Rome: A Virtual Tour of the Ancient City

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seneca2008
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Rome: A Virtual Tour of the Ancient City

Post by seneca2008 »

The University of Nottingham is running an on line course about the history and archaeology of Rome. This is the introductory blurb:

"Take a guided tour around ancient Rome with expert Professor Matthew Nicholls, using his detailed and award-winning 3D digital model of the city. Explore Rome’s architecture and how it was used - how did Romans worship their gods and meet their political masters? How was drinking water supplied to the city’s million inhabitants? Moving seamlessly between footage of contemporary Rome and the digital model (including interactive elements), you’ll explore these questions and much more.

Use this insight to inform your own encounters with the eternal city and the study of ancient history more generally."

Its a free course with the option of paying a fee to retain access to the resources used once the course is over.

It starts on October 12. I think you can still sign up for it through Future learn here:

https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/rome
Persuade tibi hoc sic esse, ut scribo: quaedam tempora eripiuntur nobis, quaedam subducuntur, quaedam effluunt. Turpissima tamen est iactura, quae per neglegentiam fit. Et si volueris attendere, maxima pars vitae elabitur male agentibus, magna nihil agentibus, tota vita aliud agentibus.

wilberfloss
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Re: Rome: A Virtual Tour of the Ancient City

Post by wilberfloss »

A free course entitled 'Health and Wellbeing in the Ancient World' is also available through Future Learn. This course was developed by the Open University. Details below:

https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/ancient-health

Aetos
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Re: Rome: A Virtual Tour of the Ancient City

Post by Aetos »

Thank you, Seneca!
I've signed up for the free course, although the prices to access the course after 7 weeks seem quite reasonable ($84.00 US). It starts 20:00, Eastern Daylight Savings Time on 11 October, here in America. I'm looking forward to the presentation!

cb
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Re: Rome: A Virtual Tour of the Ancient City

Post by cb »

This free course is great, thank you for the recommendation! A lot of work has gone into making it very approachable (and into the virtual model of Rome). Just finished week 1.

Cheers, Chad

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Re: Rome: A Virtual Tour of the Ancient City

Post by Aetos »

I'm in to day 5 of the first week and enjoying the course, which is designed to fit within a 5 week timespan and features the following general topics:
Week 1: Location and Infrastructure
Week 2: Political Architecture
Week 3: Religious Architecture
Week 4: Life and Death in Ancient Rome
Week 5: Bread And Circuses

Each week's work consists of watching videos, reading articles, and engaging in discusssion over key questions relating to the videos, review of the information presented and a quiz. The lead educator is Dr. Matthew Nicholls, who is a professor in the Classics Department at the University of Reading.

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seneca2008
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Re: Rome: A Virtual Tour of the Ancient City

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Aetos and Chad I am glad you are both enjoying the course.

Engaging with the model at the end of the first week really forces one to think about, in this case, the Porta Maggiore (aka Porta Praenestina?) very closely. It is much more immediate than looking at a plan and a diagram in a book, although using the description in a book is a helpful adjunct. I was intrigued by the archaic spelling of "Caisar" on the gate itself (according to Amanda Claridge Rome (Oxford Archaeological Guides) it is characteristic of (presumably) Claudian inscriptions.

I have in the past been rather bored by the study of coins. But they are clearly a valuable resource for learning something about the appearance of ancient buildings. Fascinating to hear that even buildings which were not in fact completed were commemorated in this way. This has rather opened my eyes.

Platner and Ashby’s 1929 Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome is mentioned in the further resources. The link doesn't seem to work but I think this must be it:

https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/ ... html#walls

The "TOPOGRAPHIA VRBIS ROMÆ" is reachable from that page too.

This link seems to be the Roman home page of "Lacus Curtius". The web site seems to have a lot of links!

https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/home.html

Finally I had on my bookshelves The ruins and excavations of Ancient Rome by Rodolfo Lanciani 1897. Clearly quite old but the author was the supervisor of first modern excavations so it has some value. This led me via a search to this interesting site (Rodolfo Lanciani and His Archive: A Visual History of Rome):

https://exhibits.stanford.edu/lanciani

One can browse images from the collection here:

https://exhibits.stanford.edu/lanciani/browse.

I find these plans, photographs and etchings fascinating.
Persuade tibi hoc sic esse, ut scribo: quaedam tempora eripiuntur nobis, quaedam subducuntur, quaedam effluunt. Turpissima tamen est iactura, quae per neglegentiam fit. Et si volueris attendere, maxima pars vitae elabitur male agentibus, magna nihil agentibus, tota vita aliud agentibus.

cb
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Re: Rome: A Virtual Tour of the Ancient City

Post by cb »

Hi all, I just discovered in the course's reading list Carandini's Atlas of ancient Rome. This looks amazing. See e.g. the videos here: http://atlasofancientrome.com/videos/

Has anyone here read it? This might be one to put on a Christmas wish-list...

Edit: My will-power broke and I ordered it. I'll let you all know if it's as good as it sounds. Reviews pick up some typos and a few awkward sentence translations, and an assumption around the reality of figures from the royal period, but otherwise sound very positive.

