Blog #8

This is my final blog. I'm writing this at 11:15 PM after getting up at 5:30 AM to go to Florence for the day. Also the metro line A closes at 9:30 and our train got in at 9:35. We proceeded to take the above ground metro bus as a substitute. We took it 4 stops until we realized we were going the wrong direction. Needless to say, an hour and a half later we were home. You could say exhaustion has set in. So bare with me.

My last day in Rome has been one of the best days in Rome. Today we (10 of us) woke up at what felt like the crack of dawn and headed for Florence. When we got there around 9:30 in the morning we headed straight for Academia, the museum that has the statue of David. Half of the group didn't come along but Alexis, Jonah, Marshall and Adam did! When I saw the statue of David for the first time, my jaw nearly hit the ground. It is absolutely amazing and that stupid replica does not do it justice. First off. This statue is HUGE. The detail is out of this world. Honestly, a must see if you go to Florence.

After this we headed to the Duomo too climb to the top of the dome and check things out a bit! Turns out a 10E ticket buys you access into the church, Crypt, bell tower and dome. We did the church and then headed to the bell tower. It was 414 steps to the top. Yep you got that right, 414. No elevator. Going up was pretty not great but once you got to the top, the view was absolutely stunning. If you don't fall in love with Florence up here then I think your eyes must be closed. Loved it.

After this, everyone was really hot and tired so we took a break for lunch. After lunch, Alexis, Hannah, Rachel and I headed off to do some shopping. We spent a lot of time in the San Lorenzo market just taking in all of the stuff they had to offer. We quickly realized that much of the stuff on the street was fake, so we moved into the shops. I found the gifts I was looking for and Alexis found her dream purse! After a quick stop for gelato, we headed over towards the river.

After more stops for shopping, we eventually made our way to the river and the place where they sell all of the gold. The river was absolutely beautiful and I wish we were able to stay long enough to see the sunset. Unfortunately we didn't have enough time for that. We met back up with the group and had a big group dinner. I finally got my caesar salad and we all ordered dessert which was a perfect way to end our last dinner together!

Back to the train station we went and back to Rome. Spending our second to last day not actually in Rome was a really fun thing to do. We got to explore a completely new city and just enjoy the day with zero plan. We wandered, got lost, got found, got gelato and all and all had a pretty amazing day.

Cannot wait to wrap up this chapter in my European adventure and prepare to start another one!

Blog #7

Today we visited the Vatican Museum! I could probably write you a book on the amount of things that were in that museum but I won't make you endure that. Instead, I'm going to tell you about the Sistine Chapel. As some of you might know, you are not allowed to take pictures in the Chapel, (even though I saw like 4 people trying to sneakily take some tisk tisk) so I won't have any of my own pictures to add to this blog post! 

The Sistine Chapel for those of you who do not know, is a large chapel in the Vatican Palace, the place in Italy where the pope lives. The Chapel was built between 1473 and 1481 by Giovanni dei Dolci for Pope Sixtus IV. The Sistine Chapel is most famous for its fresco paintings by Michelangelo. 

Outside of the Sistine Chapel (and part of the Museum)

The ceiling of the Chapel is the most famous part. The first time I saw it, I was overwhelmed with where to look first and shocked at its beauty. No image that you can find online or on a postcard can come close to the real deal.

Stunning ceiling

Michelangelo was a famous sculptor not a painter. So why the heck would a sculptor agree to paint this? At first, he didn't. Three years later after a lot of convincing and begging, he agreed to paint the ceiling. He worked from 1508 to 1511, standing on a high platform with his arms stretched above his head. I think I would call it quit about 45 minuets into this 4 year project. 

Let's talk about the layout of the ceiling briefly. Along the centre of the ceiling are nine painted pictures that tell stories from the Book of Genesis from the Bible. The stories start with three pictures of God making light, making the Earth, the Sun and the Moon, and making the Sea and Sky.

Following that, the next three tell the story of Adam and Eve. The first scene is making Adam and God reaches out his hand and touches his finger to give him Life.

In the next picture, Adam is asleep and God makes Eve from one of Adam's ribs.

In the third picture there are two scenes. Adam and Eve are tricked by the devil to eat fruit from the tree that they have been told not to touch. In the other scene, an angel chases them out of God's Garden of Eden, telling the story of how sin came into the world. 

