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!