The ancient Latin city of Gabii was a city-state that was both a neighbour of, and a rival to, Rome in the first millennium BC. Gabii is located in the region of Italy once known as Latium. The site of Gabii was occupied since at least the 10th century BC until its decline in the second and third centuries AD. Major excavations have been carried out on the cemetery of Osteria dell'Osa in Gabii. These tombs have been divided into 14 groups, with each group exhibiting a set of distinctive traditions and each believed to represent a different community which has settled in the area.
The Ara Pacis Museum in Rome is a striking modern building designed by architect Richard Meier, which has been criticised for its lack of congruity with its historical surroundings.
It houses the Ara Pacis, or "Altar of Peace". The Ara Pacis is a stunning work of Roman art, which was discovered in the 1930s. It was commissioned in 13 BC to celebrate the return of Emperor Augustus from Gaul and Hispania.
This 1:250 scale model of Ancient Rome was built over 36 years by Italo Gismondi and is one of the key features of the Museo della Civiltà Romana, or the Museum of Roman Civilisation. The model is representative of Rome during the rule of Constantine in the fourth century and features highly detailed reconstructions of several iconic landmarks including the Colosseum, Pantheon and Circus Maximus.
Museo della Civiltà Romana, or the Museum of Roman Civilisation, is based to the south of Rome's city centre, in the 1930s-era zone known as EUR. Built under the influence of a Fascist regime, the museum's building shows the hallmarks of that era's architecture: an imposing entrance that dwarfs the visitor, classical-style columns and super-human size spaces with high ceilings, large steps and often windowless walls. The displays focus on the civilisation of the ancient Romans, from the beginnings of their culture up until the fifth century. The most well known exhibit is a large plaster model of the city of ancient Rome by the Italian archaeologist Italo Gismondi (started in 1935 and completed in 1971).
The museum's website claims that it "unites in its halls an extraordinary and rich display of various aspects of ancient Rome, documented in their entirety, through the combination of casts, models and reconstructions of works conserved in museums throughout the world and of monuments from all over the Roman Empire."
The museum was inaugurated in 1955.
The Drunken Satyr (also known as the Barberini Faun) is a human-sized marble statue, depicting a Roman version of a Greek satyr. It is currently on display at The Glyptothek in Munich, Germany.
Satyrs were creatures of Greek mythology, human-like but with a woodland animal's features (notice that the statue has a tail). They were often associated with sex-drive. The satyr in this statue is no exception - reclining with its spread legs, drawing attention to its genitals, it has become one of the most famous pieces of homoerotic classical art in the world.
A well-known marble copy of the Drunken Satyr was sculpted by Edmé Bouchardon at the French Academy in Rome in 1726. It currently resides in the Louvre Museum.
Lupanar is the world's oldest known brothel, situated in the ancient Roman city of Pompeii. It is particularly famous for the erotic paintings that adorn its walls, grahpically depicting men and women in an array of sexual positions.
Pompeii was a famously decadant city. At its peak it had as many as 35 brothels - one for every 71 adult males. Lupanar - which translates as "den of the she wolves" - was the biggest and most famous, with 10 rooms. These spaces were typically plainly furnished - with perhaps just a mattress on a brick platform to serve as a bed. The prostitutes were most likely slaves, usually of Greek and Oriental extraction.
Wealthy Romans generally didn't visit brothels as they had slaves and concubines, but the presence of an upper-floor with more spacious rooms and finer decoration suggests that better services were reserved for higher-ranking clientele. 134 different examples of graffiti have been identified scrawled into the walls at Lupanar. Many of them are bragging tales of mens' sexual exploits, written in crude and explicit language, verifying the building's usage as a brothel.
The Capuchin Catacombs, in Palermo on the island of Sicily, Italy, are a series of burial catacombs below the city's Capuchin monastery. They house over 8,000 bodies, many of them embalmed or preserved in glass cases. It represents perhaps the world's most macabre tourist attraction, as well as a quite incredible historical record.
The catacombs were excavated in the 16th century after the monastery outgrew its graveyard. Brother Silvestro of Gubbio, a monk, was the first person buried there, in 1599. As well as more monks and friars, people of all walks of life would follow - doctors, lawyers, bankers and artists included, as well as their families.
Their bodies were dried out on ceramic pipes, then sometimes treated with vinegar. It became the fashion for bodies to be entombed in their clothes - some would even leave instructions for their outfits to be changed regularly. The last body buried there, in the 1920s, is perhaps the best known - Rosalia Lombardo, a child who had died from pneumonia. She was preserved so expertly by notable embalmer Alfredo Salafia that she has been nicknamed "Sleeping Beauty."
The catacombs are open to the public, although photography is prohibited and iron bars have been erected to prevent people tampering or posing with the bodies.
Palazzo Strozzi hosts three major exhibitions a year; it also has a permanent exhibition on the history of the building. It hosts other events too, including lectures and programmes designed to appeal to a people of all ages and nationalities.
The building is one of Florence's finest examples of Renaissance architecture. It has been the city's largest temporary exhibition space since World War II. Previous exhibitions include The Peggy Guggenheim Collection (1949), Gustav Klimt (1992), La Natura Morta Italiana (2003), Botticelli and Filippo Lippi (the most visited exhibition in Italy in 2004), and Cézanne in Florence (Italy's the most popular exhibition of 2007).
Ötzi the Iceman is an exceptionally well-preserved natural human male mummy, found in 1991 in the Schnalstal glacier in the Ötztal Alps, near Hauslabjoch on the border between Austria and Italy. He is believed to have lived around 3300 BC, and died either as a result of exposure on the snowy mountain, or after being bludgeoned to death in a fight. He is Europe's oldest natural mummy, and offeres a fascinating glimpse of Chalcolithic period humans.
He was around 45 when he died. Because his body was covered with ice, it was largely preserved before decomposition began to set in. After being found by German tourists Helmut and Erika Simon in September 1991, his body was haphazardly removed by Austrian authorities, then taken to a morgue in Innsbruck. Because it was later established that his body was found inside the Italian border, he was eventually handed over to Italian authorities. Since 1998 he has been on display at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano.
Volterra was an important Etruscan centre, known as Velathri to the Etruscans. Situated on a Pliocene ridge 541m above sea level, it was a settlement since neolithic times and was then colonised by the Etruscan Velathri tribe during the 8th century BC, while the city wall (7km long) was built in the fourth century BC. The main industry there was based on copper and silver mining, as well as agriculture. It became one of the 12 important Etruscan city states but in the third century BC came under Roman control after the battle of Vadimone in 283 BC. During the 80s BC, the town now known as Volaterrae by the Romans supported Marius during the civil war between Marius and Sulla. After Marius's defeat the dictator Sulla inflicted a two-year siege on Volaterrae, after which the city was sacked. One of the town's important families, the Caecinae, were on good terms with Cicero, who persuaded Sulla to drop his sanctions on the city. An impressive Augustan-era amphitheatre, some fourth century AD baths as well as an Etruscan acropolis, are some of the important heritage sites in Volterra.
