Jerry Monaco's List: archaeology

• Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), Italian philosopher and organiser and leader of the Italian Communist Party. Gramsci wrote more than 30 notebooks of history and analysis during his imprisonment under Mussolini. These writings, known as the Prison Notebooks, contain Gramsci's tracing of Italian history and nationalism, as well as original ideas in Marxist, critical and educational theory such as: Cultural Hegemony as a means of maintaining the capitalist state; the need for popular workers' education to encourage development of intellectuals from the working class; 'Absolute historicism' and the critique of economic determinism.

• Atlante Archeologico Indice   * Titolo  * Notizie  * Descrizione  * Approfondimenti  * Indirizzo  * Orari  * Contatti  * Soprintendenza   Museo Nazionale Etrusco di Villa Giulia

• They found that milk was already being used and processed by societies there by the seventh millennium B.C.

• Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in Rome    Tucked away among the trees in the heart of the Villa Borghese park is one of Rome's more surreal sights. It's a full-scale reproduction of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, copied from the original designs, and almost identical to the one that now stands on London's South Bank. Rome's version of the Globe was built over the course of three months in 2003, several years after the London reconstruction was completed. It was built by the council and financed by the Silvano Toti foundation - the late Silvano Toti was a builder and patron of the arts

• House walls were plastered and painted with decorative panels, scenes from mythology or from daily life. Exteriors, and walls of the less wealthy, might be bright solid colors - often an ocher yellow-or marked and painted to resemble stone. Columns of stone, wood, or intricately shaped bricks, plastered and painted to look like stone, supported the roof. The roof beams were generally of wood, though stone might be used as well for short spans. Both Etruscans and Romans used the arch and the vault, though the possibilities opened up by arch construction were not fully explored until later. Wealthy homes might also boast of an interior garden, the peristyle garden, centered by a fountain and surrounded by a colonnade, columns supporting the roof of a covered walkway. Lead gutters and pipes channeled rainwater from the roof into storage for the household.
• Terra cotta
• was used extensively by the Etruscans for roof tiles, column capitals, decorative friezes around the tops of buildings, statues, pots and other household uses.
• Doors and window shutters from Republican Rome were generally of wood, though they might be reinforced with iron. Ironwork gates and grills provided security.
• The Roman domus opened inward. The front entrance was often the only entrance to the house, although there might be an additional service gate to a back alley. Wide doorways with draperies and folding doors of louvered panels opened the dining rooms and other public areas to the atrium or peristyle garden. No windows opened onto the street at all.
• By the time of Augustus, the Phoenicians had learned to blow glass, and to create sheets of it clear enough for windows. The Romans, true to their common practice of adopting anything from other cultures that made for a better quality of life, soon were adding glazed windows to their houses.
• The urban domus might include shops opening onto the street.
• Multi-story apartment houses, insulae or "islands," were home to urban Romans who couldn't afford their own domus. The ground floor was generally set aside for shops or other commercial use. The next floors might have two or four "luxury" apartments, with the density increasing and the apartment size decreasing on upper floors.

  • Remember that Gaius Julius Caesar, whose family was of ancient patrician lineage but had little money, grew up in one of these insulae.
• We don´t know the height of the tallest Roman insula, but Augustus limited the height of insulae in Rome to 70 ft. and a later emperor to 60, so seven or eight stories may have been relatively common. Writers of the Republican period complained of the dangers to inhabitants of the insulae, that they often burned or collapsed, killing those who lived there
• we might notice the lack of hallways. A great deal of space was used up by multiple stairways serving only apartments directly above one another. The rooms within an apartment opened directly into each other, so that if there were multiple bedrooms one might have to walk through one to get to another.
• The walls of buildings in the ancient Mediterranean world were generally brick or masonry rather than wood. They were thick by modern standards, often one and a half to two feet in buildings of only two stories, and thicker in proportion for taller buildings.
• For buildings of heroic size the Romans sometimes built with huge blocks of volcanic tufa. Tufa is relatively porous and lightweight for stone, but the blocks still weighed many tons.
• Instead of a solid wall of bricks or stone blocks, a Roman wall more often had facings of brick or stone, a cavity in the center filled with rubble and mortar or packed clay, and a coating of plaster. Roman bricks were large and flat by modern standards, approximately eight by eighteen by one and one-half inches.
• Vitruvius reports that only burnt brick could be used for new construction of insulae in Rome during his time, as common brick, or mud brick, walls needed to be thicker than regulations allowed. Perhaps that is why the ruins of the relatively newer insulae at Ostia survived into modern times.

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• Vitruvius reports that "basketwork," lath or cane woven together and covered with mortar or plaster, might be used by the poor or for interior walls, particularly on upper stories. This construction was neither moisture resistant nor fireproof, but it was lightweight, cheap and quickly built. Of course, these walls have not survived.
• About the third century BCE, Roman builders discovered that volcanic ash, when added to lime mortar, made a cement that cured to a rocklike hardness even under water. Mixed with sand and gravel, this material was the equivalent of modern concrete.
• In the time of the Republic, the core of a wall would be concrete, but the facings remained brick or stone. At first, the concrete might be poured between facings of masonry, and layers of rubble added. Eventually, walls became essentially a mass of concrete, poured into a wooden form and finished before it was completely set.
• We might ask ourselves why Roman builders bothered with facings of brick or stone for concrete walls. They certainly added nothing to the strength, and they were covered in the finished wall with plaster and paint. The striking opus reticulatum walls we see today at Pompeii and other ruins were likely not visible when the buildings were in use. Perhaps we can look to the basic conservatism of the Roman people. If a man was paying to have a wall built, he expected to see brick or stone.

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