Artifacts and Pinholes

Today I went to the Museo della Civiltà Romana which is a museum that's all about Ancient Rome and its people and such. It was cool because there were actual things from back then, like pots and pans, and cooking ware. But that's about the only real things they had there. Everything else were replicas... so, it was a little bit of a let down. I would have enjoyed the museum more if they didn't just offer replicas and copies of things, but the actual artifacts too.

The thing I was most interested in was the fascist architecture of the museum and many of the buildings surrounding Piazza Giovanni Agnelli (which is the area of the museum). When Mussolini was in power, he built all these official buildings in the same manner; most of them were made up of these huge white slabs of stone in a block formation, with everything being very square, smallish rectangle windows, and all with small amounts of writing on them. Those are at least the general characteristics I was finding while looking at different buildings. The buildings were very easy to point out because everything else around it were these colorful buildings with different decorations and textures to them. It was kind-of like playing, "which one of these things is not like the other" game. :)

This is the middle part of the museum, and on each side of it were these very large cubed buildings. The tour of the museum started in the right wing of the building, then you actually walked underground to a display of all these different Roman scenes of various things, and then entered the left wing of the museum. I didn't even know I had made the transition between buildings until the group was outside and realized that we had entered from the other side. 

This is just a replica of a famous sculpture from a wall-- we didn't really learn about it, I just thought it looked cool.

This is just HALF of the huge replica of what Ancient Rome looked like. If you really look, you can see the coliseum and some other very famous structures. 

I finally have some of my pictures I took with my pinhole camera from class! They aren't anything too amazing or special, but I think they are pretty cool- especially because they were taken from a Pringles can with nothing but a small amount of sunlight and light-sensitive paper. I didn't want to mess with the raw-ness of the photos, so I just took the negative photos, scanned them into a Mac, and used Photoshop to turn them into positives. I didn't want them having any other filters on them or something else to take away from the nature of the pinhole photo. 

This is taken from a window in the studio that over looks the Tiber River and a major street. If you look very closely, you can see a waiting bus and cars driving by.  

These next two are taken from the studio's balcony that overlooks some of the back roads, a small shop, and some apartments. 

The next major thing I want to do is to see the Pope on Wednesday for his prayer and blessing of the people! I'm going to have to miss a little bit of my early class, but I think Karl will understand. 

Molte Benedizioni!