The Real Cali Cali

Fraser Castle, Scotland

~ Statue of Hercules.

Date: 2nd century B.C.

Medium: Gilded bronze

Provinience: Rome, Capitoline Museums, Palazzo dei Conservatori, Area of the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus (Roma, Musei capitolini, Palazzo dei Conservatori, Area del Tempio di Giove Capitolino).

Atlas Telamon.   Vienna Austria.

http://hadrian6.tumblr.com

~ Remains of the temple of Vesta.

Rome, Roman Forum (Roma, Foro Romano)

Fragments of ruins of 16th-century Renaissance castle located in Janowiec, eastern Poland.

Photos © Zdzisław Barut.

Frances  

Baia or Bayas, located on the Campania coast, 20 km. of Naples, it was not a true city, but a set of luxurious villas, thermal facilities, a place of recreation and rest for the Roman elite. It seems that it was a center of dissolute life. Cicero called it “pusilla Roma” (Rome in miniature) since he considered it to be a place of vice and perdition. It was sunk into the sea due to the phenomenon called “bradyism”, which consists of the gradual rise and fall of the ground level caused by seismic and hydrothermal activity.

This is probably the strangest church of Romania: the St Nicholas Church in Densus. It’s one of the oldest churches in Romania and South East Europe, built in the 7th century. Some materials are from the fortress of Sarmizegetusa, the Dacian capital. And oh, there’s a mural painting of Jesus wearing Romanian traditional clothes. Great, right?

Bust of a Perspehone - 5th c.BC.

Temple  of Athena Nike

Athens’ Acropolis, Greece

420 BCE

Stylobate: 8.27 m x 5.64 m; height: ca. 4 m.

The Temple of Athena Nike was named after the Greek goddess, Athena Nike. The temple is the earliest fully Ionic temple on the Acropolis. It was a prominent position on a steep bastion at the south west corner of the Acropolis to the right of the entrance, the Propylaea. In contrast to the Acropolis proper, a walled sanctuary entered through the Propylaea, the Victory Sanctuary was open, entered from the Propylaea’s southwest wing and from a narrow stair on the north. The sheer walls of its bastion were protected on the north, west, and south by the Nike Parapet, named for its frieze of Nikai celebrating victory and sacrificing to their patroness, Athena Nike.

Nike means victory in Greek, and Athena was worshipped in this form, as goddess of victory in war and wisdom. The citizens worshipped the goddess in hope of a successful outcome in the long Peloponnesian War fought on land and sea against the Spartans and their allies.

history meme: 02/02 natural disasters | Eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD

In the year of 79 AD, Mount Vesuvius erupted in one of the most catastrophic and famous eruptions in European history. Historians have learned about the eruption from the eyewitness account of Pliny the Younger, a Roman administrator and poet. Mount Vesuvius spawned a deadly cloud of volcanic gas, stones, ash and fumes to a height of 33 km (20.5 miles), spewing molten rock and pulverized pumice at the rate of 1.5 million tons per second, ultimately releasing a hundred thousand times the thermal energy released by the Hiroshima bombing.[2] The towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum were obliterated and buried underneath massive pyroclastic flows. An estimated 16,000 people died from the eruption. [x]

Saint Michel d’Aiguilhe, France

The Chapel of St Michael d'Aiguilhe is a pilgrimage chapel perched atop a volcanic plug in Le Puy-en-Velay, Auvergne. Jutting dramatically towards heaven, the rock has been a sacred place for thousands of years: a prehistoric dolmen was built there and the Romans dedicated it to Mercury before the Christians built a chapel to St. Michael. The Chapel was built in 962. It was a simple shrine on a central plan: a square sanctuary with a tiny apsidole on each side. This original sanctuary still survive today. In the 12th century, the chapel was enlarged by adding a short nave west of the original sanctuary, two side chapels, a carved portal, and a bell tower.

Roman tetrapylon and odeon from Aphrodisias, Turkey

Villa Kérylos, Beaulieu-sur-Mer, France. Designed and built between 1902 and 1908, based on the model of noble houses on the Island of Delos (2nd century BC.), Villa Kérylos is an original reconstruction of an ancient Greek dwelling, and the realisation of a dream – that of Théodore Reinach, an archaeologist and French statesman, fascinated by Greek civilisation. It is also the fruit of an exemplary collaboration with architect Emmanuel Pontremoli who was passionate about this project.| Photo by Romain Laprade.

The Ezra Pound castle, Schloss Brunnenburg or Castel Fontana. Built in 1241 it is situated above the city of Merano, on the outskirts of the municipality of Tirol, Italy. The name of Ezra Pound does give a clue - in the mid-20th century Boris de Rachewiltz, an Egyptologist, and his wife Mary, daughter of the poet Ezra Pound made it their home. 

© Peter Rajkai