caesar novus
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Posts posted by caesar novus
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The Pantheon sometimes opens interesting back rooms in a structure that was meant to reinforce an area developing cracks early on. There are even a couple of external flying buttresses there. I speculate that the huge front portico must be pressing the drum structure to the rear (no cracks on it's sides). Anyway this vid shows exhibits there including nice decorative fragments:
By the way, here is how decorative elements can be robo-sculpted now in case you want some Corinthian topped columns:
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Good work. This one seemed to address my concerns on an earlier one - probably because they were obvious. But just in case of someone listening I will try to suggest refinements.
Mainly I think the roofs are too look-alike as if they had the exact same roofer and materials with the exact same amount of weathering (say 40 years). It's nice the facades are weathered with hints of staining, but still a bit uniform, without a peppering of new construction.
Nice that the colors are muted like their mineral colorants, and mostly confined to highlights seems plausible. Nice localized smoke and mist, although I would like to see more dappled light due to cloud patches. Is there something stagey about the people, like lack of kids, dogs, or ragamuffins?
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5 hours ago, Gordopolis said:
Is the Maritime Musuem the same as the Arsenale?
Oh no, Maritime museum is closed for renovation except for a small annex. Arsenale is nearby but not sure how much is open; I actually never found an entrance. To east is spacious area to wander since Napoleon had a canal converted to a wide boulevard with parks and uncrowded benches to eat snacks etc. https://www.marina.difesa.it/EN/history/museums/Pagine/museostoriconavale.aspx
If it is in season, drink plenty of fresh squeezed arancia rossa which is like rasberries. I just scored a bag of these and am in the afterglow of first taste in a while:
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https://www.thebyzantinelegacy.com/ven-byzantine- sez (embolded by me):
QuoteVenetian-Byzantine Architecture
All across the city, Venice shows complex influences of Byzantine, Islamic and Gothic architecture. It is under the rule of Byzantium, that Venice came into existence. While little remains from the earliest period, it can best be seen in Torcello Cathedral, north of Venice. The Basilica of Saint Mark (San Marco), though, is the most spectacular example. Modeled after the Church of the Holy Apostles, it is is one of the best places to see a Byzantine church is all of its glory. There are other examples though. The Murano Church, just north of the main group of islands, dates to the 12th century and has a great example of a Byzantine mosaic floor. There is also Ca' da Mosto, a Venetian-Byzantine style palace from the early 13th century, which is the oldest building on the Grand Canal. The Fondaco dei Turchi is another 13th century example of Venetian-Byzantine architecture. It would later serve as the fondaco (a one-building ghetto) for the Ottoman Turks involved in trade in Venice.
I am a Venice fanatic but not so much the Byz angle (St Mark etc) so may be a contra-indicator for you. I found Murano and Torcello islands painfully blah. Pay attention to ferry schedule for Torcello; you may have to commit to a very short or long wait for the return. Stopover in Burano which is super cute, if well over the top. They have/had coin bathrooms with no change made at the time.
Mosto and Turchi facades go by fast on a waterbus, so maybe look for viewpoints from other side of canal. One is a hotel and the other a zoolog museum, so visiting may have complications. I normally love museums, but in Venice I only find the huge Maritime museum inspiring. Nobody visits there, and the staff tries to herd everyone out way before the 1:30 closing, but you may find Byz cannons or whatever.
Consider a quick excursion to Padua for mosaics, etc. The charming neighborhoods in Venice are Dorsoduro (SW) and Castello (NE). The famous walk of train station - Rialto bridge - San Marco is a cattle drive horror show punctuated by pigeon poop. To get from west to east walk the alternate route of bus station - Academy bridge and onward; that's what Italian commuters do.
Venice has the worst food in Italy since it has negligible Italian customers. Instead of tourist gelato which tastes like shaving cream with food coloring, get sorbetto tailored to more refined taste. Instead of stockpiled wet cardboard pizza slices, order a whole pie with gourmet ingredients they have to prepare for you. Above all, wander around at dawn and night when daytripper hordes are gone.
