturally I had to take a picture to scare you all with. Logically, I know that the (currently disturbingly empty) eyes would have been inlaid with shell or glass in ancient times, but logic has no place against the soulless stare of this statue.

Oh look! Cupid! No, really--that's Cupid, or Eros. It's really a very nice statue, I was just amused at my initial mental disconnect between the divine son of Venus depicted here, and the modern characterization of Cupid as a chubby winged baby firing heart-shaped arrows. This is why I usually remember him as Eros!

This is a horrible picture (argh why aren't we allowed to use our flash?) of an incredible mosaic. I had to have it pointed out to me--I thought it was a painting, the tiles are extremely small and put together perfectly.

This is a statue of a triton, or sea god. You can see the patterns of water on the skin, and the intricate hair--the Romans developed a special drill to carve the fine details of curled hair. As I've said, I love mythology, and I love statues, so this whole trip was just wonderful for me.

This is quite possibly the most unusual statue I've ever seen--I don't think it's a typical design, and I'll be asking my professors about it tomorrow (I saw this and most of the others pictured here during a different free hour that we had). It's unfortunately not very clear, since again, no flash (and in a room with very awkward lighthing), but it's a statue of the satyr Marsyas. This is a relatively obscure myth, and a rather gruesome one (which is another thing that makes this statue unusual)--Marsyas challenged the god Apollo to a contest of music which the Muses judged. He naturally lost, and Apollo had him flayed alive for his hubris--so the statue is of Marsyas tied to a tree, with sections of the statue made out of a red-veined marble to imitate blood.

So as not to end on that rather depressing note, here's a statue of one of my favorite goddesses:

There were lots of statues of Diana/Artemis, the virgin goddess of the moon and hunting (and protector of animals and youths) but this was one of my favorites. Yay mythology!

(As you can see, this is just a very small selection of the total pictures I took. I know a large number of the pictures I take are likely to only be interesting to a classics student, so I'm trying to keep what I do post to more accessible subjects. However, I do love to share all of my pictures--so please do let me know if you'd like to see more!)