I decided to catch an afternoon train to Rome so that I could visit the Archaeology Museum in Naples. This was a very good decision. The bottom floor houses the Farnese Collection of monumental sculptures from Rome. Unlike the Greco-Roman statues in other museums, these are by and large not smashed to bits (though this is due to restoration in most cases). The sculptures themselves are immense. One sculpture, called the Farnese Bull, is a larger than life depiction of two people tying a woman to a bull (it's from a myth). This was carved from one block of marble that must have been the size of a Hummer before the sculptor worked it, and the detail is striking. Other sculptures include a resting Hercules, and a bunch of gods and emperors between 10-20 feet tall.
The second floor explained why the Pompeii site had so few mosaics and frescoes. Most of the best ones were hacked out of the site and put in this museum. This is actually for the best, as they are fragile, and being in a climate controlled museum where nobody can touch them or step on them is better than leaving them in situ, but what a wondrous sight it must have been when they were digging up Pompeii and came across frescoes, mosaics, statues, and household objects in bronze and silver that they now display here.
However, neither the statues nor the Pompeii stuff is the most interesting thing in the museum. That honor goes to the contents of the so-called Secret Room. Secret Room is actually a misnomer, but you can't name this room after what's actually in it, because "The Gallery of Penises and Naughty Statues" is not really a good thing to name something in your museum. Nonetheless, this gallery brings to light something that isn't taught in schools when the Romans are discussed: the fact that they were very, very open about sexuality, nudity, and eroticism. The penis was used as a symbol of fertility and prosperity, and so when they found Pompeii, there were dick statues and paintings everywhere. They were placed at crossroads, stores would paint Mercury with a penis in his hand instead of a cadeuceus to ward off evil, and most people had some statues in their garden that are waaaay not appropriate by today's standards. In particular, there was a statue found of the satyr Pan having sex with a goat (which I guess is only half bestiality), along with a Superbad level case of bronze penises with wings or other adornments. My friend Dan Hoff once got in trouble in Latin class for "demonstrating sexual prowess with Corinthian columns" (he held two paper columns up to his crotch and pretended to have two organs). Turns out that instead of giving him a disciplinary mark, our Latin teacher should have given us a history lesson, because that was about the most Roman thing anybody did in that class...
After that, I got on a train to Rome, watched the US advance, and then celebrated by drinking a Budweiser in Italy.
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