Ancient home, prayer room open at Rome’s Baths of Caracalla
In one of singer-songwriter Mac Davis’ most memorable tunes, he sang about “Happiness being Lubbock, Texas, in his rear-view mirror.” The song was a success for Davis, but hardly a ringing endorsement for his hometown.
However, by the end of the ditty, Davis redeemed himself and Lubbock when, disillusioned by the glitz and glamour of Los Angeles, he proclaimed that “happiness was Lubbock, Texas, coming nearer,” going on to add that when he died, he wanted to be buried in Lubbock, Texas, in his jeans.
Lubbock isn’t the first place that comes to mind for a Texas vacation. It lacks the cosmopolitan chic of Dallas and Houston, the diverse culture of San Antonio and El Paso, the cool factor of Austin or the beach allure of Corpus Christi and Galveston.
Set apart by location and landscape, Lubbock appears tethered to the arid earth by nothing but tumbling tumbleweeds and the ghosts of its cowboy past. Skyscrapers are in short supply, but the vast horizon offers endless possibilities. Here are some reasons why Lubbock is worth a visit.
ROME
One the most spectacular examples of ancient Roman baths, the Baths of Caracalla, has become more spectacular. Authorities in Rome on June 23 opened to the public a unique private home that stood on the site before the baths, with a frescoed ceiling and prayer room honoring Roman and Egyptian deities.
The two-story home, or “domus,” dates from around 134-138 AD, during the reign of the Emperor Hadrian. It was partially destroyed to
As Elvis is to Memphis and the Beatles are to Liverpool, Buddy Holly is to Lubbock. When the gangly teenager with the oversized glasses burst on the scene in the 1950s, American music was ripe for a revolution, and that’s just what it got.
Whether he was bubbling over with love for “Peggy Sue” or sentimentalizing about “True Love Ways,” Buddy sparked a New Wave of rock and roll that tragically ended in an Iowa field on Feb. 3, 1959 – the “day the music died.”
In Lubbock, Holly’s legacy lives on in the Buddy Holly Hall of Performing Arts and Science. Using no tax dollars, it was built entirely with donations from the community and from fans worldwide (see if you can spot Sir Paul McCartney’s star on the make way for the construction of the Caracalla public baths, which opened in 216 AD. The site today is a big tourist draw for the multi-leveled brick remains of the Imperial Roman baths, libraries and gyms and the marble mosaics that decorated the floors.
The home, believed to have belonged to a wealthy merchant’s family given the quality of the frescoes, therefore represents what was at the same site before the baths, and shows how the city evolved in the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD, Daniela Porro, Rome’s archaeological super
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intendent, said at the opening.
The domus ruins were first discovered in the mid-19th century about 10 meters (yards) underneath the current ground level of the baths. They were excavated about a century later, with the inner prayer room and fragments of the frescoed dining room ceiling removed for restoration and conservation.
The prayer room had been briefly exhibited but has been closed to the public for 30 years. It reopened Thursday alongside some of the neverbefore-seen ceiling fragments that feature images of Bacchus, the Roman god of wine and agriculture, using prized Egyptian blue and Cinnabar red pigments, conservators said.
“Both the subject type and the particularity of the painting are unique in the Roman panorama of the Hadrianic age” when the domus was built, said Mirella Serlorenzi, director of the Caracalla site.
The inner temple features images of the Roman gods Jupiter, Juno and Minerva on one wall, and silhouettes of the Egyptian deities Isis and Anubis on other walls, evidence of the religious “syncretism” – the blending of different belief systems – that was common in Roman public monuments but not in domestic ones of the period.
“It’s the first time we find something like that in Rome, but also in the world because it’s not like there are a lot of them,” said Serlorenzi.
She noted that what experts know about Roman-era painting comes primarily from the towns of Herculaneum and Pompeii near Naples, which were destroyed and their remains preserved under layers of volcanic materials when Mt. Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD.
“So Roman painting after the 1st century AD has remained a mystery because we just haven’t had rooms so well conserved up to the ceiling,” Serlorenzi said.
The domus exhibit, entitled “Before the Baths: The House where Gods Lived Together” is now a permanent part of the Caracalla itinerary.