Post for Jun 5

Post 2 for Jun 5,

Today we went to the Forum of Caesar and we got to hear the presentation made by Severina. She did very well and was very informative about it all. What i found very interesting from her presentation, other than the truck coming right through the middle of her speaking; was the fact that he did have a lot of interesting things in his temples that he built there, specifically the statue and picture of Cleopatra and then another sorceress who was in the Greek history more so than Roman history. It was interesting to hear that he did have women in his temples and such, then again Caesar did have a "thing" for Cleopatra during his time.

Then we went on to get some lunch and then we headed on to the museum Called Centrale Montemartini which was in a what used to be the power plant for the electricity of Rome but now it was converted into a museum. According to our professor, he said that it was running until the 60's time frame and then the museum was looking for more space to put some statues they received and were restored and wanted to be put on display, so the Museum Montemartini rented the building from the city and worked around the big Diesel engines and put up the sculptures around them. It was very interesting to me again seeing the idea of having old building sites like power plants for example getting shut down and then being used for another completely different business, they are constantly recycling things and sites here all the time. I think that its kinda cool and is a very good idea to use buildings that are decent and making them better and better for different business's. Although, there can be a down side of not getting anything brand new from ground up or feelings similar to that. But on to the sculptures.

We learned a little bit about some that were originally in Greece, for example the main statue has Athena and some other scenes that was from a temple and then put on another temple here in Rome. Why did they steal it? I don't know but they must really like there culture, because when you think about it the Romans and the Greeks have many of the same characteristics, just Rome in my opinion made them a little more "stand out like"; making it there own. We then learned about some other statues there too. Another example would be the statue of this one man who was holding two heads, one of his grandpa and the other his dad that he would show around and brag about them at social gatherings or parties. When you think about it, we still do the same thing; yet we don't go around the house and find statues of heads of individuals who were important to our lives whether it be family or a good friend. We use pictures that are either developed or on our computers, smartphones, and /or tablets.

Severina at her presentation site

We were asked to find what was our favorite statue in the museum. For me, I really did not have a favorite one, but there were a lot of ones that I thought were interesting, like a man who looked like he was trying fight a snake, although the head and tail were gone on the snake but it looked cool to me. There was no inscription on it but I would like to find out more about it.

The daily life statue

The favorite statue that I mentioned at discussion was this one where it was called the Asian sarcophagus. It was just an image of a temple with half of peoples body's, the idea that intrigued me the most was that it was not really Mediterranean based for influence, it was a whole other continent and that shocked me to see them be going to another area like that for a sculpture. I don't think it was middle-eastern, but it could have been. Then there were two others that I though were pretty cool; the one where it showed a bunch of carpenters working, and then there was a scene with two people and then two bulls in a pasture setting.

Statue that I thought was cool

The statue with the other statue

Another cool statue

The main statue at the museum

Huge floor art that was amazing

Lunch.