4.8 Saturday: The best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley.

I make a fetish of my birthday, as many of you know, so to have my birthday plans canceled on me was pretty traumatic. But it’s probably just as well; we’ve been heavily overscheduled this entire trip, for all I thought I’d kept it pretty light, so it was mostly a toad day. The original plan was for a tour of Hadrian’s villa and the ancient collections at the Villa d’Este, but not enough people signed up for it to fill the luxury coach involved, so it was cancelled. So instead we went up to Capitoline museums, and accidentally to Santa Maria in Aracoeli, which was very rococo, but had nice cosmatesque (named after the Cosmatis, who did a lot of mosaic floors in this style -- I'll label some of the nice ones in the flickr stream) floors made of recycled ancient stone (as usual, mostly from collapsed stuff in the Forum. Everyone thinks the Forum was pristine white. It was crazy with color!). I have to admit, I was somewhat entertained by how disdainful I felt of the church. I mean, it was all so NEW. Practically nothing there pre-1400! (It is supposedly built over the ruins of the Temple of Juno Moneta, of sacred geese fame, and home of the governmental coin issuers of ancient Rome, thus "money" and "mint," but none of that is anywhere visible. And I should note, most of the columns dividing aisles and nave were also recycled from the Forum.)

Because I am a major geek, at the museum I wanted to stand around reading grave inscriptions and taking pix of a bunch of them, but children make these things harder; Elise was tired and Rose was bored, so I kept it minimal. I got a few good ones, of a gladiator, an incense vendor, and a few parents of children and masters of slaves. I am wondering what happened to the stone Colossus of Constantine – he was nowhere to be found. A bronze one was in the new room where the Capitoline Wolf now stands (still with those terrible babies). There’s a whole new exhibit in the Palazzo Nuovo with a bunch of stuff from the area of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, very cool. Even a bit of the foundation wall, which apparently was under the hillside and no one knew until recently! So that’s been moved/incorporated into the new wing with a bunch of new Etruscan stuff, including a remarkably complete burial of a teenaged boy, most of the grave goods still intact. There was also a reconstruction of what the Capitoline must have looked like in the 6^th C BCE when the temple was completed, and good old Jupiter really would have dominated the skyline. I’m going to put a goodish bit (at least, relative to other texts) about Etruscans in my book. There’s so much to Rome that they kinda get lost in the shuffle, but their culture is really important to Roman history. Any of my Mirman students will remember: When in doubt, add palmettes!