8/7 - Rome-Naples (Part 2)
I had some spare time before we were due to take the train to Naples, so I went to the Etruscan museum. Very irritatingly, it was all the way in, at the end of the Villa Borghese. Though this meant that I could take the tram back.
Busto - Ritratto virile
As you can tell, most of the item labels were in Italian.
Antefissa A. Testa femminile, 530-20 BC
Urna Cineraria a forna di kline, Necropolis di monte abatone
I was trying to take the Sposi sarcophagus, but a woman told me that photography was not allowed, pointing at the CCTV camera above me. This was very weird. For one, the museum charged adults €4 and EU students €2 - in my previous experience, photography was only banned in expensive (so that they could reap even more supernormal profit) museums that were well-traficked (there's a reason why this was at the end of the park). Also, no one was going to buy Etruscan postcards. Most pertinently, nowhere in the museum did I see signs anywhere in the museum, nor at the entrance, saying that photography was not permitted. As such, I was very indignant. Crazy Italians. Maybe she had some superstition about the CCTV camera, believing that if I took a photograph, it would stop working.
There was a floor with discourses on Etruscan linguistics - grammar, word borrowing from Greek and such. Heavy stuff.
More than half the museum was closed for refurbishment. Gah.
Helmet in Italian is "Elmo".
Mosaic on the floor - the museum is housed in a converted villa.
Specchio-s, 5th century AD
High relief of Temple A, Pyrgi
Amusingly, there were Etruscan fakes. In the 18th and 19th centuries, due to new museums and collector interest, fakes were made - mostly hybrid pastiches. They did have a real fake though, and it was even artifically tempered so it'd look old/weathered.
Terracotta sarcophagus, 175-50 BC, Tuscany
The pottery was almost all either Greek or Greek-style; even the Archaic and Geometric styled pottery looked Greek.
Faliscan red-figure kylike (Drinking cup). The saying translates as: "Today I will drink wine, tomorrow I will do without"
Bronze Strigil from Palestrina hill. The largest I've ever seen.
Palestrina hill, Lastrine di Rivestimento d'avorio con guerrieri
Cista ficoroni opera dell'artista novios plautins, 350-30 BC
Palestrina hill, Lastrine di rivestimento d'avorio con figura femminile con tirso, armato, Hermes ed armato
There were a lot of grave goods. I wanted to see grave frescos, but I guess I'll have to visit either the actual graves or the museums in Tuscany for them.
Cartiere necropolis, Cratere a calice etrusco a figure russe. Produzione vulcente. 360 BC.
Apollo di Veia
There was a guard here, so I cunningly positioned myself such that the doorway concealed myself from him and snapped.
Luckily, the trams from the Etruscan museum were working. This sort of strike is okay, since the trams and buses were still working - the strike was major enough to be annoying and for the workers' grievances to be noticed, but not bad enough to shut the whole city down (also being on a Saturday and not for the entire day).
Even if the ticket machines on buses/trams are spoilt you still need a valid ticket. Wth?! Yet, on the tram down I noticed that almost no one validated their tickets. Was this due to the European tradition of not paying for transport, or did they have monthly tickets? But then there were too many of them for it to be totally due to monthly tickets.
Another Cock Bus
I realised I'd forgotten to take the cliched Colosseum shot, and so went back for it:
I was amused that half the people in Roman costume around the Colosseum and similar places (though I didn't see Popes around the Vatican) preying on tourists for photo-taking purposes have visible tattoos.
Maybe Italian rail has the trains late on purpose, so people will have to pay fees to change their ticket reservations. Maybe this is how they keep fares low.
Amazingly, we arrived in Naples only 3 minutes late. We wanted to buy tickets to our hostel, but the damn ticket machines both swallowed our money (€1 and €0,40), so we just walked through the open gates - no one would catch us at this hour anyway.
The receptionist at our hostel looked young and was very blur (a short while after we entered our room, she ran in and asked for our passports), and as such reminded us of Screwed Up Girl.
The first entry of my July secret diaries is out. If you can't access it, contact me.