The last three pictures are about Noah's Ark. But the painting doesn't end here for Michelangelo. In 1537 Pope Paul III orders him to paint another giant fresco behind the alter. He painted The Last Judgement. Showing Jesus judging the people on Earth and sending some to Hell and others welcomed into Heaven. 

He painted most of the figures naked. But of course this made the church angry. They tried to get someone to paint over the naked bodies with clothes but many people refused until someone finally said yes and painted clothes on many of the figures. Kind of a bummer that they messed with his beautiful art. What do you think? 

Blog #6

My blog today ties together two places I have visited in the last week as well as another blog post I have previously written.

Yesterday we visited the Bath of Caracalla. In blog post #5, I talked about the Forum Baths at Pompeii. The baths we saw yesterday were similar in layout to Pompeii, although on a much grander scale. The Baths of Caracalla were so big that they have been said to hold 10,000 people at one time!  The reason these baths interest me as much as the ones from Pompeii are because people didn't just come to the baths to get clean.

When we entered into the Baths we walked into a big open space that was used as an exercise space. People would come here and throw exercise balls or do whatever form of exercise they desired really.

Along with exercise, many people came to the baths for massages, grooming treatment which seem like normal things to do in the bath. However, people could also hear poetry readings, lectures and gossip and it has been said maybe even sex! The baths essentially became a social gathering for people. 

This Bath ties into another place we visited in Naples called the Archaeological Museum. In this Museum, there was a giant statue of Hercules that once decorated the Baths of Caracalla. It might not look that large in the picture but i'm telling you, this thing is HUGE. Hercules was loved by the Severus Family and therefore was portrayed in the baths, more than once.

Hercules in the Museum that was once in the Baths

Another part of the Baths of Caracalla that I did not get to see in the Forum Baths was a part called Isotterranei. It is basically the underground chambers where they burned the wood to keep the baths warm. Hundreds of tons of wood was burned each week. Attendants would be in this underground tunnel putting more and more wood into the ovens and stoves to keep the bath water warm. There was also a elaborate pipe system that ran underground for abduction and distribution of water. Pretty cool to see how the inner workings of this giant bath worked!

Where they burned the wood, now used to display artifacts from the Baths

Little more perspective on how big the Baths were

Blog #5

Pompeii. Where to even begin here. I am going to talk about two things that I thought were really cool when we visited here. But first, for those of you who are like me, I'll give you a quick little background on Pompeii in case you don't know much about it!

Pompeii is a city that was preserved in it's ancient form from a volcanic eruption in 79 A.D.
Mt. Vesuvius erupted and covered the land with ash and pyroclastic flows. The cool thing about having a city completely covered in volcanic matter, is that it allowed it to be nearly completely preserved. So thanks Mt. Vesuvius for that!

View of Mt. Vesuvius and some of the city

I had a lot of favorite things from Pompeii but my favorite things were the baths. These pictures below are all from the Forum Baths. 

These baths below were build after 80 A.D. These baths were divided into men's and women's sections. First we walked into the Caladarium or the "hot room".  This is where people would start their bath. They would sit in the hot water and then move their way though the other parts of the bath. The water was usually heated from and underfloor heating system, probably from fire or the hot air from outside.

Hot room, kind of like a modern day hot tub

Tempidarium bath item holding spots

 Next, bathers would walk to the tempidarium. This was known as the "warm room". In here it was like a modern day locker type of things. The box looking things to the right are where people would keep their bath items and unguents. The tempidarium is decorated with geometric partitions and mythological figures, as you can see below.

Mythological figures in the tepidarium

Interesting fact: bath time was usually in the early afternoons and public baths were every inexpensive and used nearly everyday! 

The last part of the baths is the frigidarium or cold room. Depicted below: 

This is an example of a smaller type of cold bath but some of them were as big as a swimming pool! The first two spots, caladarium and tepidarium were used to open up the pores and clean them out. But this part of the bath was used to close the pores back up. Not sure if I would like to end my bath day in a really cold pool but I guess if it was 95 degrees outside, it might feel great! 

Blog #4

Excitement at the Colosseum!