Cheers, Chad

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Re: Rome: A Virtual Tour of the Ancient City

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The Carandini Atlas looks very appealing. Amazon has one on offer for £107. I am very tempted.
Persuade tibi hoc sic esse, ut scribo: quaedam tempora eripiuntur nobis, quaedam subducuntur, quaedam effluunt. Turpissima tamen est iactura, quae per neglegentiam fit. Et si volueris attendere, maxima pars vitae elabitur male agentibus, magna nihil agentibus, tota vita aliud agentibus.

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Re: Rome: A Virtual Tour of the Ancient City

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The course has now ended but I would recommend it to anyone who wants to try it out next time its on.

The course is informal and contains a mix of videos, short articles and an exploration of certain monuments which form part of the digital model created by Professor Matthew Nicholls of Reading University (now Senior Tutor at St John's College Oxford).

It was fascinating to take part in the discussions with fellow course members. Some had no experience of the classics and had never been to Rome others had more familiarity with the subject. All were able to contribute something interesting.

I loved the videos featuring Roman coins. My eyes tend to glaze over whenever I see (usually) black and white images in poor resolution in books. But seeing someone turn the coin over in their hand and point out features and how they relate to statues and buildings in Rome was very engaging.

It made me reconsider the motives of those who built on a large scale in Rome. We tend to simplify issues and think only of emperors wanting to demonstrate their power and characterise this as "megalomania". Yet they did not for the most part tear down their predecessors' work (think of the successive imperial fora of Julius Caesar Augustus Nerva and Trajan) but to enscribe themselves into the physical fabric of Rome. Is this so very different from what Horace, Vergil and Ovid did? Do we think of these poets as power crazed? I suppose it has something to do with how we think of "artists" as opposed to "politicians". But there has to be some overlap. Politics is implicated in everything perhaps so is "art".

Finally I have borrowed Carandini's Atlas of ancient Rome from the library. It is a beautifully produced book full of fascinating detail. The Librarian told me that there had been complaints that it was not easy to use and that the organisational logic was not readily apparent. I have been browsing rather than looking things up in a systematic way so I have not encountered this problem. I see that it is proposed to make an online edition so that frequent updates can be given. The work is being continually updated and any print edition is bound to be out of date as soon as it is published. That said the book is so attractive I will be saving my pennies to buy a print version.
Persuade tibi hoc sic esse, ut scribo: quaedam tempora eripiuntur nobis, quaedam subducuntur, quaedam effluunt. Turpissima tamen est iactura, quae per neglegentiam fit. Et si volueris attendere, maxima pars vitae elabitur male agentibus, magna nihil agentibus, tota vita aliud agentibus.

cb
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Re: Rome: A Virtual Tour of the Ancient City

Post by cb »

Hi seneca, I completely agree - I actually binged on the course and finished it a few weeks back. Would definitely recommend it to others. There are other flyover reconstructions of Rome that I've found on the web (e.g. Rome Reborn) which are also useful - I wonder how many teams have separately created a 3D Rome on computers...

Carandari as you say is fantastic - I'm reading through the whole thing, which is taking time as you need to look at volume II every second paragraph, to see the tables and images that go with the text. The fact that it is being continuously updated doesn't bother me: like critical texts of works of literature, even if they will be improved in the future, the versions we have now are still worth investing a lot of personal time in.

One other great resource on Rome's archaeology which I bumped into online last week is the "Digging History" series by the American Institute for Roman Culture. First video here (it's a whole series):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzQ2SK9Oww8

One final resource worth checking out is the Breviarium Urbis Romae Antiquae: effectively an anthology of extracts from ancient texts relating to each monument and district of Rome, with chapters organised by regio:

https://brill.com/view/title/7615

If anyone else knows of other useful resources on this topic, I'd really appreciate hearing about them. Many thanks in advance.

Cheers, Chad

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Re: Rome: A Virtual Tour of the Ancient City

Post by Aetos »

Just finished the course today and must say I thoroughly enjoyed it! I especially liked how Dr. Nicholls drew on the ancient authors and particularly the poets to help describe daily life and the physical grandeur of ancient Rome. The course featured excerpts from the works of Livy, Virgil, Ovid, Martial, Juvenal, Seneca, Pliny and others. Pliny's description of Curio's theatre and Seneca's lamenting of living near a balnea helped me visualise daily life. Virgil's 'guided tour' from book 8 of the Aeneid is mentioned, giving us an idea of what the area looked like before 'construction' began. Ovid's Ars Amatoria makes an appearance (twice!) as a bachelor's guide to Rome.

Along with Seneca and CB, I heartily recommend the course. These days, online courses such as these are as close as many of us can get to a classroom environment and I found it refreshing to read others' comments on what we were learning as well as to enjoy the contributions they made to each topic with their own experiences.

