Fears grow over condition of Rome's 280-year-old Trevi Fountain

By NICK PISA

PUBLISHED: 05:45 EST, 11 June 2012 | UPDATED: 11:14 EST, 11 June 2012

Worries: Surveyors were today examining the facade of Rome's famous Trevi Fountain after several pieces of decorative cornicing fell away

Tourists looked on as barriers were put up around one side of the square to prevent them from getting to close in case there were further falls and an exposed black iron rod could be seen from where the cornicing had fallen.

Some were also disappointed as they had arrived on a Monday morning when the fountain is switched off for its weekly cleaning and maintenance.

Umberto Broccoli, superintendent of Rome's artistic heritage, dismissed claims of disrepair and instead blamed the fall of the plaster on heavy snow which blanketed the city in February in what were the heaviest falls in more than 30 years.

He said: 'There is absolutely nothing to be worried about. The pieces that fell away from the Trevi Fountain were small decorative pieces of leaf cornicing.

Problems: The incident comes after similar 'falls' at the Colosseum and the ancient walls encircling Rome

'In reality it was only only piece actually fell away we took the off other pieces as a safety precaution because they could have fallen away at any time and were therefore a danger but it was just a preventive measure.'

Mr Broccoli added: 'It looks like there has been some water infiltration and we suspect it was from the heavy snow and rain of the past winter. I have been up there and examined the area and it is fine.'

Fears: The Trevi Fountain incident immediately prompted claims that the state of some of the city's most famous monuments is at a critical level

However, opposition city councillors from the Green Party were not convinced and party chief Angelo Bonelli urged Romans to 'keep their eyes open for other signs of disrepair on the city's monuments'.

He added: 'The monuments of Rome are going through a period of poor upkeep that is without precedent.

'The latest incident is very serious and comes only a few months after what happened at the Colosseum.

'At this point we are seriously left asking ourselves just how good is the upkeep and maintenance of the city's monuments and artistic heritage. What else has to happen before this issue is looked at properly?'

The fountain was commissioned by Pope Clement XII and Nicolo Salvi and work began on it in 1732 and it was eventually completed 30 years later.

It stands on the spot where an ancient Roman aqueduct brought water to the city more than 2,000 years ago and has been the backdrop for several films inlcuding Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita and Roman Holiday starring Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck.

Each week when the fountain is drained around €3,000 in coins is collected by cleaners and this goes towards charities in the city.

But police have often caught people with nets trying to scoop up the money thrown in. The last time the fountain had a major restoration was in 1991 although there was a smaller one 12 years ago.

It’s all Greek to me! Has the Royal Mint picked the ‘wrong’ gods for its Olympic coins?

By James Andrews | Yahoo! Finance UK – Fri, May 4, 2012 08:24 BST

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The Royal Mint 2012 Olympics gold coins - with Roman gods

The Royal Mint has already hit the headlines with its Olympics-themed coins, after a 50p piece explaining the offside rule caused debate over whether it had misunderstood the rule.

Now it seems to have done it again, after releasing a set of coins with what look like the wrong gods on them.

[Gallery: See all the Olympics 50p designs]

For the Royal Mint has struck a whole series of new coins celebrating London 2012, with the latest to be released made of gold.

The collection features the Olympic rings as well as events at the Games and classical gods representing the Olympic motto of “Citius, Altius, Fortius” – Latin for “faster, higher, stronger”.

“When first faced with the task of designing a new and original set of coins for the forthcoming London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games it was difficult to know just where to begin,” said sculptor John Bergdahl, who designed the coins.

“My only option was to look to the past, to the first Olympic Games in ancient Greece, where the first athletes pledged their allegiance to the gods of Olympia; gods who governed all aspects of the ancient world.”

But which gods did the Mint choose to represent the Games?

Somewhat confusingly it chose Roman ones. For despite the Olympics being a Greek creation, which took place in Olympia and was held in honour of Zeus, the coins use Roman gods because “the Olympic motto is Latin” the Royal Mint told Yahoo! Finance.

And it’s not just the names that are a confusing choice, the gods the Mint has picked seem a little odd, too.

Vulcan, the god of fire, falls under the “stronger” category – despite his mythology showing he was a skilful and clever god rather than a powerful one and was lame in one leg. While this makes him a great ambassador for the Paralympics as a rare example of a disabled deity, he might not be the best choice as a representative of strength.

“Vulcan is the ancient god of fire in Roman mythology and was skilled in the art of metalwork,” the Royal Mint website states. “Bergdahl’s juxtaposition of god and athlete dramatically captures the strength and might of this popular sport.”

The coin featuring Vulcan pictured with a statue of the Roman god

Minerva – goddess of wisdom – is also chosen in the “stronger” category with a picture of a javelin thrower. As a goddess she was most closely associated with wisdom, poetry, medicine, commerce, weaving, crafts and magic – none of these obviously relating to strength or throwing things. The Greek equivalent, Athena, was far more warlike (being associated with victory and courage as well as just warfare), but these attributes were taken on by Juno among the Roman gods.

Juno herself had already been used in the “higher” series of gold Olympic coins which was released earlier. Quite why the patron goddess of Rome and protector of women should be associated with “higher” and – more specifically – the pole vault is not made clear on the Royal Mint site.

