Elisa

I have just come back from a short trip to Portugal and had the chance to explore Roman Lisbon 😊 Here are some pics of the sites I visited. The city's Roman theatre is one of the most important monuments of the roman Felicitas Iulia Olisipo, with visible structures from the 1st century CE. The Casa dos Bicos is a beautiful XVI century palace hosting the José Saramago Foundation and houses archaeological exhibits from various periods, including Roman foundations. The exhibition presents remnants of a preserved and salted fish production unit from the Roman city of Olisipo (modern-day Lisbon), which was most likely set up next to the fluvial beach of the Tagus River during the 1st Century CE. A fragment of a Roman wall and semi-circular watch tower also highlights the reinforcement of Roman cities’ defence mechanisms from the late 3rd century onwards, while other archaeological finds show how the Roman wall was subsequently integrated into the Medieval wall. The ruined Carmo Convent is one of Lisbon's most hauntingly beautiful sights. It was its greatest medieval building, but stands as a reminder of the devastating earthquake of 1755 that destroyed most of the city. Its roof collapsed on the congregation as it was attending Mass on All saints’ Day, and was never rebuilt, but the Gothic arches still stand. Most of the architecture dates back to the 1300s, but Manueline (Portuguese Gothic) windows and other details were added later, in the 16th and 18th centuries. The sacristy’s small archaeological museum presents an eclectic collection that was donated by archaeologists in the 19th century. Among the treasures from Portugal and elsewhere are the Roman “Sarcophagus of the Muses” and other Roman artifacts.

Source: BBC news

You're most welcome, I linked them directly from the Euronews website this time, but I'm planning to upload more pics from different sites so will definitely let you know, thanks 😊 Talking about the find, I really wish I could read those cuneiform tablets! It must be wonderful for an archaeologist to come across something like that.

Source: https://www.euronews.com/green/2022/06/07/3-400-year-old-city-emerges-from-reservoir-in-iraq-after-months-of-extreme-drought

Absolutely!Thanks for posting the videos, such a wonderful site, not to mention all the pottery and the tools found in the excavations!

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/may/27/mexico-mayan-city-xiol-discovered

Fascinating

I used to live in York and what fascinated me was the amount of Scandinavian place-names in Yorkshire. I thought that an ending in -by or -thorpe implied the existence of a Scandinavian settlement, but apparently there are some problems with this: https://www.gla.ac.uk/research/az/esharp/issues/2/yokota/

You have carefully avoided to quote the bits about peace, freedom and democracy. That looks VERY valuable to me, but that notwithstanding, food safety, soil conservation and biodiversity are absolutely paramount and to me, a continent that makes a point of making sure that its citizens have access to food that is safe to eat (again, not a given in this day and age) and to crops that are not harmful and do not devastate soils and soil biodiversity deserves respect (there are places that in the name of economic gains put at risk the health of their citizens and devastate soils and soil biodiversity with disastrous consequences for human health and the planet at large). http:// https://theconversation.com/the-97-climate-consensus-is-over-now-its-well-above-99-and-the-evidence-is-even-stronger-than-that-170370 "US researchers examined the peer-reviewed literature and found more than 99% of climate scientists now endorse the evidence for human-induced climate change.” With a 99% scientific consensus worldwide that climate change is a man-made disaster I don’t think I need to look at anything else. And one might wonder what someone who calls Europe’s past “worthless” is doing on a Roman History forum? Not so worthless after all?

Today is a Neil Young kind of day 😊 I absolutely love this live version of Cortez, my favourite.

Why is Europe important? Why is the past so important to Europeans? (By the way, I would be very careful about calling Europe's past "worthless", just as I would be careful about calling worthless the history of every continent on planet Earth). First of all, Europe is not about economic prowess at all costs. Europe is about values, about giving a fair start in life to anyone irrespective of their individual circumstances. This sometimes means not being as economically competitive as other countries/continents. Europe leads the way worldwide in terms of the fight against climate change and has regulations in place in terms of food quality, environmental standards and citizens’ rights and protection. European countries are free and democratic, and that is something that in this day and age I would not take for granted. Europeans had been waging war on each other for millennia but have enjoyed a period of 70+ years of peace, and that is a great achievement. Our motto (I say “we Europeans” because I am a European citizen) is “United in Diversity” and that is very telling as to why Europe matters. Europe is about mutual understanding, it is about building bridges. Last but not least, the past is important to Europeans because it is only by knowing our past mistakes that we can avoid repeating them, and also because it is thanks to our past that we know who we really are and where we want to go in the future. Sir Isaac Newton once said: “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” If we are to see further than the generations who preceded us, we have no choice but to keep studying our past. And now, let me "scratch really hard" to find something that I believe will explain in a more poetic way Europe's connection to its past and its importance. It is a poem by Pier Paolo Pasolini and it is called "I am a force of the past". I am a force of the past I am a force of the Past. My love lies only in tradition. I come from the ruins, the churches, the altarpieces, the villages abandoned in the Appennines or foothills of the Alps where my brothers once lived. I wander like a madman down the Tuscolana, down the Appia like a dog without a master. Or I see the twilight, the mornings over Rome, the Ciociaria, the world, as the first acts of Posthistory to which I bear witness, for the privilege of recording them from the outer edge of some buried age. Monstrous is the man born of a dead woman’s womb. And I, a foetus now grown, roam about more modern than any modern man, in search of brothers no longer alive.

Source: Ansa A perfectly preserved altar in white marble with the story of a young Roman girl, Valeria, who died at the age of 13 years and 7 months, was found together with precious fragments of a marble sarcophagus decorated with refined hunting scenes, thought to date back to the 2nd century CE. They come from an excavation in via Luigi Tosti, Rome. The excavation has brought to light a funerary building that was part of the necropolis of the ancient Via Latina with cinerary urns, interment burials and marble remains of great interest. The altar of the very young Valeria was found two metres below the current road level. On the epigraph we can read the dedication: «Valeria P F Laeta vixit annis XIII m VII». According to the first hypotheses of study, the inscription, in Latin capital, could be read as: «Valeria Laeta daughter of P [ublio] lived 13 years and 7 months». The small columbarium (4 meters by 3 meters), probably hypogeum, was built in the natural tuff bank and consisted of 80-centimetre concrete masonry covered with a brick facing, opus latericium, of excellent workmanship. The walls were covered with plaster painted in yellow and red, to emulate marble slabs. The building appears to have been heavily damaged, so much so that it cannot be excluded that it may have been demolished during the urbanization of the neighborhood, which took place in the 1930s.

I had never seen this performance with Elton! I was introduced to T-Rex's music while living in the UK. Marc Bolan died so young...

Some classic Clapton with Cream 😎 ...and some classic T-Rex

I watched all the lectures from the Twelve Caesars series and I must say they were brilliant!I don't want to spoil anything but I now know everything about the Grimani Vitellius in Venice and its impact on western art (as well as many other fascinating things about the depiction of the "Caesars" in the history of western art). Highly recommended for those with an interest in ancient history and art history. I finally bought the book as well, planning to read it asap.