Before you dig . . .

Back home, before you do any construction related digging, everyone knows ya gotta call “Miss Utility” who comes and marks all the utilities. It’s not so easy in Rome! When you dig there, you don’t know what you’ll find, but you know you will find antiquities buried over the past 2,000 plus years, and if you do a lot of digging, you will find a lot of them.

This was a concern when they decided to build Roma Termini, the main Rome train station. This was a very large project, so before they began, they built a museum to hold the artifacts they expected to uncover. And did they uncover artifacts! So many, in fact, that the building they built wasn’t big enough. Today, many of these artifacts are on display at the National Museum of Rome in the Palazzo Massimo.

Tiled floors!

So many sculptures!

This woman looked very uncomfortable.Leslie Ruth wanted to see how close her hands were.She determined that she was just as flexible and could strike the same pose. She should never need to, however; it turns out that in the legend illustrated by the statue, the woman was trying to pull an arrow out of her back.

Many of the statues are copies of Greek bronzes, the Greek originals of which were famous in Ancient Rome but have since been lost. There are many Roman copies of a famous sculpture of a Greek discus thrower; this is said to be the best.

Many other statues are, at least to our untrained eyes, equally stunning.

We loved this boxer.Like so many others, at some point this guy was buried under rubble – perhaps discarded, perhaps hidden away when the Visigoths or someone else were about to sack Rome. Then, hundreds and hundreds of years later, someone was building something, so they dug a hole. And there he was!

The most astounding exhibits, to us, were the frescos recovered from the Villa of Livia. Excavation of this site outside of Rome began over 150 years ago. One thing which they found was a very large roomwhose walls were covered with frescos of beautiful garden scenes.Upon excavation, the frescoes were carefully preserved and are now on display at the museum.

The last gallery we visited contained, among other things, thousands of coins going back two or three hundred years BC. The early coins looked pretty old, but once the Romans started making gold coins, the gold coins look good as new. Here’s one from the first century BC.

What a museum! We spent nearly six hours there and didn’t see everything.