Daily Updates
Week Three: Oct. 7
07 October. Hello again, Sophia reporting to you from the Albergo Sole on this fine evening. Today was an eventful day as usual for the Classics FSP. After rising to a chilly morning and hustling over to the Capitoline Hill, we sat outside for a short while and received some background information on the day’s proposed course of events, then stopped to see the view from a terrace high above the city, and finally made our way into the museum. Perhaps the most immediate and recognizable attraction when first we entered was the famous bronze, gilded statue of Marcus Aurelius astride a horse—at least twice life-size. After eight long years of restoration, it is on display at the entrance to one side of the Capitoline’s museum (the museum itself is divided into two separate parts on either side of the Piazza Campidoglio), and one can’t help but to be drawn towards its mammoth magnetism. As we continued to wander through the halls, careful not to lean on anything or catch spells of clumsiness and knock over a two thousand year old bust, we found many such exaggerated figures. Gods, emperors—the entire place was filled with looming marble heads gazing eerily from behind white eyes. We soon discovered that one of the purposes of this latest leg of our Italian odyssey was not, as one might think, simply to be daunted by the masses of sculptural masterpiece and feverishly scribble down dates and names as the professors dictated to us about portraiture and style. Instead, each one of us has been destined to choose a Roman emperor with which to forge an everlasting alliance (or at least one that survives until Thursday evening) and to prepare a short oral presentation for the group on a sculptural portrait of one such character from the museum. This will entail placing the piece chronologically through specific characteristics that mark certain time periods and surmising an overall message that the sculpture radiates. Perhaps the only part of the assignment met with some disgruntlement, besides playing the imperial guessing game (there were no nametags attached to our beloved busts), was the aspect of drawing out a model of the statue…some of us are less artistically inclined than others, and it would only be an insult to the good emperors and artisans of yore to make any attempts at imitating their incomparable genius. Nevertheless, it is our task. After we broke up formally, most people went back to the Room of the Emperors to make attempts at identifying their chosen busts or to begin the dreaded sketches. Some returned to the hotel and made way for the Capitoline again later on—in the end, almost everyone reconvened for a blaze-through session on Greek and Roman mythology that began almost as chaotically as the world before Zeus brought it to order and ended in a contented sort of golden age with the Twelve Labors of Hercules (Herakles for the Hellenophiles among us). Then, with tales of divine backstabbing and heroic deeds replaying in our imaginations, many of us headed out to dinner at the Theater of Pompey restaurant located right next door to our hotel in honor of Karen’s birthday—buon compleanno, Karen! As the night has yet to conclude, I leave you all to imagine us snug in our beds with white marble busts floating over our heads. Arrivederci.
07 October. The Campidoglio, Michelangelo's piazza on the Capitoline Hill
07 October. The Campidoglio
07 October. Looking at the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius
07 October. A close up of the statue
07 October. A close up of the horse
07 October. Mars Ultor from the Temple of Mars in the Roman Forum
07 October. A high relief Imperial sarcophagus
07 October. The couple atop the sarcophagus
07 October. A Roman copy of the Dying Gaul
07 October. The Dying Gaul
07 October. The Dying Gaul
07 October. The Dying Gaul
07 October. Professor Ulrich lectures on a mosaic from Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli, depicting doves drinking from a bowl
07 October. Brian, Cordelia and Adam listen to the lecture
07 October. Peter
07 October. Lectures on Roman portraiture
07 October. The ceiling of the Capitoline museums
07 October. Tori and Sarah pose with our old friend Homer
07 October. Katherine
07 October. Myung-Hee and Maya
07 October. Paige
07 October. Joanna and Brian admire a gilded bronze statue
07 October. The Spinaro, the boy with a thorn in his foot
07 October. Courtney and Brutus
07 October. Brutus
07 October. A view of the Vittorio Emmanuele monument
07 October. Capitoline she-wolf with Romulus and Remus
07 October. A detail of the she-wolf
07 October. The Temple of the Divine Vespasian
07 October. A detail
07 October. A close up of a reconstruction of the architectural decoration from the Temple of the Divine Vespasian
07 October. Detail