On Sunday, we visited the place I was most looking forward to seeing...The Colosseum! Out of all of the amazing, beautiful and historic places, this is the one I wanted to see most. The reason I am so fascinated with the Colosseum is because I had to create a 25 minuet presentation on it. I'm not sure if you have ever made a 25 minuet presentation before, but it takes a ton of research and time put forward to really dig in! That being said, I was really excited to see this amazing monument in person, because of all of the research and things I already knew about it.

I love so much about the Colosseum but I am just going to pick a few things to tell you about! If you want to learn more--hope on over to my blog site and learn more about it!



One of the first things I think is really cool and rather unfortunate is all of these crude holes you can see all through the Colosseum. When the Colosseum was first build, they did not sure mortar like we typically see. Instead they used iron clamps. Great idea until they decided they needed this iron for other purposes and mined the Colosseum to get it. When you pull out the things that are helping to make a structure stable, it makes it really vulnerable and unstable. All it took was an earthquake and down half the Colosseum went.

Cool view of the levels from the damage that has occurred over the years

The next most interesting thing to me was the hypogeum depicted below:

The hypogeum, underneath the playing field of the Colosseum

This was once covered with the arena's playing field but now it is visible to everyone who visits! The word hypogeum literally means "underground" from the Greek words hypo (meaning under) and gaia (meaning earth). It pretty much refers to a network of rooms, cells, tunnels and passage ways under the Colosseum. I thought this was fascinating! They used it to house the animals, for gladiators to warm up and pretty much as a back stage for the games. A fun fact I learned from my research and presentation was that the workers down below would hoist an animal into an elevator in the hypogeum though a trap door in the arena floor. The animal would pop out from behind a blind into the arena during part of the games. The hunter didn’t know where, when or by what he would be attacked and people loved this!

Beautiful day for a visit!

 

Blog #3

I am back tracking a little bit to Saturday because I found something that I thought was really fascinating! Today we spent most of the morning at the National Roman Museum. If you are ever in Rome, I highly recommend this museum!

The main and first floor mainly consisted of sculptures but the second and bottom floor had amazing frescos, mosaics and really cool coins but I had too much fun on the second floor to make it to the coins!

I saw a lot of really cool stuff today but I'll pick just one thing to tell you about!

This picture is of the first Roman calendar! This might not sound like such exciting stuff but back in day, 753 BC, there were only 10 months and 304 days in a year! In that time you would get older much quicker than today's time! This calendar was attributed to Romulus, the mythical founder of Rome.

Scattered pieces of the first Roman Calendar

But as we know today, there must have been a reform! King Numa Pompilius in 713 BC, reformed the calendar to include the solar cycle. This means two months were added, as we call them today January and February and a variable duration of the months was established, brining the year to 355 days!

This is how the months were set up

Closer up picture

This type of "Numa" calendar continued until 46 B.C. when, at the request of Julius Caesar, the Alexandrian astronomer, Sosigenes preformed a radical reform that created the "Julian Calendar" which was used until the "Gregorian" calendar was installed by Pope Gregory XIII(1582).
This version of the calendar is very similar to what we use today! It has 365 days divided into 12 months.

Little fun fact for all of you, Quintilis, the month between June and August got a new name in honor of Julius Caesar in 44 B.C. Mark Antony renamed this month, Iulius or as we know it, July in honor of him. Cool!

So far this was one of my favorite museums! I wish I could write another blog post about the mosaics upstairs but maybe that will make an appearance in my journals!

Until next time!

Blog #2

Yesterday, we took a bus outside of Rome and headed for Tarquinia. After about an hour and 15 minuets on the bus, we arrived in this new space. The ocean breeze and beautiful views of the town surrounded my sight line.

Beautiful view from the top of the hill

The first thing we did when we arrived was head to the Museo Nazionale Tarquiniense. When we first stepped into the museum, I think everyone got a little bit nervous because all we saw was Italian and none of us speak the language. We very quickly realized that they made laminated sheets explaining things in English. Deep breath.

The first (among many) interesting things I learned yesterday was about the tombs. I learned that the tombs in the pictures thought this post, specifically were from the 4th and 2nd century B.C. and were excavated from one of the burial areas of Etruscan Tarquinia.

