Archeologist’s Delight

Greetings from Rome.  What a fascinating place!  A history buff’s delight.   This photo is taken at the Roman Forum.  Many of you have been there.  Any of you can find photos of it.

What surprised Carol and Roger is that there is not one Roman forum, but four.  They overlap, crowd one another out, and sometimes replace whatever was on that spot when the latest Roman emperor decided to leave his mark on what was then downtown.

This went on for hundreds of years.  This is reputed to be the home of Romulus, who founded Rome in 753 BCE.  Just a few yards away is…

…the Temple of the Vestal Virgins built centuries later.  How could any archeologist sort all this out?

They have done an amazing job of taking fragments they’ve unearthed and used them to reproduce what the whole looked like.

This is the Emperor Trajan’s Market today.

This is what they believe it looked like almost 2,000 years ago.

This is what the Temple at Trajan’s forum looks like today…

….and what it looked like almost 2,000 years ago.

Many of the prime ancient sites are undergoing further archeological excavation.  We learned archeologists know what is below street level of only 38% of Rome.  The rest is unknown and subject to…surprise!

What isn’t being excavated, is being renovated.

We were particular fascinated by the Arch of Titus…which he had built for himself to honor his successful conquest of Jerusalem.

Inside the arch you can see images of the plunder he took when he sacked the Second Temple.

The loot he brought back was used to finance construction of this building.

This is a two thousand year-old building that had 50,000 seats and could hold 75,000 people—-SRO—-for a big event…like when the Bronx Bombers came to town.

What Carol and Roger couldn’t figure out was, where in the Coliseum did the Romans put home plate?

In our next blog post, we’ll show you another ancient Roman city that’s almost intact today.