Museo Della Civita Romana & EUR

If it's Friday, there's a good chance the school is on a day trip. This past Friday, I elected to join the group that went to the Museum of Roman Civilization. For those of you who have kids who ever come to Rome, this is the museum for you. EVERYTHING is a copy of the real pieces so you can touch all you want. The guards don't even bat and eye if you start fondling something. My only warning to you is that the museum is FREEZING COLD. There is a reason why, but you'll have to wait until later in the posting to find out.

The museum is great because it has great "cheesy" models like this one which tells the story of Julius Caesar's capture of the Gallic town of Alesia. Caesar was a great military general and his claim to the throne was expansion of the empire, Gaul (modern day France) was the feather in his cap.

Story goes that the town was inside the walls of the city. Caesar had the time to build these structures to eventually get his men into the city and take it. Students in one of the advanced Latin classes here knew the story from their readings. Makes me want to take Latin so I can learn these things myself.

The Museum shows how Roman life worked. Here is how they guaranteed themselves clean water. Water came in on the left and then worked its want into the bottom two chambers. As water increased the water came into the top right chamber clean because all the silt and dirt settled out into the bottom left chamber.

Augustus (you all know how I feel about him) in his classic portraiture. My advisee Steve C. is playing cupid as you see is also at the feet of Augustus.

Here's the model of what is hypothesized to be Augustus' tomb.

Here is what's left of it in Rome. It sits next to the Ara Pacis, but it's closed off.

Constantine, the emperor who changed the course of religious history by declaring the Roman Empire to be Christian.

One tool the Romans used to make right angles. If the Romans could do anything it was to build great structures.

Economics was an issue in Roman times as well. Diocletian sought to curb inflation by setting price ceilings, which as we know in a capitalist society only makes things worse. Free markets, baby!

Trajan's column, which still stands in Piazza Venezia in Rome has a continuous frieze wrapping around it telling the story of Trajan's two successful wars in Dacia, modern day Romania.

Mussolini had plaster casts of the entire column (the casts number around 125 or so) made and they are housed in the museum. Here is the cast somewhere in the middle which shows the story of Trajan and his men setting off into the Adriatic to fight the second Dacian War.

The Museum is in an area of Rome known as EUR, or "Esposizione Universale Roma". This area, southwest of historic central Rome was until the 1930's a flat plain that was claimed by Mussolini and the Facist regime as the area they would build upon to showcase, in 1942, their 20 years of rule. As we all know, that didn't come to be as WWII started and Mussolini had other issues to deal with. This is what modern Italy MIGHT have looked like without the fall of the Facists. Everything is BIG and grand, wide streets and built with a nod to great architecture of the Roman Empire. It's BIG, but it doesn't have much "heart". It leaves the viewer cold both emotionally and physically as I mentioned about the museum. The rooms of the museum are 20 feet high and huge, there is no way to efficiently heat them, therefore they are left only with space heaters, which don't do the trick.

Here's a church the facists built, but it seems to miss the mark.

The inside, not inviting.

This building is "pinnacle" of EUR facist architecture. It is known as the "square colosseum". The inscription says "A people of poets of artists of heros of saints or thinkers of scientists of navigators of explorers."