Unfortunately, by the time these tombs were excavated, they had already been looted. This basically means someone came in and stole all of the valuable things these people were buried with. You might be wondering, much like myself, why people would be buried with such valuable things? Family members places lots of things like pots, jewelry, gems, etc. into the sarcophagi (tomb) so that when the afterlife took place, they had things to start their "continued" life with.

Example of something someone was buried with

A few really cool things I noticed about the outside of the sarcophagi were that they depicted different things on the outside about the person's life who was buried inside. The most frequent subject-matter was the journey of the dead to the hearafter. For example, in the one below, the man riding the horse held high civil office when he was alive because he is depicted riding a horse with musicans and a large entourage.

Man riding the horse with many other supporters

In this picture, the man, Laris Pulena, is resting on two cushions with a scroll unrolled in both of his hands. The long scroll, that was almost completely gone by now, told all about the mans life. It told about posts he had in life and other activities he preformed.

Laris Pulena 

People are often depicted as sitting up right or lounging position because once a year the family of the deceased would visit the tomb and have a celebration for the person. They wanted the dead to feel a part of this celebration. Seems a little strange to me for an entire family to gather around a burial site and celebrate life but I guess when you really think about it, I guess being right there with the person is as close as it gets! Maybe someday someone will have a party at my grave!





Until next time!

Official blog day 1

Hello blog world!

Today we explored the Republican Rome. We had three spots on our agenda for the day consisting of Capitoline Museum, Forum Boarium and Tiber Island. Since June is very very hot in Rome, most people opted out of going to see the Tiber Island in person after our instructor Aaron told us about it while we stood in the shade. 

I was interested in the Tiber Island, so I did a little bit of research outside of the conversation we had today and learned that as legend has it Tiber Island was formed from angry Romans throwing wheat and grain into the Tiber. The accumulation of all of the mud around it is said to have gradually lead to the forming of the island. More realistic, tuff rock compacted forming the natural geological formation of the sand, dragged here from the rivers current, bringing it to a stop.

The first stop of our day took us to the Musei Capitolini or the Capitoline Museum. Quick background on the museum, the historic area of the museums are Palazzo dei Conservatori and Palazzo Nuovo, facing on the central trapezoidal piazza in a plan developed by Michelangelo Buonarroti in 1536. It took about 400 or so years to finish. The history of the museums can be traced to 1471, when Pope Sixtus IV donated a collection of important ancient bronzes to the people of Rome and put the on Capitoline Hill. The museums collection has been growing ever sense. 

View from the top of the Museum by the cafe where we all had lunch! 

The outside of the museum

Now onto the museum! Aside from it’s stunning roof top view of the city, it holds a great deal of Roman history. As you can see from the picture below, we got to see the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius. The actual statue is inside while a replica is outside in the courtyard. There isn’t an exact date, but according to many ancient literary sources, it was created in 176 AD, along with other honors on the occasion of Marcus Aurelius triumph over the Germanic tribes.

The statue of Marcus Aurelius

Snake infested head of Medusa

The next picture is called Bust of Medusa. When I saw this in the Hall of Geese, I was fascinated by the quite frankly, scary snakes coming from this persons head. What I learned was the mythical Medusa had the power to turn anyone who looked directly at her into stone. The Ovidian myth says that Minerva, as punishment, transformed Medusa’s hair into terrifying snakes, condemning her to become an instrument of death.

I have learned so much already and I will keep sharing my new found knowledge as the days slip by! 

Until then. 

Mykonos Island

Waking up at 6AM after going to sleep around 1:00AM was well worth it today when we stepped off the little puddle jumper from Athens to Mykonos Island. It is stunning here. Since this is our 4th country out of 5, we went choose Mykonos with the sole intention of relaxation. We wanted to lay by the ocean in the hot Greek sand and just be. We wanted to drink cold drinks by the pool and watch the sunset without feeling an ounce of urgency to be anywhere.

As I am sitting on this rooftop terrace writing this post and looking out over all the white topped houses and ocean beyond, I am definitely at peace. Here I am not trying to live this vacation through the lens of my in this case, iPhone, so I have limited pictures so far for our 48 hour adventure but the few I have taken so far speak for themselves. And with that, until next time!