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New York's wonderful lost tribute to baths of Caracalla is well summarized in first 5 minutes here:
To go beyond the simple sad narrative of Roman style monuments lost, take a look at one of the most engaging architect historian ever on a longer riff on that Penn Station. He ties it together with so many fascinating developments (fine art, engineering, finance) that makes it seem a miracle that the things worked out at least briefly.
https://www.c-span.org/video/?309730-1/history-york-citys-penn-station
That professor Barry Lewis can talk about most any architecture history in a way that gets exponentially more interesting as the clock moves on, and can be found not on youtube but at:
https://www.c-span.org/search/?searchtype=Videos&sort=Newest&personid[]=9278702
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I thought I would pass on some Roman smuggling info from TV series. They aren't worth a separate topic and I will only mention once since I have stopped watching these 7 or so series.
There are actually 2 series covering Spain, which seems to be inundated by South American drug traffickers. It's kind of interesting how their law enforcers seem to be small and ageing vs the violators who may be large and aggressive. Anyway the Roman connection is that their coast guard checks underwater wrecks about once a month with divers to see if looting takes place. Expensive operation which might attract notice from bad actors.
There are series for just about every country in South America which has interesting no-nonsense enforcement styles, but a Roman connection appeared in the US based one. They found huge real mosaics in storage along with tons of loose ancient tile which they were using to "enhance" the mosaics. We saw a familiar Roman scholar from Yale or whatever value these for a jillion dollars. The perpetrator was dead and I forget the result, but they may have been waiting to see what country to return it to. The US style is depicted as a bit more clumsy and bureaucratic than other countries, and super eager to repatriate things unasked with skimpy evidence.
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4 hours ago, guidoLaMoto said:
more artifacts being "repatriated" from some museum in another land to their land of origin....
...At what point should artifacts become part of the "domain of civilization" or "the human domain," comparable to a work of literature becoming part of the public domain?
Great point. While the above examples seem justified, there are others with little proof of wrongdoing snagged up in a recent massive witchhunt. Most of this seems to be from one NY prosecutor for whom we have noted gets pushback from museums. And this isn't due to selfishness of museums, which are mostly woke and would be proud to give stuff away except when there is no justification.
In an enlightened world, different regions should have displays of each others artifacts. Instead we gravitate toward fortress mentality where nobody is allowed to export artifacts, museums are underpatronized since they just show local stuff, and entire classes of artifacts are subject to wipeout from disasters like earthquakes, floods, war.
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On 12/17/2023 at 1:55 PM, caesar novus said:
Casting a net for more Roman content, I enabled a bunch of free streaming TV channels
Actually the legacy CATV Smithsonian channel is showing 2 high quality series on Aerial Italy and Aerial Greece, playing Dec 27 am (here anyway). Better than earlier series with the same exact name or a close name, it seems to give a fresh look and has me often saying "wow, I didn't know that". Ancient architecture seems well covered along with beautiful settings, and remember some of the Greek monuments were commissioned by Rome.
The Greek series shows up on the internet (Paramount+), and I will post episode 1 from youtube which oddly is not scheduled for Dec 27, just 4 other episodes each. Rome has other online aerial view videos, but with spotty quality. For once the mandatory "platinum" level of CATV that I am forced to pay for reaps benefits re: Rome.
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I only proposed stand-rowing in an aside, for modern pleasure rowing. For competition, the magic element is a sliding seat. Nowdays you can combine facing forward with sliding seat and pulling the oar handles. Rowing is fine for a sprint, but I can't imagine doing it all day like ancient mariners (if no favorable winds for sailing). So hard on backbones over time.
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5 hours ago, guidoLaMoto said:
The biggest problem of many guys rowing a large vessel would be the co-oridinated effort required to synchronize the multiple oars. It's not rocket surgery or brain science-- it wouldn't take many minutes for untrained slaves to become professional rowers.
