Friday was great. We bussed out to the Alban Hills, famous in Roman history for lots of things, among them a great place to quarry various kinds of stone. We started at the top of one of them, I think Palestrina, but I'm not sure, and worked our way down. On the top was a really neat little museum built into what was originally a huge temple. They had a model of what the temple would have looked like; it was huge and built into the rock, but they wouldn't let me take a picture of the modern model of the ancient site. I can understand not letting me take a picture of the giant and amazingly famous mosaic of the Nile, but the modern model? That they made? Come on, I have blog fans that need pictures. After the museum we meandered down the hill, Stroup pointing out various points along the way of historical significance, including an 11th century C.E. church with a Byzantine bell tower. We couldn't go in, however, because there was a service in progress, but Stroup assured us it was cool. We then bussed to another famous hill (maybe this one was Palestrina...) where lots of really famous Romans had villas (the only one I remember is Cicero). There was a nice view, and most of the group walked to the top, spread out and took a nap. After we arrived back at the Pio, Stroup invited us all over to her apartment for dinner, so we went around seven and helped her cook (I brought some proschiutto for the rest of us that were not vegetarian) and pretty much just hung out until around ten that night, at which time Ashli, Dan, Nick and I all went on a walk to the Trevi Fountain and the Spanish Steps.
This is a small part of the original temple that we couldn't get to, and are most likely not supposed to take pictures. Take that, no pictures of the modern model people. Archaeological faux pas number five.
This is a view from the top of the hill, entrance to the museum.
Another view, as we descended the hill.
...pp...that's all...Hovde might like this one.
We work hard, we play hard.
Myself atop the second Alban hill we climbed (maybe Palestrina?). I was trying to explain to Stephen how to take a picture with my camera, but we figured this one was good enough.
That night we had dinner at Stroup's. This is a view of the Campo dei Fiori from her balcony. All the awnings are restaurants, and every morning except Sunday the Campo is transformed into a huge farmer's market that starts around 7:30am and is taken down and totally cleaned up after by 3:00pm. This is where I buy a lot of my groceries. They're all fresh, and hormone free (Italy doesn't actually allow in any corn products from the United States because of the genetic alteration stuff). At night it becomes a huge hangout for Italians and a lot of tourists, and they don't shut-up until about 3:00am...we've all become very good sleepers.
Saturday I tried to study for my Circus Maximus presentation, and then went to the first of two heavily anticipated events for my weekend. I saw the opera "La Traviata" at a large Anglican church (the main opera house is not showing any operas while I'm in Rome), and it was a lot of fun. I went with three other people, and we had pretty good seats considering it was on a flat floor (meaning the people in front of us were atypically shorter German people). The clarinet player (for those of us interested) was really good, with a really round, mellow sound. The bassoon player (this is for everyone) was great, because his sound was really good, but also because he warmed up for the second act by playing the Emperor's theme from "The Empire Strikes Back." Which I didn't toally understand, but he's been my favorite person for a while now. This was my first opera that I got to actually watch, and I have confirmed that I really do like opera (I didn't fall asleep at all). I've played a couple at UW, but you don't get to see much from the pit.
Sunday I put in about fifteen minutes of work on my Circus Maximus presentation before my Latin TA, Ashli announced we were leaving in ten to go to my first Italian soccer game. It was pretty intense. It wasn't even a terribly important game, but the fans were so into it. It was way crazier than a football or basketball game in the U.S., where people cheer and paint themselves. Here there were fans running all over the place, jumping over seats in every part of the stadium (which is huge...it's Rome, go figure). When the referee made a relatively poor call at one point, not a terribly horribly awful call, just a little iffy, the entire stadium was absolutely deafening with boos. Everyone in the stadium knew the Roma song, too, and when they sang it you couldn't hear yourself think. Soccer has never been so exciting. The security at their game was pretty intense, too. The away team's fans were all practically quarantined off in one section of stands, and there were probably only about 100 of them (the game was Roma vs. Torino, which means at least as much to you as it did to me). Rome won 4-1, which is a pretty serious landslide in professional soccer. Getting to the game was a novel in itself, however. We knew it was cheaper to get tickets at the stadium on the day of the game, because that's what they told us at the AS Roma store, which is where you buy Roma gear and sometimes tickets for the games. When we got to the stadium, however, they told us they didn't sell tickets at the stadium, and you had to get them at the stadium box office about three kilometers away. So we took about fifteen minutes finding a place that sold bus tickets (you can't buy bus tickets on the bus in Rome, either). By the time we got a bus, got to the box office, bought our tickets, and got back on another bus, it was 2:45pm, and the game was supposed to start at 2:00. We figured we'd make it at least for the second half, and were totally bummed, when we noticed on the ticket that it said "15:00pm." Someone had read the time wrong, and we were actually back in near perfect timing, because the game didn't start until 3:00pm. We missed the coin toss and the kickoff, but saw the entire rest of the game. After the game I went home and finished my site report...after dinner...and gelato.
