I have walked more than once along the Via Appia but I don’t remember seeing this mosaic. It shows a gladiator with a trident. The name of a gladiator equipped in this manner is Retiarius. Next time you are on the Appian Way consider visiting this Roman Villa, along with the various catacombs.
For #MosaicMonday a panel depicting a gladiatorial combat, recently discovered in the baths of a 2nd c. CE Roman villa at Santa Maria Nova, along the Appian Way. We see a retiarius ('net-man') called Montanus and the referee Antonius with his staff #RomanArchaeology pic.twitter.com/FksWdT6Bsi
— Giacomo Savani (@GiacomoSavani) February 14, 2022
A few years ago we read about a vineyard where people had been digging. They discovered a vineyard that was well preserved. At least with a vineyard above there is no chance of a plow or other tool damaging the mosaic.
Roman remains may be found and excavated but sometimes nature reclaims them. These ruins were discovered in 1882 but nature returned and hid them safely away again. Such tweets should inspire archeological departments, and film and TV or BA Media Studies to document the process of re-excavating these ruins, with photogrammetry and other modern tech used.
When you walk in specific European cities you find that history is either very visible, or hidden just beneath the surface. In Rome and other places, every time someone digs they find ruins. As in the images below we see that the same is true, in this instance of Hvar, in Croatia. Imagine how many tens of thousands of people have walked along this street, without realising that there were mosaics.
What is nice in this instance, is that at least part of this ruin remains to be seen, protected by the street above. The buildings may have destroyed sections of this archeological site, but enough remains to allow people to take a glimpse into the past.
When I started writing about the Roman civilisation in the summer of 1996 content was still new on the web. Wikipedia didn’t exist and we still relied on books and encyclopedias. We still had to visit ruins and more. Today the web has matured to such an extent that you can find tweets about the Roman civilisation every day. This means that history is not updated when books or newspaper articles come out. It is updated on a weekly, or even hourly basis. The beauty of tweets, as opposed to blog posts or articles, is that you can share snippets of information, as you get them.
When we have seen hundreds of statues and other objects over the decades of our lives, it is easy to assume that statues and other objects are just statues, that they have no colour, but of course they did. What was just a relief becomes a 3d painting after colour is added. It brings sculptures and reliefs back to life.
With 3d modelling it is easy to reproduce an exact replica of a painting or sculpture and then imagine how it would have been colouried. Tweets are frequently shared, that show statues and other objects as they would have looked when new. With mosaics we see them dry and dull, but with water they come back to life.
I considered playing with colours in photo editing software to bring colours from a mosaic back to vivid life.
I like archeological twitter because it shows us curiousities every day of the week, several times a day. I like the image of the mosaic below because you see that it was quite deep, and hidden. Imagine digging down and coming across such a sight and site.