Travelling in Time!

Having missed out on a holiday this year, time to look back at my last trip abroad and a great day in Ostia Antica, outside Rome. 

Ostia was originally a Roman fort controlling trade on the Tiber and developed into a wealthy town with 50,000 inhabitants before the decline of the Roman Empire. The excavations and park cover about 173 acres and although the buildings are somewhat rundown you definitely can sense the bustle of this town and port and view shops, baths, tombs, amphitheatre and even the remains of a Roman inn. 

Statuary was still in situ, like the fabulous (headless) figure in the sketch on the right, everywhere around the remains of Roman living …. from latrines, to beautiful mosaics, murals in the bath houses and amazing columns. Saunter down the main street, peruse the shops, pop into some Roman couple's living room, including the amazing marble and porphyry floor seen in my sketch. I can just imagine some Centurion coming home from work, taking off his helmet and his wife saying ''How was your day dear? What do you think of our new flooring?'', husband takes a peek ''it's pink ….. we've got a pink, yellow and green floor? What'll my mates say?''. Never mind the colours, just look at that workmanship, it has survived over two thousand years and really could almost have been laid yesterday. 

The colourful flooring really belies what our image of Roman statues and buildings is; white marble and pale travertine, in fact buildings, columns and statues were painted (quite garishly) or covered in gold, or both … gilded and painted. How do we know? Well residual colour and pigments have been found on artefacts, and painting also explains the ''empty'' eyes on statues and busts. Having said that, apart from the very polychrome floor in the house of Cupid and Psyche, most of the visible mosaics were monochrome as you can see in the photo above. The Romans generally however, loved life multi-coloured and not majestically minimalistic, hard to imagine in the face of such magnificent marble! This possibly looked like something out of Bollywood …. to be honest at the moment I'd love to wander around these ruins, colourful or not!