Many, many places have I loved in London, but Highgate Cemetery has a special place in my heart. Construction began on this Victorian burial ground in 1839, when the city had long outgrown real estate for the dead. Only the very wealthy afforded tombs and mausoleums there. Tourists today can seek out the graves of […]
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In the most remote parts of central Pennsylvania there are a string of state game lands that go by the name of “St Anthony’s Wilderness”. And on a mountain ridge, accessible only by hiking in, are the ruins of a small coal-mining community around the village known as Yellow Springs. An identifying sign along the
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This is a picture of a Medieval garderobe, which back in the day could refer to a nook outside a castle wall which had a seat for defecating. Everyone needs to go, perhaps at least once a day, and those castle walls were high up. It actually sounds pretty hygienic — except for the fact
Erfurt Latrine Disaster of 1184 Read More »
There are so very many eccentric and grand homes built by early 20th-century millionaires, and they draw me like honey draws a fly. The exquisite pictures here all feature just one structure in the palace complex called the Quinta da Regalreira built by Antonio Augusto Carvalho Monteiro dating to 1904 — it is the “Initiation
How we treat the dead reflects much about what the living believe. In the Ancient Mediterranean, pagan cultures considered the proper burial of the deceased to be of critical importance: otherwise, the dead person’s spirit would have a restless afterlife. On the other hand, the world of the living was to be kept separate from
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Pittsburgh’s unusual geography — with three rivers that conflate at different spots amidst steep hillsides — made it difficult for pedestrians to traverse. Starting in the 1870s, German immigrants started building funicular railcars to make getting around easier. Today only two of these remain, and the one featured here is the Duquesne Incline. Built
Take a moment to ingest the various components of this Late Roman artistic scene, because they’re really weird. This is just one small part of an enormous (36’x23′) floor mosaic discovered just last year during the COVID lockdowns on an English farm in Rutland. The discovery is quite the find: first, the enormous room
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Yup, you are seeing what you think you are seeing: it’s a sex scene, and it comes from the Lupanar of Pompeii, the largest brothel discovered in the famous Ancient Roman city. “Lupanar” translates both as “brothel” and “wolf-den,” and another name for a prostitute is “lupa”. Calling a sex worker a wolf is
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The Pantheon of Ancient Rome is one of my favorite buildings because its architecture is so distinct. The late second-century historian Cassius Dio attributed the dedication of the temple to “all the Gods,” but he was speculating — ‘pantheus” might have referred to one deity (albeit a superlative one). Why is that important? Well,
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The Ancient Greek art that most of us know features able-bodied people up-front: athletes with six-pack abs and fit and trim muscular physiques. But these images skew what we know to be the reality for many Ancient Greeks, and recent work by Dr. Debby Sneed aims to show that disabled people were not only commonplace,
The Bodies of Ancient Greeks Read More »
What could be more fun on a Friday than stories about travel and tawdry Popes? How about the Baroque-era Vatican in 17th-century Rome and a pope from the ridiculously wealthy Italian family, who went to war for Papal territory and drove the apostolic see into great debt? Pictured here is the Baldacchino, the enormous
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One of the eeriest Medieval practices was the ceremonial burial of the anchorite, or the “Servicium Recludendi” as one litany calls it. Imagine being in the head-space of an anchorite, in which you were so concerned about devoting your life to prayer and abjuration of this world that you willingly entombed yourself in a prayer
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To the northwest of the Fertile Crescent of ancient Mesopotamia, in the southeast of modern Turkey, lie the ruins of one of the most important archaeological sites in human history: the stone monuments of Göbekli Tepe. Only discovered in the 1990s (earlier archaeologists has thought the remains medieval), Göbekli Tepe sprawls over twenty acres
Here you see La Posada, constructed in 1929 in Winslow Arizona — the last of the Fred Harvey Hotels still in operation. The Fred Harvey Company’s restaurants and hotels shaped the architectural landscape and culture of the American Southwest — packaging the American Indian, Spanish Mission Revival, and US cowboy culture for middle-class tourism. And
This is a Sheela-na-gig: a type of statue or carving found on European Christian buildings from the Central Middle Ages showing a naked woman overtly displaying her vulva. Whatever messages they were intended to make — fertility blessing, pagan remnant, or grotesque ridicule — contrasted with the high value of female virginity promoted by the
This is a Late Roman mosaic of a peacock, probably from north Africa. When the Roman state withdrew its armies and state apparatus from Britain in the late fourth century, the peacocks that had dotted the wealthy estates of the Roman aristocracy went away as well. But we would be grossly mislead to imagine that
Ancient Romans were so used to human brutality and violence that they took its existence for granted. Whether the violence was directed by slave owners to their human property, on display at the regular games and gladiator matches, or observed at the very public slaughtering of animals for religious sacrificial purposes, it was normalized.
Ancient Romans and Animal Brutality Read More »
Let’s talk about apotheoses in domes in art, shall we? This term comes from Ancient Greek and means “to make into a God.” Some heroes of Classical myths ended up ascending into the heavens to be with the other Olympians, such as Hercules. In Ancient Rome, emperors beloved by the Senate could be given the
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This is a picture of Hvalsey Church, a Norse ruin from a settlement in Greenland that was abandoned in the 1400s. Scientists and historians have recently amended their ideas about what caused the collapse of this culture. In the late 900s, some Vikings from Iceland migrated to Greenland, setting up small communities that lasted
This collage shows different angles of one of Washington DC’s lesser-known architectural wonders. The Heurich House, aka the “Brewmaster’s Castle,” is located in DC’s trendy Dupont Circle neighborhood. Built between 1892-1894 for the German immigrant Christian Heurich and his wife Mathilde, the Heurich House is a terrific example of Richardsonian Romanesque, one of my favorite
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