Adam's Blog: Post 3 for June 8

June 8,

Today we went to the park where all the cats where, or as I like to call it the "cat palace" or its real name is Largo Argentina. Where some temple's to some for the strange Rome Gods were located as well as the Theater/Temple was located. There we talked about the Poems we were supposed to read, They were interesting Poems but they were hard to understand for me, but when Someone read them out loud, it was better for me to understand them. There were some about the Colosseum that were pretty interesting as well as the one of the man giving the tour of Rome to a stranger and explaining the past to the present. Then we made our way to the Forums of Augustus and Vespasian.

Here is Hannah at her Presentation at the Forum of Augustus

A random bird at the Forum of Augustus

Here is JT at her Presentation at the Forum of Vespasian, not much remained for ruins to take pictures of.

A little more of the Forum of Augustus

The Forum Nerva ruins, not much left.

These were the sights of the presentations that went on today, and they were very good. They were better than mine.Hannah was the first one who presented, and what we learned from the Forum of Augustus is that Originally the project was going to be Mark Antony's, but then both young Augustus, or Octavian, had a civil dispute between them both and the project was taken over by Augustus later on when he defatted Mark Antony. It was very interesting at the site, because there was a huge retaining wall, and I found that very interesting that did that type of technology back then. But then again its the Romans, they did a lot of what we are doing today or just figuring them out in regards to building items now days. Then we went to the Forum of Vespasian. This was our friend Justina, aka JT. She did very well with her presentation, I thought personally. I knew a lot of what she already told us about the Vespasian dynasty and family. I did forget to tell some of that info during my presentation, but she said them in her presentation and it went along better with her topic rather than mine per say. A fact that I found interesting was that the Forum never really was opened to the public for quite some time and then it was opened to the public, the reason for that is unknown according to JT, but it was an odd thing that they would have something done and not allow people to use it for certain things for a long time. That idea sounds a lot like what Minnesota does sometimes for construction projects. For example there was one ordeal that happened where I live near Mankato, MN and there was a highway that was all done construction wise; it was all painted and ready to be used, but no one could drive on it since it was not "inspected" for close to 4 years. Once it was inspected and "approved" We could drive on it. Maybe that's what happened here with the Forum of Vespasian, maybe something had to get inspected and approved in-order to be used by the people. Another fact that I believe was in the main temple in the Forum, don't remember which one it was, but it had a map of the whole city inside of it showing to the people of Rome that there was more to the city than just people's little main go to areas within the city.

After all of that, we walked back to the Accent Center and then we were free to go back to the apartments, figured out the bus system by myself back to the apartments as well.