The first Punic war was a clash of 700 ships trying to ram one another in maneuvers like:
Rome's success has been attributed to the relative skill of it's mariners. https://www.warhistoryonline.com/instant-articles/rome-vs-carthage.html sez:
QuoteTo the Romans’ surprise, the Carthaginians were not the able seamen they had feared. The increased Carthaginian fleet size and the inexperience of the freshly recruited sailors negated their previous maritime experience advantage.
Apparently Rome considered it worthwhile to pay 300 sailors each year about 100x the cost of each ship, with this making it a savings-in-disguise if the ship sinks. Sounds like the practice in olden US where the Irish were preferred for dangerous work, since their death cost nothing vs. a steep loss for a slave. Also it must help to have a motivated crew during crunch time. This is covered along with a lot more in:
Some sources say slaves were used in a crunch, but normally lower class ram-fodder were plentiful. Maybe the rowers had to have sail handling skills as well. Probably sometimes had to assist repelling boarders.
5 hours ago, guidoLaMoto said:The seated backwards position is far superior to the gondolier method. Seated, one would use a combination of quads, glutes, lats & traps- the four largest muscles in the body, as opposed to doing a push-up with your arms against the oar as you fall onto it....and you gotta stand back up from the awkward forward position to take that next stroke. ...The standing gondolier method, however, has the advantage when one guy has to row and navigate (not to mention sing) in rush hour traffic on the Grand Canal.
With no sliding seat for Romans, the muscle set is substantially reduced. Furthermore with suboptimum placement of seating vs oarlock geometry for at least some of those crowded 300, you are further degraded. I have had 3 sailing dinghys with wonkey oars for backup. They're excruciating to row far, and for the last 2 I get along better rowing on my knees facing forward.
Gondolas are (inefficiently) sculled, not rowed. And maybe Asian style yuloh oars kind of bridge the scull-row continum. Seated backward may still be the most powerful, but get a load of these oar-pushing forward-facing racers (not on thumbnail), like I did on my first trip to Venice:
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Casting a net for more Roman content, I enabled a bunch of free streaming TV channels, mostly ranked in the article https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/best-free-tv-streaming-services/ . So far I have found zippo of Rome, but I do agree that the Tubi channel is one of the least annoying and worth a free account (which isn't normally required for any of them). Surprisingly sharp resolution with shorter and less woke ads, altho you can't avoid the ads like on CATV using fast forwarding.
So Youtube remains the motherlode for Roman video content for me, but maybe you can show otherwise. Here's part of hundreds of hours of Roman docs:
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I think I have heard and then forgotten those issues being addressed, possibly in a documentary of a replica Roman rowing ship and their troubles getting 100 or so university students to row it properly. Might be on youtube or in the back of someones mind; I think issues particularly arise in sprinting and maneuvering for ramming.
However, having owned a couple of rowing sculls and rowing machines I am overflowing with likely irrelevant observations. First of all, rowing can be terrible for the disks in your back. If you pull with rounded back it can squash the gel disks rearwards and bump against your spinal chord with disastrous long term effects. For some reason rowing machines do this to me the most, including the most fancy air resistance version which was made in a factory nearby to me and gave me a good deal on a test version.
Secondo, look at almost any amateur rower and see the dysfunction of them pulling the blade at a 45 degree pitch instead of vertical, and where they dip down and pull out is also whacky. I am not nitpicking and not trained, but this drives me nuts where the natural tendency is to self sabotage everything. Some of these issues could go away if the oar was higher or had a handle extension on it.
Tripleessimo, rowing is crazy in the way you are facing backwards. I never got around to trying some bike mirrors, but you can be moving pretty fast towards disaster half blind. I have looked longingly at those complex contraptions that let you face forward and row, installable even on a SUP board. But I think the best solution is the Venice standing row boats where you throw your weight forward. One or many rowers, even the lifeguards in Italy have these in little catamaran configurations that are stable and roomy for several victims.
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20 hours ago, guidoLaMoto said:
Languages are livng and evolve.
