Rome via Brooklyn

417 words, 2 minutes read time

For Day 5, we visited the Ostia Antica and had a nice picnic amongst the ruins during our lunch break. I absolutely loved the black and white mosaics used at the site, it highlights the artistic sense of the Ostians super well. I visited the Vatican Necropolis this morning with a few others, and we saw more of this type of mosaic there! Does this mean the black and white mosaics were spread across the Lazio region or are there specifically more instances of it in Ostia? I also found the difference in the gods depicted (Neptune for Ostia, Bacchus for Rome) intriguing. Unfortunately, I won’t be doing much else interesting today besides chores and coursework, but my body needs a break from the constant movement.

Compared to the Roman archaeological sites we’ve visited, this site preserved what everyday structures and life for an Ostian may have looked like instead of the elaborate temples and shrines preserved in Rome. For instance, learning about the workings of their bathhouses and going inside their surprisingly well-preserved tavern made it a lot easier to picture myself living here. I would prefer living in Ostia over Rome, simply because of its closeness to the water. However, I don’t know how much worse Tiber River/Tyrrhenian Sea flooding would be in this location compared to the latter.

Regarding social hierarchy, I’m not sure how much power women held in Roman society then compared to their male counterparts, but I would love to be a member of a trade guild, such as weavers or fishers. I’ve learned that Medieval/Early Modern European trade guilds often had a patron saint of that guild or the village they’re located in, so I wonder if ancient Roman/Ostian guilds had a similar practice with Pagan gods. We also visited the statue of Cybele, or the Magna Mater, which was an amazing example of how local folklore developed during ancient times. This goddess’s relation to syncretism and Mithraism was really useful for my upcoming solo presentation!

The highlight of yesterday was 100% the beach. I can’t emphasize enough how much I missed swimming in the ocean after years of psyching myself out of doing so: I felt like a kid on the Breezy Point beaches in the summer again once I started to smell the saltwater on our walk there. By jumping in the water almost immediately, though, it washed off my sunblock and I got sunburnt (again). Maybe Apollo just loves my shoulders.