caesar novus

The Pantheon sometimes opens interesting back rooms in a structure that was meant to reinforce an area developing cracks early on. There are even a couple of external flying buttresses there. I speculate that the huge front portico must be pressing the drum structure to the rear (no cracks on it's sides). Anyway this vid shows exhibits there including nice decorative fragments: By the way, here is how decorative elements can be robo-sculpted now in case you want some Corinthian topped columns:

Good work. This one seemed to address my concerns on an earlier one - probably because they were obvious. But just in case of someone listening I will try to suggest refinements. Mainly I think the roofs are too look-alike as if they had the exact same roofer and materials with the exact same amount of weathering (say 40 years). It's nice the facades are weathered with hints of staining, but still a bit uniform, without a peppering of new construction. Nice that the colors are muted like their mineral colorants, and mostly confined to highlights seems plausible. Nice localized smoke and mist, although I would like to see more dappled light due to cloud patches. Is there something stagey about the people, like lack of kids, dogs, or ragamuffins?

Oh no, Maritime museum is closed for renovation except for a small annex. Arsenale is nearby but not sure how much is open; I actually never found an entrance. To east is spacious area to wander since Napoleon had a canal converted to a wide boulevard with parks and uncrowded benches to eat snacks etc. https://www.marina.difesa.it/EN/history/museums/Pagine/museostoriconavale.aspx If it is in season, drink plenty of fresh squeezed arancia rossa which is like rasberries. I just scored a bag of these and am in the afterglow of first taste in a while:

https://www.thebyzantinelegacy.com/ven-byzantine- sez (embolded by me): I am a Venice fanatic but not so much the Byz angle (St Mark etc) so may be a contra-indicator for you. I found Murano and Torcello islands painfully blah. Pay attention to ferry schedule for Torcello; you may have to commit to a very short or long wait for the return. Stopover in Burano which is super cute, if well over the top. They have/had coin bathrooms with no change made at the time. Mosto and Turchi facades go by fast on a waterbus, so maybe look for viewpoints from other side of canal. One is a hotel and the other a zoolog museum, so visiting may have complications. I normally love museums, but in Venice I only find the huge Maritime museum inspiring. Nobody visits there, and the staff tries to herd everyone out way before the 1:30 closing, but you may find Byz cannons or whatever. Consider a quick excursion to Padua for mosaics, etc. The charming neighborhoods in Venice are Dorsoduro (SW) and Castello (NE). The famous walk of train station - Rialto bridge - San Marco is a cattle drive horror show punctuated by pigeon poop. To get from west to east walk the alternate route of bus station - Academy bridge and onward; that's what Italian commuters do. Venice has the worst food in Italy since it has negligible Italian customers. Instead of tourist gelato which tastes like shaving cream with food coloring, get sorbetto tailored to more refined taste. Instead of stockpiled wet cardboard pizza slices, order a whole pie with gourmet ingredients they have to prepare for you. Above all, wander around at dawn and night when daytripper hordes are gone.

New York's wonderful lost tribute to baths of Caracalla is well summarized in first 5 minutes here: To go beyond the simple sad narrative of Roman style monuments lost, take a look at one of the most engaging architect historian ever on a longer riff on that Penn Station. He ties it together with so many fascinating developments (fine art, engineering, finance) that makes it seem a miracle that the things worked out at least briefly. https://www.c-span.org/video/?309730-1/history-york-citys-penn-station That professor Barry Lewis can talk about most any architecture history in a way that gets exponentially more interesting as the clock moves on, and can be found not on youtube but at: https://www.c-span.org/search/?searchtype=Videos&sort=Newest&personid[]=9278702

I thought I would pass on some Roman smuggling info from TV series. They aren't worth a separate topic and I will only mention once since I have stopped watching these 7 or so series. There are actually 2 series covering Spain, which seems to be inundated by South American drug traffickers. It's kind of interesting how their law enforcers seem to be small and ageing vs the violators who may be large and aggressive. Anyway the Roman connection is that their coast guard checks underwater wrecks about once a month with divers to see if looting takes place. Expensive operation which might attract notice from bad actors. There are series for just about every country in South America which has interesting no-nonsense enforcement styles, but a Roman connection appeared in the US based one. They found huge real mosaics in storage along with tons of loose ancient tile which they were using to "enhance" the mosaics. We saw a familiar Roman scholar from Yale or whatever value these for a jillion dollars. The perpetrator was dead and I forget the result, but they may have been waiting to see what country to return it to. The US style is depicted as a bit more clumsy and bureaucratic than other countries, and super eager to repatriate things unasked with skimpy evidence.