I believe television influenced english for the last 65 years by presenting an aspirational alternative to those otherwise immersed in regional accents. I grew up among the quirky accent of a remote region of lumberjacks and farmers, and when I watched national TV or even better the then-posh accents coming over the border from Canadian TV, well I decided I need not talk like my hick neighbors. I find it puzzling how anyone maintained a regional accent in the TV age, altho not going forward.
I think TV influence is about over now, with the Orwellian ESG mafia clogging 90% of all commercials with patronizing afro influenced accents, or weed-puffing huskiness, or other fringe stuff. I am about to enable streaming on my TV to escape this decadent mess which can't be avoided even by frantic channel switching. I like watching 60+ year old Perry Mason shows which have amusing language quirks now ironed out by TV.
With the TV age maybe over, I notice the effect of the internet bringing disruptive diversity back to fortress America. For example British use of prepositions have been picked up by the US in a way that can be very confusing: "different to" vs. "different from". I don't care which convention, but let's stick with one per country altho nationalities of anonymous ones setting an example online may be unclear.
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7 hours ago, Valka D'Ur said:
opportunity to take Latin. It wasn't offered in any of the schools or the college I attended
That seems strange; isn't Latin something that those on a medical or biology career track want to take for the terminology? I had naively imagined it was offered at my school for catholics, and maybe your school was on a secular kick, like when revolutionary mobs bashed statues in French cathedrals.
French would have been so useful, but the spelling seemed so unphonetic. Now I hear that the spelling comes from the very old ways of pronouncing, sort of like English used to pronounce the k in knife. Blessed are the spelling simplifiers, like the removal of u from "colour".
So in HS, surrounded on 3 sides by French Canada and a zillion miles from Mexico, I took Spanish - because it was "easy". I think our Euro dialect was highly opposite to latin america's which sounds alien and incomprehensible to me. Kind of like they are chewing a dozen pieces of gum while talking, and I honestly get by easier in portuguese Brazil.
In college I took Russian as a survival move, since the focus would be on learning the alphabet (easy) more than learning the language which is inherently hard for me. It has some use because I can read if not hear some stuff in the news including Ukrainian. It's funny that Russia is trying to purge english words, when it is packed with phonetic english - like restauran for restaurant. Once you can sound the letters, half of signs you see in a city make sense http://www.russianforeveryone.com/RufeA/Lessons/Introduction/Alphabet/Alphabet.htm
It's a shame I didn't take Italian. Our humble college offered numerous languages, but all I knew of Italy was mafia, awful Italian-American comfort food, and well.. beautiful Venice. If I was aware of sublime real Italian food and Roman and other monuments, I would probably be living in Italy today. There are some cushy civilian jobs attached to US military bases in Italy that would have suited me fine.
Sorry to run on so long, but I am avoiding a grim chore...
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Nice info.
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These two Bollywood videos each have around a hundred million views! First an excerpt of the best song with dance, then the whole 3 hour movie cued up to another notable dance with song at 2:37:18:
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Interesting mythbusting of library(s) of Alexandria, and how Julius Caesar couldn't have caused much fire damage with what was a modest library during his time. Never a dominant center of scholardom except for just over a century, which was about the lifespan of papyrus in the humid sea air of Alexandria.
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7 hours ago, Decimus Gordianus Magnus said:
hope to relocate somewhere one day when I retire
You might want to open a topic to brainstorm retirement locations under "Hora Postilla Thermae Arena The after hours baths... where almost anything can be discussed". Then I can grumble about my own missed opportunities or bad choices... or about how most every nice place goes to crap given a decade or two anyway. Or why those one dollar derelict homes in Italy won't work.
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He didn't so much put it together, but made an infomercial for sombodies paid app that does the display. There are loads of these recreation videos and even the recent ones just don't feel natural. I think the color issue is overstated; you can see original Roman townscape paintings and see a lot of white with color accents.
