9. Feb. 3 update
Velia
Recent
Digs at Velia
State Museums Director
Massimo Osanna, former director of the
excavations at Pompeii, said the area
explored at Velia
probably contained relics of offerings
made to Athena, the mythological
Greek goddess of war and wisdom. Velia is
40 kilometers (25 miles) southeast of
Paestum, a much-visited site of ancient
Greek temples and tourists are now
catching on that Velia is a gem unto
itself. The recently completed excavation
at Velia unearthed a pair of helmets in
good condition (image), the remains of a
building, vases with the Greek inscription
for “sacred” and metal fragments of what
possibly were weapons.
Music-lovers, this has
nothing to do with "Vilja" a song from
The Merry Widow by Franz Lehar.
Sorry.
9. Feb. 6
3,000 Unmarked
Refugee Graves in Sicily
An
unmarked grave is one that lacks a marker,
headstone, or nameplate indicating that a
body is buried there. In cultures that
mark burial sites, the phrase 'unmarked
grave' has a few metaphorical meanings. A
deliberately unmarked grave, for example,
may signify disdain and contempt. The
underlying intention of some unmarked
graves may be to suggest that the person
buried is not worthy of commemoration, and
should therefore be ignored and forgotten.
Unmarked graves have long been used to
bury executed criminals as an added degree
of disgrace. None of that applies here.
These poor people drowned in the
Mediterranean refugee crisis.The
International Red Cross says that since
2013 one-thousand persons have drowned and
remained unidentified. They had no papers
when they drowned and now have no death
certificates, just a number in a book of
the nameless dead who were put in a mass
grave. Above the ground, they put a
certain number of crosses spread apart to
make it look like each one represents
someone buried beneath. It's an illusion,
though. Perhaps a kind one. It's not clear
what the text in the photo means. A
woman's voice is saying, "...and now my
sister's grave is no longer there." There
are more than a few of these communal
graves in Sicily.
10. Feb. 8
Here.
Have a house. That's 1 euro, please.
Is this a
hoax? No. Is it a passing craze? I don't
think so. Can you really have a house for
€1 ('premium' houses cost €2)? No. It
seems to be a good way for towns in Italy,
which have thousands of houses that are
centuries-old, dilapidated, and idle
(unihabitable), to rejuvenate them. A
recent NY Times article cited a town in
Sicily of a man who bought one and turned
it into a restaurant. He's happy. The town
is happy, because all that "turning into"
put to work local electricians,
carpenters, masons, and plumbers. He had
to pay them, so they're happy. So how much
can you reasonably expect to wind up
shelling out to finally tread where the
Caesars trod and be happy?
This
pin-drop map is not active. See links,
below.
It depends,
but I can't see you spending less than
$10,000. There are closing fees, whopping
fines if you back out, etc. Is it worth
it? For some, yes. For others, maybe. For
me? No. I already have a house. Don't
write me about this because I won't
answer. See this link: it will show a
brochure such as the one you see (above)
and also a
google
maps display like the one you
see on left. Those Google pin drops are
not individual houses; they are towns that have said, We
have some houses. The brochure only costs
€5. I think you can get 5 houses for
that. Update from
August 2022.
11.
Feb. 11
The "monument
park" of the former English cemetery after
21 years of being idle, vandalized,
spray-painted, turned into a rubbish dump
cum public toilet is in the process
of being cleaned up in preparation for
being reopened as what it used to be — a
nice little park. It's part of the age-old
Naples approach to dealing with
unemployment —build it, let it go to hell,
build it again, hell, build, hell, build,
and so forth. Forever. It's one of
nature's great cycles. Disney made a
documentary about it. I won't be here the
next time it happens, so please keep track
of it for me.
My original entry on the English
cemetery is here.
12. Feb.
14
Graffito
ergo sum --I scrawl on walls,
therefore I am.
—Kilroy
I have
always found the "Nestor's Cup"
graffiti on Ischia the most
interesting bit of scribbling in the
area, but this new one uncovered in
Pompeii gives it a run for its money.
Pompeii has other good graffiti, such as
the one that tells us we got the date of
the famous eruption wrong,
but this new one is great. There are 11
inscriptions scratched onto the north
wall of the theater tunnel, a passage
that connects the ancient theater
complex with Via Stabiana, one
of the main roads that led in and out of
the city. The scribbles are Safaitic.
Linguists, when pinned down, will ahem
and say Safaitic was first discovered in
1858. It is in the Ancient North Arabian
South Semitic script family, the genetic
unity of which has yet to be
demonstrated. (Samples of the
alphabet are shown, right.) I
care about that. A little. Honest. But I
really care about why there are
Safaitic graffiti in Pompii. Scholars
have been tight-lipped, mainly because
the graffiti just seemed anomalous.
Out-of-place. They are that, by
well over a thousand miles (or well
well over, if you're using km).
