The Ancient Ruins of Time

So far on this trip we have gone to so many ancient ruins and my favorite has to be the Roman Colosseum. I can’t even explain how amazing it was. I may be one of the most lucky people alive. So far we have been to at least 7 places and all of them are so extravagant, 3 of them we were with our Boppa Bill while he was visiting us. All of the ruins we have been kind of looked similar because all of the houses had no roofs and you could tell they were super old. My favorite part of the ruins are the bathhouses, they are so different and yet all the same.

The only thing I did not like was how there was trash in the little places, like inside old Roman toilets, and the cafeteria was in the middle of the ruin. I get that people will get hungry, but I bet they could’ve moved them to some place else. These little things take away from the full experience.

These are the places I have visited:

• Paestum, 2,500 years old
• Ostia Antica, 2,300 years old
• Pompeii, 2,000 years old
• Roman Colosseum, 1,937 years old
• Castello Gaeta, 1,400 years old (used up until 1992)
• Castello Aragonese, 600 years old
• Sistine Chapel, 551 years old

Paestum

The temples structure consists of columns surrounding the building that hold up the roof, and the to columns in the front are lower than all the other columns surrounding the building. After the greeks left the romans built on top of the original greek buildings, they evan filled in a pool to make a house. Paestum was originally for greek temples to honor the gods, neptune the god of the sea and athena the goddess of wisdom and probably the most powerful and resourceful of all the greek gods. it is very lucky of us to be able to see paestum because both gods are relevant to our trip, neptune the god of the sea and athena’s saying: quod obstat viae fit via which means, when the obstacle becomes the way.

Ostia Antica

Ostia Antica was a ancient roman city next to the tiber river. Over 100,000 people lived in this roman town and pretty much everyone abandoned Ostia Antica when the tiber river changed direction. The tiber river has been polluted for over a millennium, tracing back to the ancient roman sewer system. The people who lived in Ostia Antica were very smart, so smart that they figured out how to heat their baths. They used water heated in fiery furnaces under the raised floors of the bath. In Ostia Antica there were a lot of apartments, one in particular had a bar where people could hang out and drink beverages.

Pompeii

Between 10,000 and 20,000 people lived in Pompeii. The people that lived in Pompeii did not even know that they were living under a volcano until it erupted. When Mount Vesuvius erupted it didn’t erupt lava that flooded into the town and destroyed the town, it shot out poisonous gas and ash. The gas killed everybody that didn’t flee, and then the ash covered the entire town and buried it. Around 4,000 people escaped and the other 16,000 people died. When people excavated it they found air pockets in the form of humans and then they ejected clay into the empty pockets and made a mold of the people.

Roman Colosseum

The Roman Colosseum is the largest amphitheater ever built! The colosseum was the place where they held the gladiator games. These games were held to unite the people and celebrate their conquest over other men and animals. In these games, a gladiator- often a trained fighter from a poor background- would fight other men or animals. Sometimes the game keepers would make a fake forest where an animal would go thru a trap door in the floor and the man in the forest would not know where the animal is, so the animal could often attack and kill the man without them knowing. The gladiators are trained men that fight in the games, they don’t all use a sword, some of them used a mace or a net to catch their opponent and then a spear to stab them. The seats were set up kind of like in a football stadium. The emperor and virgin girls would sit in a box in front of the arena, The people born into royalty sat up front and then the regular people then the poor and only a few women sat at the very top. 400,000 people died in the colosseum and that averages to about 5 people dying every 5 minutes during the open hours of the colosseum.

Castello Gaeta

The Castle of Gaeta, also known as the Angevin Aragonese Castle, it is one of the symbols of the town on the edge of Gulf of Gaeta, that is on the Tyrrhenian Sea. Built from the sixth to seventh centuries A.D. the imposing fortress overlooks the city from above and has been expanded over the centuries. It is seen by visitors as two structures dating back to different periods. Castle Gaeta was last used in the 1990s for Italian citizens who refused the mandatory service of joining the military, if they said no they were sentenced to two years in prison. Before that, they would put the Nazi prisoners in there. One of the Nazis officers had a cell as big as our boat with hot water, fancy food delivered to him, and a balcony, his name was Herbert Kappler. Sometimes the prisoners would get tortured by being chained down and a drop of water repetitively landing on their forehead, it would drive them crazy.

Castello Aragonese

Castello Aragonese is on a volcanic rocky islet that attaches to the mainland of Ischia thru a passage. My family and I called it the torture castle because at castello Aragonese people dug up a lot of torture devices. The torture device that I think would cause the least amount of pain is the one that breaks your thumbs but if you think that it might be dark and scary you’d be wrong! It was one of my favorite castles with beautiful museums, churches, and even a garden. My favorite fact about the castle is that once the owners of the castle invited 140 people over for a feast, I was amazed that they did that. The castle was very big and the walkways had big domes over them. It was so big they even had a nun cemetery underground where nuns would put dead nuns on chairs with holes in the bottom so the fluids would drain out into cups. Also known as humors.

Sistine Chapel

The Vatican museum is a collection of buildings and exhibits that the church lets people see and wonder through in Vatican City, which itself sits inside the city of Rome. The Sistine Chapel is a big church inside the museum. It took Michelangelo 4 years to paint the Sistine Chapel. The museum has halls and halls of cool old painting, sculptures, maps, and a bunch of gifts from all of the countries in the world.