Teatro di Marcello by Darkroom Daze

<b>Theatre of Marcellus (<i>Teatro di Marcello, Theatrum Marcelli</i>) seen from an eastern angle, Rome (Italy).</b> This was an outdoor theatre conceived by Julius Caesar, completed by his successor, Augustus Caesar, and inaugurated in 12 BC. It is named after Augustus' nephew Marcus Marcellus, whom Augustus outlived. The uppermost storey was added to make a large residence in the 16th Century and is now occupied by apartments. The visible building stone of the Roman storeys are faced in travertine, now very eroded, covering other building materials. It astonishes me that one could be living in a modern apartment in a block whose lower storeys are a 2-milennia-old theatre and well-known ancient monument associated with one of the most famous names of Roman history, Augustus Caesar (I mean - he's even in the Bible!). ----- <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theatre_of_Marcellus" rel="nofollow">en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theatre_of_Marcellus</a> The texture of travertine has been valued by builders and architects down the ages, and has been used as a building stone and ornamental stone throughout Rome's history. It is often polished, when used for interior walling. Although travertine occurs in various places in the Rome area, much of Rome's travertine comes from the historically worked area of Aque Albule, just W of Tivoli, and about 25 Km ENE of the centre of Rome. The quarries are so extensive that they show up as pale areas in Google Maps and Google Street View, which also show stockpiles of cut stone ready for shipment. The Aque Albule deposit covers 30 square kilometres. The stone is not only used in Rome, but over the years has been exported far and wide, as well as imitated in ceramic materials. <b>GEOLOGICAL NOTE</b> Travertine is a chemically precipitated limestone (i.e. composed of carbonate minerals, mainly calcium carbonate). The Rome travertines are Pleistocene in age, those at Aque Albule being less than 165,000 years old. The slightly acidic nature of rain dissolves older limestones some distance away in the Apennines and the water enters fault and joints. It is then geothermally heated by volcanic activity in the area, and water emerges as warm water springs along faults and joints in the Tivoli area. The deposits here formed on the floor of a shallow lake fed by these springs. The layering (on a scale of millimetres to centimetres) reflects the effects of currents in the lake. The brown layers are formed of other kinds of lake sediment incorporated into the travertine. ----- Heiken, G., Fumiciello, R. &amp; De Rita, D., 2005. The Seven Hills of Rome. A geological tour of the Eternal City. Princeton University Press, Princeton. 245 pp. ---------- <b><i>LONDON - PARIS - CATANIA - ROME - LONDON ----- DAY 8</i></b> <i>Photo from the <u>eighth day</u> of our crazy long distance rail trip from home (London) to Sicily. We had had an unscheduled but happy <u>first night</u> stopover in Paris because our Eurostar train out of London was badly delayed due to 'a fatality [unexplained - perhaps fortunately] on the train'. We therefore missed our onward sleeper train connection to Rome, so spent our <u>second day</u> in Paris. We left Paris that evening, on the equivalent sleeper train service a day later. We reached Rome during the <u>third day</u>, where we changed to a daytime train for Catania, Sicily, arriving there the same evening. Our <u>fourth day</u> was our first full day in Sicily, and we spent this in the centre of Catania itself. We spent our <u>fifth day</u> on an excursion to Mount Etna run by GeoEtnaExplorer. We chose this tour company because the guides are geologists. Our particular tour went high up on the flanks on the summit, but not to the summit proper. For this <u>sixth day</u>, our final full day in Sicily, we took the bus from Catania (our base) to Siracusa, in search of Ancient Greek remains, while also getting distracted by other interesting sights, and some excellent ice cream, at various points in the day. But perhaps the most spectacular thing was the huge thunderstorm which hit us in the early part of the afternoon. The <u>seventh day</u> was the start of our homeward journey, for which we took our sixth train of the trip, from Catania and ending with an overnight stop in Rome. We spent the <u>eighth day</u> on a long walk through the heart of Rome, where we hadn't been back since I worked there briefly many years ago, before continuing our way home to London by catching a sleeper train that evening to Paris. By the end of the whole holiday trip we had seen things and sites from ancient Greek time to modern, so the trip felt like a mini Grand Tour. Or given the rich mythology of Sicily, Etna and the Straits of Messina (Odysseus, the Cyclops, Scylla &amp; Charybdis, etc.) perhaps our trip was like a modern mini Odyssey of our times. Odysseus took ten years to get home. It took us ten trains - but no monsters. </i> ---------- <b>Photo</b> Darkroom Daze © <a href="http://bit.ly/47tbGf" rel="nofollow">Creative Commons</a>. If you would like to use or refer to this image, please attribute. ID: DSC_6847