#paestum

#paestum

"It was in really bad shape, but I sensed its potential," he says. When his future client, a Swiss teacher who fell in love with the Italian Riviera, walked into his office, even she was skeptical. "Many people were," he continues. "It was an abandoned and damp property, but I convinced her. Now she's happy."

The intervention 'restored the perception of the monument's original scale and pavement level,' while enabling visitors to approach the structure more directly and understand the sequence of the ambulatory and its arches. This recalibration of levels, based on archaeological findings and geometric studies, also enabled the reorganization of the stormwater drainage system, integrating surface slopes and transitions into the paving design while maintaining coherence with the monument's historical configuration.

The excavation ultimately unearthed 34 burials, 15 of them belonging to children between two and ten years old when they died. The graves are clustered in groups, probably reflecting family nuclei. Most the grave types are earthen pits covered with roof tiles angled against each other.

Among the Pontine Islands, Palmarola emerges as an unspoiled, scenically unique land. You'll find no big luxury resorts, loud clubs, or lines of restaurants. There aren't even any paved roads, or an established electrical grid-and there's certainly limited telephone coverage, so forget working from home. However, the lack of modern amenities means less traffic and crowds.

One tenet of classical idealism is the idea that Roman and Greek statuary embodied an ideal of pure whiteness-a misconception modern sculptors perpetuated for hundreds of years by making busts and statues in polished white marble. But the truth is that both Greek statues and their Roman counterparts were originally brightly painted in riotous color.

Seven were the strings of the lyre (unless there happened to be eight or nine), seven were the gates of Thebes, and seven were the "wandering stars" in the night sky (if you count the sun and moon). The identity of the wonders was less important than the length of their list, and indeed, additions and changes were proposed since the beginning.

Set on the edge of the Mediterranean and shaped by centuries of continuous occupation, Naples is a city where architecture is inseparable from time. Layers of Greek foundations, Roman infrastructures, medieval churches, Baroque palaces, and Modern interventions coexist within a dense and compact urban fabric. Naples reveals itself as an accumulation of structures, adaptations, and reuse, where buildings are rarely isolated objects and more often part of a larger spatial, social, and historical system.

Both of the cyst graves feature funerary markers reused as building material. One of them contains the partially preserved tombstone of Legio I Italica centurion Gaius Valerius Verecundus was engraved with a wreath of which only traces remain and an inscription that describes him as having been heavily pressed by fate.

Onboard/Offboard is a series that explores the can't-miss highlights of our favorite cruises-from the shore excursions to book to the spa treatments too relaxing to pass up. A new ship sometimes needs time to work out the kinks, but at this point-more than 100 vessels later- Viking has the routine down pat. In early November, I boarded the Viking Vesta, the line's 12th ocean vessel, in Istanbul, a few months into service.

What sets this isolated rock apart from the competition? It's a question of substance and that ghastly overused word, "authenticity." Capri will always be the pretty one - the view from the Via Krupp and the Faraglioni as seen from La Fontalina are starlet gold - and the island of Procida took recent fame as Europe's 2022 culture capital. Still,

The remains of a monumental hall belonging to a 4th-century episcopal palace have been discovered at Ostia Antica, Rome's ancient port town. The base of the structure is eight by 20 meters (ca. 26 by 65 feet) and the walls were an estimated eight meters high. This is an extraordinarily large space, and it was richly decorated with mosaic floors and marble panels.

Adjacent to the masonry house is a burial ground in use from the 4th century through the first half of the 6th century. Approximately 60 individual inhumation burials have been unearthed, arranged in rows that are increasingly dense with graves as they approach the dwelling. The deceased were buried in cysts formed by reused tegulae (large clay roof tiles) or by rubble walls that supported wooden planks. They were placed in the graves in supine position facing west, north or south.

An monumental early Republican-era funerary complex has been discovered in a suburb of Rome. The excavation of the Via di Pietralata east of Rome also uncovered a stretch of an ancient road, a small cult building and two monumental basins dating back to the 3rd and 2nd centuries B.C. Remains from this early in the Republican era are scarce in the Eternal City, which make these finds very archaeologically significant.

The Neptune of Lyon, one of the largest and most important bronze statues from Roman Gaul, has arrived in Rome for a one-time guest starring appearance at the Giovanni Barracco Museum of Ancient Sculpture. The statue is in the permanent collection of the Lugdunum Musee et Theatres Romains in Lyon, and is being loaned to the sculpture museum as part of an extraordinary exchange of ancient works between the two cities.

The foundations of several buildings made of mudbrick were unearthed, evidence of a self-sustaining residential community that sheds new light on early Christian monastic life in the region. Details of the architectural remains point to a well-planned complex. Mohamed Abdel-Badei, head of the Ancient Egyptian Antiquities Sector, said the mission uncovered rectangular mudbrick buildings oriented west to east, with dimensions ranging from about 8 by 7 metres to 14 by 8 metres.

While the bone was worn and poorly preserved, archaeologists managed to identify its origin by comparing it with modern elephant and mammoth bones. Despite there not being enough DNA to confirm the exact species, the researchers were able to carbon date a tiny sample of the bone. This places the elephant's death between the late fourth and early third centuries BC - right in the middle of the Second Punic War.