AAR CSS: Day 6

Today was a half day. We spent an hour and a half circling the city by public transport to reach Villa Giulia, which houses the second biggest collection of Etruscan artifacts after the Vatican. It probably would have taken us a similar amount of time to walk there, but most of us got to sit on the bus, which was much better than walking in the heat. We had breakfast at the little cafe there - the woman behind the counter was completely overwhelmed by 25 people walking in and ordering food and drinks. I had a great little pastry - kind of like a yellow cookie with some chocolate cookie bits in the middle. This was a strictly no-photo museum, but they do allow photos of the grounds:

Afterwards, I picked up a mozzarella and tomato sandwich from the cafe (with some lettuce-y stuff and what looked like a whitish condiment stuck in there as well - I closed my eyes and ignored it). Then Tom Keeline (from Harvard) and I went in search of a couple of bookstores he had written down and wanted to go see. We went through a bit of the Borghese gardens...

...and the Piazza del Popolo:

We were distracted by a bookstore window on the same street as the first one on his list but across the way - it was closed because it was Saturday. We crossed the street to see the bookstore he had noted down only to find that it had moved - across the street. We'll probably go back at some point, since the books in the window looked cool. They'll probably be expensive, though. The second bookstore (remainders at 50% off, a la Raven) had closed permanently. On the way to the bus stop we found Libreria M. T. Cicerone (basically the "M. T. Cicero Bookshop"), which just seemed to attract classicists - we met up with four other people from our group there. Got a small catalogue of the Domus Aurea, which is now permanently closed following a structural collapse two years ago. Glad I got to go with school years ago.

The night's entertainment was a lecture by Larissa Bonfante, a leading expert on the Etruscans who currently teaches at NYU. Among other things, I learned that Etruscan is not an Indo-European language (languages in that family include Latin, Greek, the Romance languages, English, etc.), and that we have some 200 Etruscan roots and 16,000 Etruscan words from some 9,000-13,000 epigraphical sources (i.e. inscriptions). However, our Etruscan dictionary is basically a telephone book: we have 15,000 personal names, which means we don't have enough Etruscan to recreate it as a viable language (that requires 2,000 words that are not names).

There was no dinner at the Centro, since it was a weekend, so I went with a few of the girls to a place in Piazza San Calisto (#7A) called Paris in Trastevere. Charming elderly waiter, good pasta, phenomenal chocolate mousse. Not cheap (not fantastically expensive either), but highly recommended.