Blogging from Rome, Italy on October 1, 2019

Bloggers: Halle and Mila

Steps Taken: 14,000

This morning, we went to the Museo Montimartini, a Roman museum in an old coal factory. We arrived before the museum opened (as usual) and sat outside to listen to Ben give his presentation on Roman slavery. Nothing like a super long lecture on the brutality of slavery to start your day!

Despite the vague sulfur smell of Montimartini, the pieces at the museum vastly lifted our spirits. We had planned to start with the room of busts, but an art school was taking up that space to sketch. To each their own. So, we started upstairs to engage in a complex discussion about temple archaeology. We saw the marble statues from the temple, and a frieze with a very cool trophy made out of the spoils of war. Those of us less familiar with mythology learned a bit about Hercules’s labors. To put it in terms our FSP (and our loyal blog readers????) can understand, Hercules’s labors are comparable to the labors of our finding a lunch place that has vegetables. We then moved on to some frescoes which were enthusiastically (and pathetically) replicated by our fellow FSPers. Photos attached. Margaret stayed in her pose for the remainder of the day.

After having lunch in a new area of town, we took the bus to the Palazzo Massimo Museum to study the Roman Calendar, a statue of Augustus, the Boxer, and the stunning paintings from the House of Livia. We also spent some time studying an altar with scenes of triumph and the founding of Rome. After our long day of museums, we went to our favorite gelato place near Campo de Fiori, Blue Ice, to celebrate another successful day of the FSP.