We had two much-anticipated trips out of the city last week, one to Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli and one to Ostia Antica. Hadrian's Villa might be called more appropriately Hadrian's Village: it is an absolutely huge complex, featuring three sets of baths, plenty of decorative pools besides, its own theater, a villa-in-miniature surrounded by a moat and an imitation little town just for fun, plus libraries, dining rooms, bedrooms, and any number of other public and private gathering spaces. We got to play detective again, as we did at Alba Fucens, dividing up into groups to analyze at sight different parts of the complex. Using our newly-acquired knowledge of early second-century and Hadrianic building technologies and preferences and of the layout of different types of structures, my group was able to describe a fancy summer dining room and the garden surrounding it. I really enjoy applying what we've learned so far through this type of exercise; it takes both concrete knowledge and a good deal of creative thinking to figure out what's going on with the remains on the ground.
By the time we were released for a late lunch, we were all pretty wilted from the heat, so we were glad to spend the rest of the afternoon at the fabulous Renaissance Villa d'Este, with its expansive terraced system of fountains stretching out back all the way down the hill and giving a beautiful view of the countryside. Never mind that the villa had no real connection to the classical period at all; it was enough for us that it demonstrated wonderfully what we've learned about as the "natural air conditioning" provided by fountains! After cooling off by their spray for an hour or so, we were ready to trek back to the bus.
We'd been preparing for our other big field trip, to Ostia, for several weeks now, because it's a longstanding tradition that the participants of the AAR Classical Summer School perform a play that they've written in Latin in the theater there. I eagerly signed up to be a writer when we divided up the tasks, and I worked with another student to write in English and translate into Latin the second scene of the wacky play we all came up with. It's part of the tradition to poke a little fun at the director and assistant director of the program in the play, so we dressed up one of our male in suspenders like the ones our professor wears every day, and another of our male students in the trademark style of our female assistant director -- a pink scarf, a baseball cap, and blue nail polish! For my part, I played a squawking bird, whose role is a little hard to describe in brief -- suffice it to say that I had no Latin lines, but I hopped about flapping my wings and screeching. The performance seemed go over well!
Apart from our play, the day at Ostia was filled by a very illuminating but very long and hot tour of the ancient city by a professor who is an expert on the site. I was most excited to get to see and even climb up to the second and third levels of the multi-story apartment complexes -- insulae -- for which Ostia is particularly well known. It was a thriving port town in antiquity, and real estate was pricey, so people tended to live in these huge multi-family dwellings rather than in single-family villas. Not just poor people, either, as you can tell from the sumptuous decoration of some of the first-floor apartments especially: we got special permission to see a few of these, and the wall paintings and mosaic floors are up to the standard of much more spacious houses at Pompeii, for instance.
By the end of the long, searingly hot day -- which was also the end of an equally hot week -- we were all pretty fried and more than ready for a break. To escape the heat of Rome, I decided to take the train north on Sunday to Orvieto, a little town high atop a fortress-like hill in Umbria. And that, dear readers, is a story in itself! I'll hold off on giving you the report from that trip, but for now, here are some pictures from the past week:
 |
| Rome: Week 4 |
Enjoy! Thanks for reading!
No comments:
Post a Comment