Us waiting for the bus, everyone pretty much disgusted with life at this point thinking we were going to miss the game and have to pay ridiculous moneys for tickets.
The game. Crazy stadium. The kid down on the left had his gray shirt tucked into his underwear, but was sagging his pants, and sagging them so low you could see his gray shirt actually coming out the bottom of his briefs.
The mascot for AS Roma is Romolo, the she-wolf, which is weird, because the she-wolf is definitely female, and Romolo is definitely both a masculine name, and the Italian form of the founder of Rome, Romulus, who was in fact (or myth, but either way definitely) a guy. His number is also super-ironically 753 A.C., the traditional date of the founding of Rome (A.C. being the Italian B.C.).
I still don't understand how you can get away wearing clothes like this in public here; and at a major sporting event, no less.
Monday I led everyone to the Circus Maximus (that's the first part of the site report; you have to lead the whole group to the place you're presenting). My presentation went pretty well, I left a few things out, and despite my not even being able to find any information on the actual ruins at the east end of the Circus, which one would think to be fairly important and prevalent in a talk about the site, my intellectual insights into how important the Circus was and its function within the city were enough to get me compliments from the professor, so I'm fairly confident that the presentation went quite well indeed. We'll see how the midterm went in not too long.
After my presentation we continued on our normal tour of the city led by Professor Stroup, lecturing as she went about all of the various sites, most of which are ancient (and therefore important to us). This is a famous rose garden, and while my picture was just barely ill-timed (they all had their noses in the bush a second before), I can still comment that they did, in fact, stop to smell the roses.
On top of the Aventine Hill (one of the seven ancient/important Roman hills) are several important churches, this monument being in front of one that dates to I think the 1300s, and was once the home of the Grand Master of the Knights Hospitallers, which is a big deal for me, being a medievalist. I wanted to be a Hospitaller in middle school...
This is an example of "damnatio memoriae," which is the "damnation of memory." Ancient Romans took this pretty seriously. When you were in a position of power, and you didn't like someone, first you offed them, and then you went around the city literally erasing their memory. In this carving of an emperor and his wife (I forgot which one), there should have been a child next to the wife, the emperor's older brother, I think. However, once the younger brother became emperor, he literally took big brother out of the picture. If you look closely you can see that the mother's left arm is obviously a later, poorer carving. Not as easy as white-out. There are lots of places around Rome where you can see this, especially on inscriptions where there is a blank spot in the text where someone's name should be. There are some, also, where they got a little lazy, and only erased the face of the person, which are kind of funny, because they're usually really good carvings, and then one guy doesn't have a head.
Yesterday was my midterm, after which I had to do my homework for Latin this morning. Now it's now, now, and I don't have nearly as much on my shoulders (see that, "nearly as much," indicating that I recognize that I do have homework, because I'm realizing that even though my next assignment isn't due until Monday, if I do a little now, I'll have less to do later, as opposed to assuming I have nothing to do until Sunday night...somebody's growing up...baaaaby steps).
This is a little random, but I forgot to put a picture on last time of the crater that we saw on the way back from our Paestum/Pompeii trip a couple of weeks ago. Speaking of a couple of weeks ago, I'm disappointed that it's May, but I feel ridiculously spoiled thinking to myself "Man, I only have five more weeks in Rome..."
Latin Word for the Day: puer, pueri; m. (tr: boy)
Vale, amici.
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