![]() ![]() ![]() Felines lounged undisturbed, and cat lovers were allowed to feed them. Over the last decades, a cat colony flourished among the ruins. Another is a stone fragment of a winged angel of victory. Among them is a stone colossal head of one of the deities honored in the temples, chinless and without its lower lip. On display are some of the artifacts found during last century's excavation. ![]() ravaged a large swath of Rome, including the Sacred Area. On display in a corridor near the temples is a black-and-white photograph showing Mussolini cutting the ribbon in 1929 after the excavated ruins were shown off.Īlso visible are the travertine paving stones that Emperor Domitian had laid down after a fire in 80 A.D. Taken together, the temples make for "one of the best-preserved remains of the Roman Republic,'' Parisi Presicce said after the Mayor of Rome Roberto Gualtieri cut a ceremonial ribbon Monday afternoon. One of the temples, reached by an imposing staircase and featuring a circular form and with six surviving columns, is believed to have been erected in honor of Fortuna, a goddess of chance associated with fertility. ![]() The temples are designated A, B, C and D, and are believed to have been dedicated to female deities. A tower at one edge of Largo Argentina once topped a medieval palace. The temples emerged during the demolition of medieval-era buildings in the late 1920s, part of dictator Benito Mussolini's campaign to remake the urban landscape. What leads archaeologists to pinpoint the ruins as Pompey's Curia? "We know it with certainty because latrines were found on the sides" of Pompey's Curia, and ancient texts mentioned the latrines, said Claudio Parisi Presicce, an archaeologist and Rome's top official for cultural heritage. That's because, over the centuries, the city had been built up, layer by layer, to levels several meters above the area where Caesar masterminded his political strategies and was later fatally stabbed in 44 B.C.īehind two of the temples is a foundation and part of a wall that archaeologists believe were part of Pompey's Curia, a large rectangular-shaped hall that temporarily hosted the Roman Senate when Caesar was murdered. Follow him on Twitter at on Faceboo k.For decades, the curious had to gaze down from the bustling sidewalks rimming Largo Argentina (Argentina Square) to admire the temples below. Wonderfully Weird & Ingenious Medieval Booksġ,000-Year-Old Illustrated Guide to the Medicinal Use of Plants Now Digitized & Put Onlineīased in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. The Aberdeen Bestiary, One of the Great Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts, Now Digitized in High Resolution & Made Available Onlineġ,600-Year-Old Illuminated Manuscript of the Aeneid Digitized & Put Online by The Vaticanĭante’s Divine Comedy Illustrated in a Remarkable Illuminated Medieval Manuscript (c. Lead may never turn into gold, but these centuries-old illuminated manuscripts may survive centuries into the future, a fact that seems not entirely un-miraculous itself.īehold the Beautiful Pages from a Medieval Monk’s Sketchbook: A Window Into How Illuminated Manuscripts Were Made (1494) (Although, as the Getty video notes, some pigments such as verdigris have a tendency to eat through the paper - one somehow wants to blame the urine.) Still, that hardly means that preservationists have nothing to do where illuminated manuscripts are concerned: keeping the windows they provide onto the histories of art, the book, and humanity clear takes work, some of it based on an ever-improving understanding of alchemy. The very nature of books, specifically the fact that they spend most of the time closed, has performed a degree of inadvertent preservation of illuminated manuscripts, keeping their alchemical colors relatively bold and deep. Alchemists “explored how materials interacted and transformed,” and “discovering paint colors was a practical outcome.” The colors they developed included “mosaic gold,” a fusion of tin and sulfur verdigris, “made by exposing copper to fumes of vinegar, wine, or even urine” and vermillion, a mixture of sulfur and mercury that made a brilliant red “associated with chemical change and with alchemy itself.” ![]()
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