Musings

I’ve been trying to get a handle on the sociopolitical and economic climate across the Mediterranean and beyond during the third through fifth centuries AD when the Roman Empire shifted from being Rome-centric to…not. Complicated—and additionally complicated by historians that avoided the period in many ways, I suspect in part because they didn’t have the volume of records they had for earlier and later periods.

Anyway, I also made a quick review of our pictures from Provence last year, and this view of the Avignon pope-fortress tied both topics together—of course, the Avignon papacy was MUCH later…. But the antecedents….

Posted at 10:22 PM | Comments Off on Parting the veil of time

Last month (is it really September? Oh my), I encountered several versions of stories about the charity organization that decided to just give money, no strings attached, directly to the people they sought to help. (NPR transcript here.)

Turns out, this village in Kenya, the recipients took their windfall and invested it in their futures. However, one thing many people did that First World outsiders found interesting was, they often used some of the money to replace their thatch roofs with metal roofs. I can understand that. Thatch involves maintenance, and apparently, in this area anyway, the right thatch-grass had to be purchased, and was not inexpensive. The metal took up-front money few had, but seemed an obvious purchase for many—clearly!

This roof (not grass/thatch) looks like it would have taken at least annual attention….

Posted at 10:22 PM | 1 Comment »

Trying to figure out how urban/suburban Rome provisioned itself. Sure, the wheat/spelt came from Sicily (and elsewhere), and a lot of other foodstuffs (especially fruit/veg and tree crops) from villa-farms and small farms not terribly far from Rome, but what about building stone and millstones? Wooden building materials and firewood? How were mural painters and sculptors trained and supported? Shipbuilding? And…and?

I have such a mono-cropping template in my head I don’t think I do a good job of imagining the productivity of intercropped fields with grain growing beneath nut-trees, and vegetable mixes around country residences.

So many amphorae were shipped to Rome (with nothing to be shipped out in them), there’s a mountain of broken sherds, even today something like 36 m high. These were, as I understand it, sherds from the ones that contained olive oil. Others were used as fill elsewhere in the city, but apparently the oil-filled amphorae became rancid/stinky, so they were broken, dumped on a waste-pile that became a mountain, and sprinkled with lime to dampen the odor. (I imagine that the high-umami garum amphorae were also stinky—but maybe not to Romans.)

Today it’s called Monte Testaccio, Mount Potsherd. Okay, big pile of potsherds. After all, amphorae were thick-walled to be good shipping containers. So they made big sherds. And with nothing to be shipped out in them, once emptied, they were…garbage.

An overwhelming percentage of the amphorae were pot-bellied in shape, and made in a small area along the middle Guadalquivir Valley in southern Iberia.

Very complicated. Very interesting.

Posted at 10:31 PM | Comments Off on Amphorae junque

I think I’ve put this mural-sign up before, but here’s this year’s version of viney-signey.

As to Rome-research, I found this fantastic map (Flash) by Katherine Wentworth Rinne showing change over time in springs, creeks/drainage, and aqueducts in central Rome (the Italian one, not the one up the way).

Posted at 10:22 PM | Comments Off on Time and time

Transportation networks—how accessible? how expensive?—are an important factor in the development of civilizations. Now it’s independent of communication (that is, the movement of information and ideas), and the perspective from today’s world, with the two separate, makes it more difficult to look back into the hazy deep-past to times when information only moved if people did.

Posted at 10:22 PM | 1 Comment »

This image is misleading. First, it’s from last winter/spring. And, it’s structure/superstructure. Whereas for much of the day I was thinking about foundations. Of the Roman florescence. The ancient one.

Posted at 10:22 PM | Comments Off on Opposite of foundation

I’ve been thinking about Rome and its treasures and history, so to me this resembles the oculus in the roof of the Pantheon. But it’s the decorated interior of a hemispherical pot.

Posted at 5:28 PM | Comments Off on Heavens above

Sometimes Art Deco pieces look so cold to me. Like this sun-moment at the Cincinnati Union Terminal; even the sun couldn’t cut the formality and severity of the design.

To me, anyway….

Posted at 10:22 PM | 3 Comments »

The image is oilcloth, or what passes for oilcloth. Funny stuff, oilcloth. The oil in oilcloth traditionally was linseed, that is oil from flax (Linum usitatissimum) seeds. Flax has a long history, and has been used for both fiber and seed-oil. Linseed oil has an usual property: over time, it sets up. So, for example, to make window glazing, it was mixed with chalk dust (hence the white glazing in old photos and paintings).

In “the old days,” oilcloth, although heavy and stiff, was a good choice for waterproofed applications. Waxed fabrics were another option. The later rubberized fabrics were a huge breakthrough.

No connection I can come up with between oilcloth and an unexpected thing I learned about today: the Vasari corridor. It’s a hobbit-trail/enclosed passageway dating to post-Medieval Florence…uhem…Firenze.

It connects the Palazzo Pitti with the Uffizi and Palazzo Vecchio. It crosses the Arno above the shops along the Ponte Vecchio, and passes through the upper reaches of a church, and above many homes. This is how the wealthy in pre-limo days commuted from home to office. In this case, the commuter was Grand Duke of Tuscany, Cosimo I de’ Medici (1519–1574). He lived on the south side of the Arno, in the gigantic Palazzo Pitti, and worked, or at least presided over, events in the Uffizi (offices), on the north side of the river. The corridor…just made his work-day easier.

The corridor was designed by Giorgio Vasari and built in five months in 1564. Today, access is nearly always closed, although along the walls of the almost 1 km long enclosed hallway are over 1000 paintings/works of art—the Uffizi’s self-portrait collection, which continues to receive new additions. There’s a second corridor off the north side of the Uffizi, with access to the Palazzo Vecchio. Thus, if you had the chops, you could move easily between the decision-making centers of Florence, and the stinky populace would have no idea you were strolling above.

The High Line is about a mile long, is in NYC, and the earliest section opened in 2009. It’s public, not private, and open to the skies, and thus quite different from the Medici pathway. They both have art, though.

Posted at 9:20 PM | Comments Off on Sixteenth-century High Line

Time is a difficult concept to grasp, frame, and master. But, as humans, we try mightily to do so.

The simplest time concept, I think, is the continuum—it’s all the same thing, going on and on.

Then you can get fancy, and introduce starting and ending points. Events, you might say.

Sometimes you can employ/deploy the idea of hinge points, or pivots, when something happens and things change going forward.

I keep thinking that overall it’s a matter of perspective, that reality is subjective, that we’re just fleas on Mother Earth’s back, belly, or neck.

Posted at 10:22 PM | 2 Comments »