Posted on 03/28/2016 9:57:32 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
A 1,900-year-old building that would have served as an apartment within the estate of Roman Emperor Hadrian has been discovered in Tivoli, Italy. The building is full of lavish artwork, archaeologists said.
"The exceptionally well-preserved decoration of the rooms includes mosaic floors with both vegetal and abstract patterns, marble revetments [panels], wall paintings, and an almost entire ceiling fresco," the archaeologists wrote in the summary of a paper recently presented at the Archaeological Institute of America's annual meeting in San Francisco.
Much of the art is now in pieces, and the process of excavating and conserving it is a difficult one, said Francesco de Angelis, a professorof art history and archaeology at Columbia University in New York, who is directing the team's work.
(Excerpt) Read more at livescience.com ...
Much of the art in the ancient apartment was found in pieces and needs to be conserved and put back together. Researchers say that it is liking putting together a jigsaw puzzle. The photo shows a small part of the fresco that covered the ceiling of the building. The colors of the fresco are well preserved, having survived nearly two millennia of time. When the fresco is put back together, archaeologists will show it to the public.
Realtor: “Yes, it’s 1,900 years old, but it’s got good bones.”
They used the same thing to color their walls as Kraft uses to color their mac and cheese!
Some things are timeless.
I have toured the sites in Tivoli, it was gorgeous and worth going there.
“It is open concept and features granite, marble, travertine and quartz.”
“It just seems a little pricey for a unique fixer upper opportunity, that’s all. What do you think, Egon?”
“I think this building should be condemned. There’s serious metal fatigue in all the load-bearing members, the wiring is substandard, it’s completely inadequate for our power needs, and the neighborhood is like a demilitarized zone.”
Also similar, if they dug up a 1900 year old box of KM&C, they could still cook it up and eat it with the same general eating experience.
/rimshot!
“You’ve gotta try out this pole!” (that’s something the Emperor Hadrian used to say all the time, but in a different context)
Actually I meant the color of Kraft mac and cheese but Tivoli too I’ll bet. ;-)
Unbelievable almost how vibrant those colors are after 1900 years.
The miracle of lead paint!
I have to wonder how many owners it went through before it finally fell into ruin, but regardless, it’s remarkable — it must still have been buried for at least 15 centuries.
Lead paint gets a bad rap.
The only reason lead paint was vilified was to excuse the incredibly low test scores of ghetto children, after the inception of the Great Society.
I rarely tell you but I love all of your pings. Fascinating subjects and I read them all.
If you go to the original article, you will find a link to pics of the buildings as they are now and a digital reconstruction of them as they were.
One of the most interesting is a building called the Serapeum which is where all the ancients wore nothing but serapes imported from pre-Columbian Mexico by Phoenician merchants.
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