Great point. While the above examples seem justified, there are others with little proof of wrongdoing snagged up in a recent massive witchhunt. Most of this seems to be from one NY prosecutor for whom we have noted gets pushback from museums. And this isn't due to selfishness of museums, which are mostly woke and would be proud to give stuff away except when there is no justification. In an enlightened world, different regions should have displays of each others artifacts. Instead we gravitate toward fortress mentality where nobody is allowed to export artifacts, museums are underpatronized since they just show local stuff, and entire classes of artifacts are subject to wipeout from disasters like earthquakes, floods, war.

Actually the legacy CATV Smithsonian channel is showing 2 high quality series on Aerial Italy and Aerial Greece, playing Dec 27 am (here anyway). Better than earlier series with the same exact name or a close name, it seems to give a fresh look and has me often saying "wow, I didn't know that". Ancient architecture seems well covered along with beautiful settings, and remember some of the Greek monuments were commissioned by Rome. The Greek series shows up on the internet (Paramount+), and I will post episode 1 from youtube which oddly is not scheduled for Dec 27, just 4 other episodes each. Rome has other online aerial view videos, but with spotty quality. For once the mandatory "platinum" level of CATV that I am forced to pay for reaps benefits re: Rome.

I only proposed stand-rowing in an aside, for modern pleasure rowing. For competition, the magic element is a sliding seat. Nowdays you can combine facing forward with sliding seat and pulling the oar handles. Rowing is fine for a sprint, but I can't imagine doing it all day like ancient mariners (if no favorable winds for sailing). So hard on backbones over time.

The first Punic war was a clash of 700 ships trying to ram one another in maneuvers like: Rome's success has been attributed to the relative skill of it's mariners. https://www.warhistoryonline.com/instant-articles/rome-vs-carthage.html sez: Apparently Rome considered it worthwhile to pay 300 sailors each year about 100x the cost of each ship, with this making it a savings-in-disguise if the ship sinks. Sounds like the practice in olden US where the Irish were preferred for dangerous work, since their death cost nothing vs. a steep loss for a slave. Also it must help to have a motivated crew during crunch time. This is covered along with a lot more in: Some sources say slaves were used in a crunch, but normally lower class ram-fodder were plentiful. Maybe the rowers had to have sail handling skills as well. Probably sometimes had to assist repelling boarders. With no sliding seat for Romans, the muscle set is substantially reduced. Furthermore with suboptimum placement of seating vs oarlock geometry for at least some of those crowded 300, you are further degraded. I have had 3 sailing dinghys with wonkey oars for backup. They're excruciating to row far, and for the last 2 I get along better rowing on my knees facing forward. Gondolas are (inefficiently) sculled, not rowed. And maybe Asian style yuloh oars kind of bridge the scull-row continum. Seated backward may still be the most powerful, but get a load of these oar-pushing forward-facing racers (not on thumbnail), like I did on my first trip to Venice:

Casting a net for more Roman content, I enabled a bunch of free streaming TV channels, mostly ranked in the article https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/best-free-tv-streaming-services/ . So far I have found zippo of Rome, but I do agree that the Tubi channel is one of the least annoying and worth a free account (which isn't normally required for any of them). Surprisingly sharp resolution with shorter and less woke ads, altho you can't avoid the ads like on CATV using fast forwarding. So Youtube remains the motherlode for Roman video content for me, but maybe you can show otherwise. Here's part of hundreds of hours of Roman docs:

