Upheaval in Downtown Rome

Good morning, everyone. This is the maiden voyage of my new blog, and I welcome you all. I'm looking forward to the adventure with all of you. This is a work in progress, and I'm hopeful to have all the bells and whistles up in the sidebar to the right shortly!

It was announced yesterday by the Italian newspaper LaRepubblica that because of a meeting of the Flp (Federazione Lavoratori Pubblici, essentially a giant union of public workers) many Roman archaeological sites—including the Colosseum, the Roman Forum, and the Palatine—will be closed to tourists today (July 14, 2013) from 5–7 pm and next Sunday (July 21, 2013) from 9–12. This comes on the heels of two strikes in June that closed the Colosseum for several hours as workers protested lack of pay. The same newspaper also released a report this week that suggested that the financial crisis in Italy is hitting ancient monuments and museums especially hard. I culled a few facts from that article:

The Mibac (Ministero per i beni artistici e culturali) reports a further decline in resources, 24% less than in 2008; more specifically, the funds for maintaining Italy's enormous amount of public works have dropped precipitously, from 276 million Euros to 115 million Euros—a reduction of 58% over the past year. Even more disturbing is that the monies reserved for cases of emergency went down over 10 million Euros in a single year. Finally, the amount designated for ordinary programs of public works

came in at 47.6 million Euros, down from 70.5 in 2012 and (shockingly) down from 201 million in 2004. In other words, we can expect further closures, protests, and degradation of ancient sites.

Even in cases where we have private funds, Roman bureaucracy often causes inordinate delays. Take, for instance, the 25 million Euros promised by a private individual, the shoe magnate Diego della Valle, back in August 2010 to renovate the Colosseum, have not yet been put into action because of holdups caused by protests and bureaucracy. The new mayor, Ignazio Marino, elected in June, has promised this week that "within ten days the restoration project will get underway." We'll see about that—he's up to his armpits in backlash since he's announced that the Via dei Fori Imperiali will become pedestrian only. Those of you familiar with the city will know that this is a major route through the center of town and that the closure will cause great headaches. Poor Via Labicana.

View of dirty Colosseum (my picture)

Meanwhile, in Pompeii, the UNESCO folks are back, demanding that the administrators of Pompeii act on their earlier report, else be removed from the list of UNESCO heritage sites. In 2011, after the collapse of the so-called  "House of the Gladiator" (Schola Armaturarum) the UN branch that oversees world heritage sites, visited the site and composed a full-scale report on the status of Pompeii—despite its technical nature, it's very readable. UNESCO gave the folks at Pompeii until January of this year to come up with a plan to shore up at-risk buildings and renovate many of the areas that have fallen into disrepair. And just yesterday, there was yet another collapse of a portion of the wall of the so-called Odeon, or "Small Theater." Fortunately, no one was struck by falling stone, and the damage was rather light, but the timing could not have been more fortuitous—perhaps the administration of Pompeii can get its act together to put a realistic and beneficial plan in motion. A fine English summary of the current call for action can be found here.

Side view of the Odeon in Pompeii (LaRepubblicaNapoli)

Weekly tidbits:

Emergency excavations on the Via Appia at the third mile (near the Villa of Maxentius) unearthed a substantial stretch of the original road, showing ruts where carriages and other vehicles bore into the considerably large basalt stones.

Excavations at Piazzale Ostiense (near the Pyramid of Cestius, which is also undergoing restoration to clean the smog-stained surface) unearthed a surprising find: a millstone of the Pompeian type. This find is not entirely surprising, given that the area was the location for off-loading grain transported up from Ostia by boat.

For those of you who saw the poorly titled "Pompeii: Life and Death in a Roman Town" (the whole show was about skeletons found in Oplontis—but that's show biz), where the bombshell was announced that two of the skeletons showed signs of congenital syphilis, here is a good scientific article on the whole debate on pre-Columbian syphilis.