Roma

At the beginning of this trip a month seemed like and eternity. Plenty of time to enjoy the many sites of Italy but as our trip flies by I realize it would take a life time to really soak up everything there is to experience in this beautiful country. Rome is a perfect example. The city is amazingly overwhelming. On our first day we spent half the day on a walking tour and every time we left a place I felt like there was something more we could’ve seen. The churches, ruins and the Colosseum in Rome completely blew me away. It’s hard to comprehend the magnitude of the buildings and what it took for the ancient Romans to construct something of that size and detail. On every ceiling and floor there were mosaics and paintings of and all the pillars and columns were carved with extreme precision. Pompeii was one of the most interesting because it was full of so many mosaics. Most of them had been transferred to a museum already but some were still visible at the site. In many of the pictures I have taken and even standing at a distance they just look like paintings. It takes a minute to realize in reality they are tiny pieces of tile.

Today we don’t see buildings as magnificent as this and we have access too much more efficient and technological construction avenues than the Romans ever did. And some of the public works that were built during the ancient Roman time were accomplished in a relatively short amount of time. We visited the Thermal baths in Rome (kind of the first versions of a athletic gyms) and we learned that it took about 5 years to construct. With heating systems for the hot baths, draining systems for the pools, intricate mosaic tile floors and multiple levels

and rooms for excising, spa rooms and so much more.

In an article we read on the Manpower Needs for Public Works from in ancient Rome it illustrated the size of the workforce it took to construct many of the public buildings in ancient Rome including the aqueducts, theaters, forums and basilicas that were put up between 29 B.C and 68 A.D. They averaged the amount of“units” it took for work on each different type of structure considering mason work, earth movement, artistic embellishment, carpentry and stonework. Not hard to believe temples and basilicas were ranked with the highest units, but still during the time period the article covers the aqueducts caused most of the peaks in construction. What caught my attention was the articles explanation for the “downtime” periods. They stated that they did not include the construction of a giant town called Ostia. So even while all the temples, aqueducts, basilicas, and forums the Romans were still off building a town. In short the manpower of this century was pretty unbelievable. I can’t wait to see what else this trip will have to surprise me with.

I’m off to eat pizza now,

Ciao