I think I have heard and then forgotten those issues being addressed, possibly in a documentary of a replica Roman rowing ship and their troubles getting 100 or so university students to row it properly. Might be on youtube or in the back of someones mind; I think issues particularly arise in sprinting and maneuvering for ramming. However, having owned a couple of rowing sculls and rowing machines I am overflowing with likely irrelevant observations. First of all, rowing can be terrible for the disks in your back. If you pull with rounded back it can squash the gel disks rearwards and bump against your spinal chord with disastrous long term effects. For some reason rowing machines do this to me the most, including the most fancy air resistance version which was made in a factory nearby to me and gave me a good deal on a test version. Secondo, look at almost any amateur rower and see the dysfunction of them pulling the blade at a 45 degree pitch instead of vertical, and where they dip down and pull out is also whacky. I am not nitpicking and not trained, but this drives me nuts where the natural tendency is to self sabotage everything. Some of these issues could go away if the oar was higher or had a handle extension on it. Tripleessimo, rowing is crazy in the way you are facing backwards. I never got around to trying some bike mirrors, but you can be moving pretty fast towards disaster half blind. I have looked longingly at those complex contraptions that let you face forward and row, installable even on a SUP board. But I think the best solution is the Venice standing row boats where you throw your weight forward. One or many rowers, even the lifeguards in Italy have these in little catamaran configurations that are stable and roomy for several victims.

I believe television influenced english for the last 65 years by presenting an aspirational alternative to those otherwise immersed in regional accents. I grew up among the quirky accent of a remote region of lumberjacks and farmers, and when I watched national TV or even better the then-posh accents coming over the border from Canadian TV, well I decided I need not talk like my hick neighbors. I find it puzzling how anyone maintained a regional accent in the TV age, altho not going forward. I think TV influence is about over now, with the Orwellian ESG mafia clogging 90% of all commercials with patronizing afro influenced accents, or weed-puffing huskiness, or other fringe stuff. I am about to enable streaming on my TV to escape this decadent mess which can't be avoided even by frantic channel switching. I like watching 60+ year old Perry Mason shows which have amusing language quirks now ironed out by TV. With the TV age maybe over, I notice the effect of the internet bringing disruptive diversity back to fortress America. For example British use of prepositions have been picked up by the US in a way that can be very confusing: "different to" vs. "different from". I don't care which convention, but let's stick with one per country altho nationalities of anonymous ones setting an example online may be unclear.

That seems strange; isn't Latin something that those on a medical or biology career track want to take for the terminology? I had naively imagined it was offered at my school for catholics, and maybe your school was on a secular kick, like when revolutionary mobs bashed statues in French cathedrals. French would have been so useful, but the spelling seemed so unphonetic. Now I hear that the spelling comes from the very old ways of pronouncing, sort of like English used to pronounce the k in knife. Blessed are the spelling simplifiers, like the removal of u from "colour". So in HS, surrounded on 3 sides by French Canada and a zillion miles from Mexico, I took Spanish - because it was "easy". I think our Euro dialect was highly opposite to latin america's which sounds alien and incomprehensible to me. Kind of like they are chewing a dozen pieces of gum while talking, and I honestly get by easier in portuguese Brazil. In college I took Russian as a survival move, since the focus would be on learning the alphabet (easy) more than learning the language which is inherently hard for me. It has some use because I can read if not hear some stuff in the news including Ukrainian. It's funny that Russia is trying to purge english words, when it is packed with phonetic english - like restauran for restaurant. Once you can sound the letters, half of signs you see in a city make sense http://www.russianforeveryone.com/RufeA/Lessons/Introduction/Alphabet/Alphabet.htm It's a shame I didn't take Italian. Our humble college offered numerous languages, but all I knew of Italy was mafia, awful Italian-American comfort food, and well.. beautiful Venice. If I was aware of sublime real Italian food and Roman and other monuments, I would probably be living in Italy today. There are some cushy civilian jobs attached to US military bases in Italy that would have suited me fine. Sorry to run on so long, but I am avoiding a grim chore...

Nice info.