A Blast from Italy's Past

A wonderful clip of traffic and pedestrians in 1950s Rome and Milan on the latest video site to make the Internet rounds, Critical Past. Enjoy!! :-)

(via @RobertaK & @SanctuarePress)

Famed Roman Capitoline Wolf statue "not ancient"

I first saw the Capitoline Wolf in person just last year at the Capitoline Museums in Rome.

The statue you see today is supposed to commemorate the suckling of Remus and Rome's legendary founder Romulus when they'd been abandoned as babies. Ancient Roman authors Cicero and Pliny the Elder had described such a statue as standing in the Roman Forum back in the first century B.C., and nearly everyone had always assumed this statue was it.

Turns out however that it wasn't. The announcement was just made this week that the statue is neither Roman nor Etruscan, that is, the people who had dominated central Italy before the Romans. Rather, it's over a millennium younger! Carbon dating and other tests (particularly that of dirt that remains in the belly of the wolf) recently have made the controversial discovery that the statue's creation during the Middle Ages, sometime in the thirteenth century A.D.

What unfortunately confirms a lot of stereotypes about the Italian government however is that this very important art discovery was confirmed nine months ago, and Rome's municipal government reserved the right to make the findings public but they only got around to announcing it last week. *sigh*

For more, you can go to BBC NEWS Europe: Famed Roman statue 'not ancient'. The original article in which the news was originally released last Tuesday is here.

P.S. The babies are even younger... It's been well-known that they were added to the presumed ancient statue a couple of centuries later during the Renaissance!

VIDEO: Thousands of balls released on Rome's Spanish Steps

Longtime readers of MMC will remember that I'm completely enamored of the Sony Bravia commercial in which a quarter of a million super bouncy balls were released on the steep streets of San Francisco.

First, there was the beautiful original... (which you can't even fully appreciate unless it's in ultra high resolution!)

(How'd they do it? You can see here!)

Then there was the great British Tango fruit juice parody...


Now it's been done on Rome's famous Spanish Steps (strangely, as what is apparently an incredibly abstruse political demonstration to protest the ongoing appalling garbage crisis in Naples)

(via Decio: Il Blog)

My comment (#27) about this prank should be appearing any minute here on Boing Boing.

When in Rome...

My first post ever on MetaFilter. Not a lot of bells and whistles, but you gotta start somewhere... Enjoy!

Today's Photos: From Rome's Capitoline Museums

Remember my blog post about the "Road Less Taken"? I have a nasty habit of wanting to feel like I've still accomplished something when my plans wind up being thwarted, so - after discovering the Church of the Santi Quattro Coronati in Rome was closed - I schlepped back downtown in the blazing heat, past the Colloseum, past the ancient Roman Forums, and up the Capitoline Hill in order to visit the Capitoline Museums, which I'd never seen before.

There are some FAMOUS ancient Greco-Roman statues there... The She-Wolf who suckled Romulus & Remus, the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, remnants of the colossal statues of the Emperor Constantine, not to mention "The Dying Gaul," (which I accidently called in Italian "the Dying Rooster... Oops!) All told, I wound up spending FOUR HOURS inside (and afterwards I was so exhaused from walking all around the city and then doing the museum that I could hardly move!)

The photos posted on Flickr today are some random ones of the minor statues in the museum, but ones I really kinda liked nonetheless. You're not likely to see many of these in your average art book, so I thought I'd share them with you here... Enjoy!

Everybody Wants to Be a Cat... in Rome!

A note on the new pictures I've posted on Flickr... These photos were taken at the "Area Sacra" at Torre Argentina in Rome at the end of last month.

As you can see from the pictures, the ruins of at least 4 ancient Roman temples (some of the oldest ever found in the city!) were discovered here in the 1920s. Because this is now, as a result, a protected area smack dab in the middle of Rome, it - like the Colloseum and the Roman Forums - became preferred haunts of the Roman stray cats. So much so that now there's officially a cat sanctuary here (which you can visit virtually at romancats.com) and at last count there were something like 250 felines who call these ruins home! (And you thought that your local cat lady had a lot!!)

A few years ago, I actually saw a documentary called "Cats of Rome," directed by Michael Hunt, who spent - I heard - something like 3 years filming the project. In it, they discovered that these stray cats actually behave a lot like prides of lions on the African savannah! In fact, I felt kinda like I was on safari when I took these photos... :-) Not to mention that I couldn't get "Everybody Wants to Be a Cat" from "The Aristocats" out of my head!

What's more, in the Italian version (called the "Aristogatti"), O'Malley is actually dubbed with a Roman accent and calls himself "Romeo"! He continues in Roman dialect to say that he's "er mejio del colosseo" (or "the best cat in the whole Colosseum!" And, believe you me, with all those cats, that's really saying something!!)

P.S. Want to lend a hand to the Torre Argentina Cat Sanctuary, which has no government funding and lives off donations alone? According to ArkOnline...

"WHAT YOU CAN DO:
Torre Argentina urges animal lovers to send letters to Prof. La Rocca, the Roman authority in charge of the archeological site of Torre Argentina. Please ask La Rocca to approve plans for linking the shelter with the city's sewer system, so that the shelter can have proper drainage, running water, and toilet facilities.

For $15 a month, you can provide food and medicine for the cat of your choice. Torre Argentina will send you a picture and update on your feline friend and their life in Rome. To meet some of the cats... [write] Torreargentina@yahoo.com.

Additional tax deductible donations can be made in the United States through "In Defense of Animals," 131 Camino Alto, Mill Valley, CA 94941 (Be sure and write "For Torre Argentina Cats" on the front of the check)... Contributions can also be sent to Silvia Viviani, Via Marco Papio 15, 00175 Roma, Italy. Tel: 0348-384-5853 from 11 am to 7 p.m. (Roman time)."