Roman Relics Part 3: Pompeii

And, finally, we come to possibly the most famous of the three sites that I visited: Pompeii. 

I had been to Pompeii once before in 2003 but, I'll be honest, I didn't really appreciate what I was looking at. Yes, I knew it was nearly 2000 years old, but it wasn't until I visited this time that I had that 'WOW' moment where the significance of the site suddenly hit me. 

Although Pompeii is, of course, just as busy as many of the central sites in Rome, there were still plenty of moments during the day where you are suddenly and startlingly reminded of the miracle of the city that you are looking at. Nowhere did this hit me more than when I was stood in one of the quiet side streets near the House of the Faun, gazing up the street to the peak of Vesuvius. That night in 79AD must have been genuinely terrifying, and it came to life for me more in that moment than it has in any of the dramatisations that I've watched over the years.

2000 year old cart tracks running through the streets

Takeaway food, Pompeii style: storage containers in the counter

A lion painted onto a wall fresco

Mythical beast painted onto the same fresco

The rather extravagant entrance steps to the House of Julia Felix. They were built up over the usual pavement to illustrate her wealth to passersby

The atrium of the House of Julia Felix (sadly closed to the public currently)

Another angle on the atrium

View through one of the house's rooms into the courtyard beyond

The beautifully preserved black and white mosaic floor

The mosaic sign on the street outside the House of the Faun. 'Have' means 'greetings' (see also the new header of my personal Twitter page!)

The ubiquitous 'beware of the dog' mosaic at the House of the Tragic Poet': 'Cave Canem'

I was trying to find a quotation on which to finish the last of these three blog posts that would sum up the awe-inspiring power of Pompeii and Vesuvius, and found this incredibly moving extract from Statius's Silvae, written in the AD 90s:

'In a future generation, when crops spring up again, when this wasteland regains its green, will men believe that cities and people lie beneath? That in days of old their lands lay closer to the sea? Nor has that fatal summit ceased to threaten' (4.4.78).

 © Jenna Townend 2013

Roman Relics Part 2: Ostia Antica

Next stop on my tour of the key Roman sites of Rome and its surrounding countryside was Ostia Antica. This is, without a doubt, my new favourite archaeological site.

Only discovered and excavated in the last century, the site is yet to be over-run by tourists and site-seeing tours. Because of this, the whole area is still virtually totally un-fenced and, although there is a free basic map and a visitor centre, you are still free to go and explore wherever you choose in relative peace and quiet. Provided you have a reasonable working knowledge of the layout of Roman towns (if you don't, all you need to do is watch Mary Beard's 'Meet the Romans'), you can spend, as I did, an entire day wandering around and stumbling across some truly magnificent finds.

If anyone is taking a trip to Rome in the near future, I would definitely recommend Ostia to you. It really is the most incredible place.

Roman takeaways: produce display area in a shop selling hot and cold food just off the forum

Counter facing out onto the street at this shop

Part of a beautiful fresco in a private residence 

The street that many of the food shops and stalls face onto

The infamous 20-seat public latrine!

Me with the forum in the background

The entrance to a family's mausoleum, where the urns of both family members and their slaves were kept

One of the rooms of this mausoleum. Significant family members, such as the husband and wife, would have been placed in the larger alcoves, with children and slaves taking up the smaller alcoves

A mosaic advert for a stall dealing in exotic animals. This is in the marketplace that lay behind the ampitheatre (see below)

The beautiful ampitheatre

 © Jenna Townend 2013

Roman Relics Part 1: Gladiatorial scrawls

If you are a reader of my blog that is unyielding in terms of what 'early modern' means, then I'm afraid that you will have to excuse the content of the next few blog posts! Before I get back into my normal early-modern-themed posts, we are taking a brief trip back to around 50-80AD...

As some of you may know, I recently went on holiday to Italy: Rome and Sorrento to be precise. Now, apart from eating my own body weight in pasta, pizza, and gelato, I did actually manage to fit in a fair bit of sight-seeing. First on the list was the Rome's Colosseum. 

Rather than bore you with the standard photos of its exterior and interior (which are, nonetheless, absolutely stunning!), I wanted to share with you a little collection of photos that I took of some sections of marble that have been removed from the walls of the Colosseum's 'corridors' - for want of a better word - and have been placed as part of the exhibition that sits on the upper floors.

I really can't get these images out of my head. They are something that at once struck me as unmistakably antiquarian (they are, after all, accompanied by a card telling you the likely date that they were engraved), but also incredibly modern. Engravings and scrawlings in stone, wood, even modern school tables, are surely as common now as they were around 80AD.

A gladiator, with armour, spear and shield

A big cat used in gladiatorial competitions

Two gladiators fighting. Both wearing armour, with the left-hand gladiator holding a shield, and the right-hand gladiator brandishing a sword

Gladiator with wonderfully detailed armour on his lower body, carrying a spear

 © Jenna Townend 2013

Giovanni Bracelli: early modern Cubist?

Giovanni Battista Bracelli was, by all accounts, an Italian engraver and artist based in Florence in the early part of the seventeenth century. It was during this time that he compiled his little-known work Bizzarie di Varie Figure, which was published in 1624. It contains what are certainly some of the most highly inventive drawings of human-like figures of the period, which were sadly lost to the world until the re-discovery of the text in, or around, 1950.

As Sue Welsh Reed indicates, the Bizzarie shows characteristics of the artistic style called Mannerism,
which originated in Italy in the sixteenth century: 'the term derives from the Italian word maniera, meaning style. It is applied to a way of working that was developed to oppose the idealized naturalism of the Renaissance as practiced by Raphael and others'.

Below I have shared three of my favourite engravings from Bracelli's work. As several other scholars working on Bracelli have indicated, the figures in the Bizzarie certainly seem to be a kind of prescient for the modern artistic trend of Cubism.

Stumbling across these wonderful drawings were a welcome break from the rather gory reading that I've been doing this week, and certainly gives me a different slant on considering the early modern body!

References:
1. I owe the origin of these images from the Bizzarie (which are sadly not available on EEBO), to this article on Bracelli that was written in 2005: http://www.spamula.net/blog/2005/08/bracelli.html
2. For a more detailed commentary on Bracelli and his work, as well as a more comprehensive biography, see this pdf file: http://mail.nysoclib.org/Braccelli_Bizzarie_di_varie_figure/BCLBZR.PDF

© Jenna Townend 2013