Of course, that’s not saying all of the gods are badly associated with sports. Neptune, god of the sea, is associated with sailing; Mercury – messenger of the gods with winged sandals – is associated with runners; and Mars, the god of war, is pictured with boxers.

Here’s the full breakdown of who has been chosen, what they’re representing and the sport in question.

Citius series (Faster)
Neptune – God of the sea – Sailing 
Diana – Goddess of hunting – Cycling
Mercury – Messenger of the gods – Running

Altius series (Higher)
Jupiter – King of the gods – Diving
Apollo – God of the sun – Rhythmic gymnastics
Juno – Queen of the gods – Pole vaulting

Fortius series (Stronger)
Mars – God of war – Boxing
Minerva – Goddess of wisdom – Javelin
Vulcan – God of fire – Hamme

Plan a Trip Through History With ORBIS, a Google Maps for Ancient Rome

Rather than encounter history as a linear story, we see it as a world more like our own, one in which we're actors with sets of competing choices laid out before us.

Say you were thinking about taking a trip this summer to Italy, and were considering a drive northward from Rome to the ancient coastal city of Ravenna. How long would it take? How would you go about finding that out?

Most likely, you'd use Google Maps, which would tell you that by car you could take a variety of routes, all of which would get you to Ravenna in about four and a half hours.

Now say, just hypothetically, that you wanted to make the same trip except -- and it's kind of a big exception -- that the year is not 2012 but 200, you're not traveling by car but by ox cart, and, just for a little extra challenge, let's say it's February. How long would that journey take?

To answer that question there's ORBIS, a sort of "Google Maps for Ancient Rome," which will tell you that the fastest way for a third-century traveler to get to Ravenna will be to take your ox cart to the sea, board a ship, and sail around Sicily, around the southern coast of Italy, and northward to Ravenna. It will take you nearly 15 days and cost nearly 400 denarii. Over land, the trip will last a month.

ORBIS is the project of a team at Stanford led by classicist Walter Scheidel and digital-humanities specialist Elijah Meeks. It is a model of the ancient world, including more than 750 settlements, 4 million square miles of space, 50,000 miles of land routes, 20,000 miles of inland waterways (rivers and canals), and nearly 1,000 routes among sea ports. By playing with ORBIS's interactive map, you can grasp at how geography -- distance, really -- appeared to a person living nearly 2,000 years ago under the reach of the Roman empire. And if you want to think like a Roman, there's a lot to be gleaned from the richness of the dataset and the interactive little tool you can explore it with.

But ORBIS also tells us something that goes beyond the reach of Ancient Rome, right to us here in 2012. And what that is comes not from the content of ORBIS, but in the reaction to it, which has been, at least in technical terms, overwhelming, slowing the site down dramatically and requiring some updating just to deal with the traffic. Yes, you read that right: An academic site on the travel routes of Ancient Romans has been inundated with visitors since its launch three weeks ago, beginning with a not-too-shabby trickle of 1,200 visits on the first day, and ratcheting up to a total of 100,000 visitors in less than three weeks, with some days hitting15,000 unique views. Why do so many people want to know how long it took to get from Rome to Ravenna 2,000 years ago?
It's not that that information is so interesting on its own merit, but that ORBIS has given us a way to look at a world -- the ancient one -- with an interface that is from our own time. The interactive trip planner acts as a translator for us, speaking our language but telling us about a foreign place. Moreover, as Ars Technica writer Curt Hopkins puts it, the site uses "technology to approach history as a system instead of a static collection of data." So rather than encounter history as one linear story, we encounter it as a world more like our own, one in which we are actors with sets of competing choices laid out before us.
It's this feeling -- something almost like being a player in a role-playing game of Ancient Rome -- that makes ORBIS a fun way to explore history and has brought so many people to the site. Further evidence: Another tool on the site -- in fact the tool that ORBIS was built around -- has garnered far less interest. That tool is the "dynamic distance cartogram" which morphs the geography around a single point, such that a distance between two points no longer represents miles but rather represents how long the journey would take or how much it would cost. Thus you could see all points within a 12-day journey from Constantinopolis, even though some will be much farther away by distance because they are quick to reach by sea.
This tool is in some ways more informative than the route planner. You can see at a glance all the points one major city is connected to by trade, rather than having to test a variety of points and see which take less time. But people aren't playing around with this tool very much at all. "A tech friend of mine was laughing at the metrics," Meeks told Hopkins. "It'll show 50,000 people looking at the maps but only 100 using the interactive distance cartogram." Perhaps this is because that tool is a little less intuitive and a little less centrally placed on the website. But even once you find it and play around with it, it just doesn't have the same charm as the trip planner. We don't see the world that way today, and it doesn't square with how we use information and make decisions.

There is a big audience out there for a site that enables your imagination to spin out a bit more freely over the terrain of the ancient world, and much of that audience is plugged into social sites such as Reddit where they can share a good find and turn out in droves. "This is why the internet is wonderful, " says Cyriaque Lamar of io9 of the ORBIS site. But it's not just ORBIS that makes the Internet wonderful, but the people who eat it up -- the curious explorers who may not be going to third-century Ravenna, but are certainly thinking through their route.