18th September 2010
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Ceriwis Geek
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Join Date: Sep 2010
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Rome, The Eternal City
Memory-haunted arena of the ancients, Rome�s 1,900-year-old Colosseum saw bloody gladiatorial duels, battles with wild beasts, and mock naval engagements on its flooded floor. Christians banned the spectacles, and in later centuries presented church dramas here. Time, earthquakes, and stone scavengers took their toll. Still, the treasured monument survived and at the time of this photograph was still serving Rome�as a traffic circle. Cars at evening rush hour create streaks of light in this time exposure, which also captures horse-drawn carriages waiting at curbside for tourists.
Out of the grasp of looters, a Roman soldier shares a shed with other statues removed from display in Rome�s Villa Borghese gardens. Since 1970 thieves have pilfered some 523,000 treasures in Italy. Trained �art police� have recovered about a third.
The villa was originally a simple vineyard, which was purchased by the Borghese family in 1580. In the early 1600s Cardinal Scipione Caffarelli Borghese, Pope Paul V's nephew, purchased surrounding lands. He began an ambitious building process that converted the simple vineyard into a sprawling, 200-acre (80-hectare) estate with a dozen buildings surrounded by gardens replete with statues and fountains.
Walled within the city, the Vatican, with its domed St. Peter�s Basilica, covers 109 acres (44 hectares). All Rome was under papal rule from the sixth century A.D. until the city became Italy�s capital in 1870. But not until 1929 did the papacy renounce its claims to all other Italian territories and win recognition of its sovereignty over Vatican City. Residence of a thousand citizens, the enclave has its own railroad station, post office, radio station, newspaper, mosaic studio, palaces, gardens, library, and museums.
In a frieze in the fifth-century B.C. Tomb of the Leopards in Tarquinia, Italy, an Etruscan couple admires an egg, symbol of immortality.
The Etruscans have long been the magical mystery people of Italian antiquity. They rose from the mist of prehistory around 900 B.C. and for some 500 years dominated most of the country, from Rome to the Po Valley. Yet, unlike the Romans, they left behind a sparse written record�no heroic poems, no histories, no literature, only short official or religious inscriptions. Etruscan art survived largely because it was buried in tombs.
Jutting out toward the Aksu River, Turkey, this ancient aqueduct is a small portion of the hundreds of miles of aqueducts built by the Romans to convey water throughout the sprawling empire. These monuments to archaeology and hydrology remain among the most widely recognized of the remaining Roman architecture. The Romans were not the first to use such technology�aqueducts were devised by inhabitants of the Middle East centuries earlier. But the Roman design allowed a particularly advanced form of transferring water across often vast distances. With the fall of the Roman Empire, this sophisticated engineering knowledge was lost until the 19th century.
Julius Caesar, depicted here in his military attire, extended the Roman Republic to the Atlantic Ocean with his conquest of Gallia Comata�Gaul, in what is now France. Caesar became the sole ruler of Rome following the first Roman civil war, after which he had himself named ruler for life. Caesar's assassination at the hands of his close friend Marcus Brutus spawned Rome's second civil war. Brutus and his co-conspirators were attempting to save the republic from dictatorship. Instead, they ushered in the Roman Empire under Caesar�s nephew and adopted son, Octavian, who would become known as Emperor Caesar Augustus.
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