File:Wanderings in the Roman campagna (1909) (14779716414).jpg

Identifier: cu31924020498980 (find matches)
Title: Wanderings in the Roman campagna
Year: 1909 (1900s)
Authors: Lanciani, Rodolfo Amedeo, 1847-1929
Subjects: Art
Publisher: Boston and New York, Houghton Mifflin company
Contributing Library: Cornell University Library
Digitizing Sponsor: MSN

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ind, but out of sheer decrepitude of thetrusses; and at that late period (the fifth century afterChrist) some of the statues were still standing on theirpedestals, an Apollo, a Hercules, and a heroic figure inthe reception room, a Paris in the dining hall, a Marsvasin the northern garden, etc. When these statues fell,there were already three feet of rubbish collected on themarble or mosaic floors. The telltale strata of this rub-bish not having been disturbed by previous excavators,from the day the roof had caved in to the spring of1884, we were able to gather from their study all theseinteresting details. One of the most irritating problems in this subject ofthe extinction of life in the Camj^agna is that concern-ing the fate of Ostia, a city of fifty thousand inhabitants,a city of wealthy merchants in whose hands the tradeof the Mediterranean was concentrated. Ostia did notdie a sudden death, like the Vesuvian cities; it was nottaken by storm and destroyed at one stroke by barbarian
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THE CITHARCEDE APOLLO FOUND IN THE VILLA OF VOCONIUS POLLIO THE LAND OF SATURN 59 hosts, like Concordia Sagittaria; it was not 1)uried underits own pall of ruins and never disturbed in its rest;Ostia died a lingering death, by starvation, inanition,consumption, decrepitude, pillaged at leisure by foreignand domestic marauders, open to all treasure-seekers,and only exposed to such ravages of nature as came fromthe periodical floods of the Tiber and from the growthof shrubs and trees over its mounds. Such being thecase, we ought to have found Ostia a city of bare walls,stripped of every movable fixture, not to speak of worksof art and objects of value. Nothing of the kind has hap-pened. Some of its houses and public buildings lookas if they had been deserted by their inhabitants andcustodians only yesterday, and their works of art leftintact. In the excavations of 1858 led by Visconti, ahouse was discovered in the Strada delle Pistrine, inthe larariuni of which some fifty bronze and sil

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