One issue is weathering; everything looks near brand new in these videos rather than in various stages of weathering. It reminds me of Italian disneyfied tourist traps like Positano or Portovenere which looked more natural when at least some of the buildings were in disrepair due to bankrupt or dying owners. Now they must have an HOA type tyranny to keep fresh pastel paint everywhere.
Years ago recreation videos looked false due to lack of haze. Then the added haze looked false due to it's uniformity. It now does have sort of patchy haze and clouds, but seems to need differential ageing on facades including dark stains from water and maybe smoke. Maybe moss or vines that you see in neglected Via Appia structures?
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The mosaic's inscription is translated in the older article and is the usual vacuous jibber jabber that is so disappointing in most ancient inscriptions. The patterns are nice, and they aren't just random geometry according to an explanatory writeup I have lost track of, but have meaning somehow.
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It's been decades since I took classes in dating artifacts, but as I understand it the dendrochronology approaches (new and old) are limited to finding matches between artifacts of known date vs found artifacts. You often may have no continuous map of the seasonal variations to piece together for a given locality.
In contrast approaches like radiocarbon dating (new and old) doesn't rely on seasons and continuity, but of course has much less precision.
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4 hours ago, guy said:
magnificent structure on the Black Sea coast in Georgia
I'm sure some of the travelers among us are wary of the fact that most of the black sea coast of Georgia was occupied since 2008, but fortunately the site is near Turkish border and not invaded (yet):
Another attraction for visitors is perhaps one of the least known charming capitals if I can believe youtube walking tours. Here is an eccentric one, but find your own one to fit your fancy:
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Pretty close to a ruined city recently added to my youtube ruins playlist - probably more to be discovered...
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Nice; I've brought it up before, but will add more here. I went to a glass lecture by a (technical) rep of that museum, and asked about the myth that glass is slightly fluid over the centuries. It sounds silly and he did deny it, but there is various supposed evidence out there. After the lecture he was nibbling at an appetizer table and I got more explanation on what accounts for that misleading evidence and how it applies to Roman glass.
Bottom line is that the topsy-turvy Roman glass at our local museum is that way because they (or their donors) could only afford cheaper objects, not because Roman objects wilted in underground pressure and volcanic heat. Or at least our museum had other priorities than than premium Roman objects and the security they would need. The post above has slightly asymmetrical blue objects but ours just scream asymmetry.
BTW, I had no idea that lecture would have a Roman connection but went because it was held in an outrageous "arabian-nights-like" mansion of the once richest women in the world. The estate hadn't finished being converted to a museum, but I got on an email list for stealth events there (no outsiders allowed to drive or walk in that neighborhood). The very rich/artistic audience showed little comprehension of the technicalities of glass, so the speaker seemed to appreciate my odd but at least on-topic line of questioning.
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Forma Urbis Romae, ancient map of Rome, to be put on display
in Archaeology
Posted · Edited by caesar novus
Besides the "map" superimposed on a 300 year old map of Rome, they are refurbishing it's whole dilapidated historic property including walkable grounds with archeo fragments. Hopefully this will extend the foot traffic on kind of the "wrong" shadeless desolate side of the coliseum, and bridge to onward attractions like Baths of Caracalla / St John Lateran / Via Appia.
I love walking the continuous fabric of a city instead of being abruptly plunked at spots, although the shade of a few more umbrella pines there would help. Maybe can't dig a hole for a root ball without unearthing a zeroth-century vomitorium? Anyway, even Ostia Appia seems closer using a nearby train station. https://www.finestresullarte.info/en/archaeology/rome-caelian-archaeological-park-opens-to-the-public-with-new-forma-urbis-museum
May be some risk to the proliferation of niche museums in Rome, showing this new restoration and that. Often they are relatively expensive and you can see everything twice in 20 or 30 minutes. Then on to the next 5 niche mu$eum$ that day, some of which require inflexible appointments and weren't what you expected. They tend to have low attendance and are hard to staff. A normal medium or giant museum has diversity so a few disappointments are balanced by unexpected things that ring your bell. I knocked a ton of these small museums off on a "free museum" week they have around April, and got quite a perspective.