They have been one of Pompeii's greatest
mysteries and now a plausible solution
may be at hand. Safaitic is otherwise
completely unknown in the Western
Mediterranean. Who wrote them on the
walls of Pompeii? There are 34,000
Safaitic inscriptions written between
the first century B.C. and the fourth
century A.D., but they are found in
Ḥarrah, the black sheet-lava wasteland
that runs from southern Syria, down
through northeast Jordan, and into
northern Saudi Arabia. And we have 11 in
Pompeii. Why? How? Maybe traders, except
there is no evidence at all of trade
between Arab nomads and Puteoli (the
port that served Pompeii).
The red section is the
theater tunnel in Pompeii. This
"Ancient
Graffi" site tell you
everything about writing on
walls (as if you didn't know). On the
site, that red tunnel is
designated Pompeii,
Corridoio dei Teatri
(VIII.7.20).
Kyle Helms,
classics professor at St. Olaf College
(in Minnesota), now offers in the Journal
of Roman Studies a solution. Helms
argues that these nomads had been
incorporated into the Roman military and
had come to Italy with the Legio III
Gallica —the Third Gallic Legion—
during the civil war of 69 A.D. The
graffiti are not isolated; they are
scribbled in among the inscriptions that
adorn the theater wall; images of boats,
animals, and the bathroom-stall junk you
may have heard that other people do. So
these guys from the Third were on leave
in Pompeii and decided to take in a show
at the theater and scribbled as they
walked along. Helms says Roman legions
had become more provincial and
increasingly drew upon the local
population. Tacitus himself refers to
the men of the Third observing Syrian
religious customs. It’s also
possible that the Safaitic writers were
auxiliaries (reservists). It was unusual
to move auxiliary troops but a crisis
such as the civil war in 69 A.D. might
well have prompted it. Graffiti is a
cross-cultural practice and everyone
(else) does it. Kilroy lives! [from
later- April 2023: Maybe it's
the Nabataeans!]
13. Feb.
28
Today is Someday the Shroveteenth - or
maybe not.
Shrovetide
is the Pre-Lenten season or Forelent,
the Christian period of preparation
before Lent. I think today is Shrove
Monday, alias Collop Monday, Rose
Monday, Merry Monday or Hall Monday.
It falls on the Monday before Ash
Wednesday every year except in Leap
Shroves. Since Monday comes before
Tuesday, tomorrow should be Shrove
Tuesday. As the Monday before Ash
Wednesday, it is part of celebrations
such as Mardi Gras and Carnival.
Everything about Christian religious
festivals during this period is
confusing except maybe that "shrove"
is an old past tense of "shrive", a
cognate of "scribe"; thus, today is
when you write down your sins so you
can remember why you are contrite and
penitent. All of this changes to
something else (sorry for that
technical term) depending on what
brand, kind, or version of Christian
you are. You know - Catholic,
Protestant or a Quartodeciman
Christian. They end the fast of Lent
on the Paschal full moon of the Hebrew
calendar, in order to celebrate the
Feast of Unleavened Bread beginning on
the 14th of Nisan. Oh, if you're not a
Christian, that's fine. Put your head
down for a while or go to study hall.
Please be back by July.
14.
Mar.
1
today
is Tuesday
this photo is
from Sunday, Feb
27
That stands for Darwin-Dohrn Museum, the newest in the string of acronyms as Naples keeps reducing Italian to a string of grunts. After all, "Love is a Mono-Syllabic Thing",* so why not everything else? People will still call it "the Aquarium" (l'acquario in Italian, and don't worry, I have to look up the aq or acq thing every time, too!) Thus, the former Dohrn Aquarium is now the DaDoM and remains what it has always been (see this link), a scientific center for research with emphasis on marine biology. A good one, too. The new twist is the conversion of the old Press Club at the west end of the main building into part of the DaDoM. The small building was built in 1948 and was a big deal in a city still trying to clear away the rubble left from WWII. That new building did not fare well, as you can see in the old image on the left. It went into debt, was vandalized (the only Boniek I know of was a Polish soccer player — loyal fans!), and finally closed in the mid-1990. In 2015 the city hall and the "Dohrn Zoological station" agreed to convert the old press club building into a library and "museum of the sea", all part of DaDoM. The results are what you see in the image on the right. They did a good job.
Mt. Vesuvius last had a violent eruption in 1944, towards the end of WWII. It could be a few hundred years before another dangerous, explosive eruption occurs. That is the considered opinion of volcano experts from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH) and local scientists from the Vesuvius geological observatory in Naples. Their report is in Science Advances, the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) (geo-geeks may read the report off-site here). They published this illustration (right). The report concerns only Mt. Vesuvius under "smaller eruptions") and its good twin Mt. Somma (together called the Somma-Vesuvius Volcanic Complex). The illustration is by ETH team member, Olivier Bachman. Note the left-hand side of the image, ominously labelled "supereruptions" and "Ereputible magma", briefly
