The Day I am going to be sharing with you is June 9th, when the class traveled to Ostia, which was a Roman port city on the mouth of the Tiber.
On arrival in Ostia we were surprised to find the city fairly well intact. This could be properly portrayed to you through many of the pictures that I definitely did take, but unfortunately I still have no way to upload them onto a computer. The first example of well preserved structures that we were brought to were 'medianum' which were apartments from the Hadrianic period. The thing I found most interesting about these buildings, although potentially boring to the history buff, was their size. The examples that we got to see were approximately 1600 square feet, and the average size was 2000 square feet. To explain, a modern 2000 square foot house can, fairly easily, provide 3 bedrooms, 2 baths, and a 2 stall garage. You can see examples of floor plans for houses this size here After looking at the apartments, we traveled to the Barracks of the Vigiles. This is the area that housed the fire-fighters which were a Roman Cohort (1/10 of a legion). The thing I found most intriguing wasn't the structure itself, but the idea of fire-fighters being part of the Roman military. I still have trouble imagining the intricacies of the Roman societal structure, or any ancient societal structure for that matter. I even find the incentive of providing the vigiles with free grain supplied by the emperor after 3 years of service to be fascinating. No matter how long I am in Rome, I will be unable to comprehend the ancient society, and will be baffled by it at almost every turn. Just as I cannot comprehend how, now, people are content with throwing their garbage on the streets and parking cars in crosswalks and on curbs when they know they are going to get hit regardless. Seriously though, every car here has dents in it.
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