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Re: Rome: A Virtual Tour of the Ancient City

Post by cb »

Hi all, in case anyone's interested, this excellent free online course on Rome is running again, starting in 4 days. I recommend it! (I'm going to do it again as a refresher). See the thread above for background.

https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/rome

Cheers, Chad

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Re: Rome: A Virtual Tour of the Ancient City

Post by amiti_blu »

cb wrote: Thu Nov 11, 2021 8:30 am ...this excellent free online course on Rome is running again, starting in 4 days. I recommend it! (I'm going to do it again as a refresher). See the thread above for background.

https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/rome
This sounds excellent, thanks for the heads-up :)
Aetos wrote: Wed Nov 25, 2020 10:06 pm Just finished the course today and must say I thoroughly enjoyed it! I especially liked how Dr. Nicholls drew on the ancient authors and particularly the poets to help describe daily life and the physical grandeur of ancient Rome. The course featured excerpts from the works of Livy, Virgil, Ovid, Martial, Juvenal, Seneca, Pliny and others. Pliny's description of Curio's theatre and Seneca's lamenting of living near a balnea helped me visualise daily life...
This is persuasive. To be able to visualise daily life in either Ancient Rome or Greece is important to me too.

When I started to read Plato's Symposium, I had difficulty imagining the room or seating layout -where the characters sat in relation to each other. The architecture.
Suck knowledge - a bit of background and culture helps make the texts more meaningful.

I was inspired by other threads re Melvyn Bragg's BBC Radio 4 'In Our Time' archived series. See episodes under 'Ancient Greece Era'.

[ I would link but as a newcomer it seems I am not allowed ?!]

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Re: Rome: A Virtual Tour of the Ancient City

Post by seneca2008 »

cb wrote:Carandari as you say is fantastic - I'm reading through the whole thing, which is taking time as you need to look at volume II every second paragraph, to see the tables and images that go with the text. The fact that it is being continuously updated doesn't bother me: like critical texts of works of literature, even if they will be improved in the future, the versions we have now are still worth investing a lot of personal time in.
Hi Chad I wondered whether you were still enjoying Carandini? I should have bought it when it was £107 on amazon. It's now £164!

I have been reading "The House of Augustus: A Historical Detective Story", T. P. Wiseman, 2019, Princeton University Press which casts doubt on the identification of "The house of Augustus" excavated by Carettoni from the 1950s onwards.

he says on p 28 ".....Iacopi and Tedone continued to treat the identification as a fact, and so the ‘palazzo di Ottaviano’ was born—a completely unattested and inherently improbable luxury dwelling created for his own use by the young Caesar in the early thirties BC and then destroyed before completion by the young Caesar himself, as part of the Apollo temple project. This chimerical idea has now been elaborated in imaginative detail by Andrea Carandini and Daniela Bruno in their book La casa di Augusto dai ‘Lupercalia’ al Natale (2008), and subsequently enshrined in the monumental Atlas of Ancient Rome by Carandini and Paolo Carafa (2012 and 2017)."

He goes on to criticise Carandini in quite trenchant terms:

"It is a remarkable story of misinterpretation, overconfidence, and wishful thinking, and it all began when a cautious, scrupulous archaeologist made an uncharacteristic historical guess, that the house he was excavating was that of Augustus himself.

Half a century later, the chief proponent of the ‘palazzo di Ottaviano’ is a very different sort of archaeologist. For Andrea Carandini, making historical guesses is what archaeology is all about:

"Ancient realities generally reach us in an incomplete and discontinuous form, but for that very reason reconstructions must aim at rediscovering the lost totality, avoiding the scepticisms of hyper-critics who wouldn’t want to reconstruct any- thing because of a vow of chastity they have made to ‘the Data’. The fillings of gaps should not be concealed, in fact they must be illustrated, demonstrating by graphic means the judgement of probability that the author has made about them. There is no ‘art of knowing’ and ‘art of not knowing’, as pusillanimous empiricists think." (Carandini 2008.148)"

It makes one wonder how well founded the reconstructions of Carandini are.

The tone of Wiseman's book is very polemical which makes it a great read. There have been a number of favourable reviews although the review at Bryn Mawr is rather sceptical. https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2020/2020.09.23/

It is refreshing to read something about the Roman Republic which acknowledges it as the oligarchy it was rather than a romanticised model of virtue which can stand as a forerunner of modern democracies. Also it was interesting to read about Augustus as seriously interested in restoring the Republic rather than cynically only interested in its outward appearance for the maintenance of his own personal power.

Wiseman has a new article in the latest Journal of Roman studies entitled "Access for Augustus: The ‘House of Livia’ and the Palatine Passages". I haven't managed to read it yet although it's waiting in the pile of things to be read. It looks very interesting with a number of plans and a couple of photographs.

I thought you might be interested in this given your enthusiasm for Roman archaeology. I found Wiseman really helpful in understanding the development of the Palatine and look forward to making another visit soon.
Persuade tibi hoc sic esse, ut scribo: quaedam tempora eripiuntur nobis, quaedam subducuntur, quaedam effluunt. Turpissima tamen est iactura, quae per neglegentiam fit. Et si volueris attendere, maxima pars vitae elabitur male agentibus, magna nihil agentibus, tota vita aliud agentibus.

cb
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Re: Rome: A Virtual Tour of the Ancient City

Post by cb »

Many thanks Seneca: I'll definitely read these materials (thanks for the recommendation!).

Cheers, Chad

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