Daily Updates
Week Six: 27 October
27 October. Charles Runckel Reporting:
Our day began with a visit to the Forum baths, an impressive complex of barrel vaults and domes erected for the veterans of Sulla's army. The baths were as much for social purposes as sanitary and included opulently decorated changing rooms. The frigidarium, tepidarium and caldarium provided increasing levels of heat achieved in ingenious ways with hollow walls and floors and hidden furnaces. The suburban baths boasted a state of the art heated swimming pool, something our hotel doesn't even have (more a frigidarium) and a locker room decorated with... stimulating frescoes (see below). We adjourned and were left to our own devices for several hours to familiarize ourselves with the city of Pompeii and especially with our site, which we would be presenting to the entire FSP over the next several days. Our day, however, was not really over and a fast train found us in Napoli a half hour later. The walk to the archeological museum left us with a less than favorable impression of Naples, which my and Kelsey's trek back to the train station more than cemented in. In the museum, Dave presented on the Alexander mosaic, a large floor decoration from the House of the Faun in Pompeii. The intricate mosaic, made completely of naturally colored stone, depicts Alexander the Great (see the movie for more details) heroically leading a charge (that never actually took place) within sight of Darius, emperor of Persia. The Romans certainly understood the concept of artistic license. With our first oral presentation complete (phew for Dave) we toured the rest of the Naples museum, viewing a carbonized scroll fragment from the library of the Villa of the Papyri, only now being deciphered by modern technology. The real treat of the museum, however, was without a doubt the Doryphoros, or Spear-Thrower. This marble Roman copy was of a work by the Greek sculptor Polyclitos, who wrote a book describing the perfect human form. To illustrate the point, he created the Doryphoros, an image of an athlete both at tension and at rest, both moving and still. Absolute perfection.
Briar and Kelsey, after a long day of work
James and a scandalous fresco.
Doryphoros, the perfect human form, and Ben, a somewhat less than perfect human form.
The group around a model of Pompeii
The class before Hercules, as tired as we were after our trials.