Jogging through ancient Rome / A journey with the Gods

The Colosseum and Arch of Titus in Rome, Italy

Jogging through ancient Rome: a journey with the Gods

Iconic landmarks and mythology on a scenic running tour of Rome

15 MARCH 2025, 

BRENDA LEE BOHEN

The Roman Empire was a vast, polytheistic, fascinating civilization. Throughout the eternal city, we recognized and worshiped multiple gods and goddesses. Although the monotheistic religion of Judaism thrived throughout the empire—a religion that eventually gave rise to Christianity and Islam—the original Romans honored multiple deities. We truly believed that these gods and goddesses served a role in founding our civilization. Most importantly, we also believed that these gods and goddesses helped shape our daily lives.

The gods of Greece and Rome

Artemis with a hind, better known as "Diana of Versailles" as it was long exhibited in the Versailles Castle. Marble, Roman artwork, Imperial Era (1st-2nd centuries CE). Found in Italy

The gods of Greece and Rome

A way for kids to experience the allure and drama of ancient Rome

15 APRIL 2025, 

BRENDA LEE BOHEN

Once upon a time, a very long time ago, the people of Greece believed that the world was ruled by a family of powerful gods and goddesses. The ancient Greeks shared myths—compelling origin stories—by telling oral stories that were then immortalized by painting such tales on walls, vases, pots, jars, and cups.

Miles Hyman / Roma

 

Miles Hyman

ROMA

Hank Kaufman and Gene Lerner / Hollywood on the Tiber

Hollywood on the Tiber

Hank Kaufman and Gene Lerner

Foreword by Sandy Lieberson

Hollywood on the Tiber is a dazzling blend of the epic and intimate featuring a glittering cast of screen gods and goddesses. This vibrant chronicle recounts how Hank Kaufman and Gene Lerner became unsung movers and shakers of a unique and unrepeatable era: the rise of Rome as the center of Europe’s film industry in the 1950s and ’60s.

 

A sanctuary in Rome of the domestic gods in an atrium of the House of the Vettii.WERNER FORMAN (UNIVERSAL IMAGES GROUP VIA GETTY

Nero’s Rome was not so different from today’s world: Stratospheric rents, gentrification and chaotic traffic 

The historian Dimitri Tilloi-d’Ambrosi has published an essay on daily life in the imperial capital, which was home to a mix of nationalities, exclusive and run-down neighborhoods, and where citizens suffered from noise pollution

GUILLERMO ALTARES

Madrid - APR 08, 2024 - 16:08CEST

In the first century A.D., Rome became the first city with a million inhabitants. Until the 19th century, when Beijing and London achieved the milestone, no other city had reached such a population. Although the temporal and human distance that separates us from classical Rome is enormous — it was an extremely violent world, with slaves and emperors — the urban problems it experienced are repeated throughout the ages. Juvenal (60-128 A.D.) had already warned in his Satires that the cost of buying a sumptuous residence in a village south of Rome was equivalent to the annual rent “of a hovel in the capital.” French historian Dimitri Tilloi-d’Ambrosi picks up this anecdote in his essay 24 heures de la vie sous Néron (originally published in French in 2022 and recently translated to Spanish), in which he describes what distances us, but also what unites us with a world ultimately not so distant: Rome during Nero’s regime.

Poppaea Sabina (Patricia Laffan) and Nero (Peter Ustinov) in 'Quo Vadis

ANCIENT ROME

Castrated and forcibly feminized by Emperor Nero

In his book ‘Pax,’ Tom Holland reviews the period of splendor in Imperial Rome from Nero to Hadrian and tells of the terrible fate of Sporo, mutilated and forced to replace the deceased Empress Poppaea

Jacinto Antón

February 29, 2024

Tom Holland, the great chronicler of the history of Antiquity and especially of the ancient Romans, has returned. After a period of illness, he crossed a personal Rubicon with Pax (published July 2023), an exciting fresco about the era of splendor of Imperial Rome that lasted from Nero to Hadrian. And despite the book’s title, the period also included great military emperors such as Vespasian and Trajan.

The story of cities 002 / Rome wasn't planned in a day … in fact it wasn't planned at all

An 18th-century painting of The Martyrdom of Saint Agnes in the Roman Forum,
with the hills behind. 

THE STORY OF CITIES

2

Rome wasn't planned in a day … in fact it wasn't planned at all

The grid system which the Roman republic exported all over Europe was never employed in the capital itself. The city has always lacked a coherent plan – save for the monumental temple that once towered over it

Adrian Mourby
Tue 15 Mar 2016

According to Tacitus, perhaps the greatest of all Roman historians, it was the great temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus on the Capitoline Hill that held the key to the future of ancient Rome.

 

Taiye Selasi

Literary City: Taiye Selasi’s Rome

One of the world’s best beautiful and charming cities is also the new home of novelist Taiye Selasi. She talks to Henry C. Krempels about her favourite haunts, why the city insipires her, and new writers not to be missed.

Henry Krempels

Updated Apr. 14, 2017 5:07PM ET / Published Dec. 13, 2013 7:45AM ET 

One hundred pages into her career as a novelist, Taiye Sleasi had signed a two-book contract and could count Nobel winner Toni Morrison as a fan. Perhaps it’s understandable then, that the next hundred or so pages that completed her debut took much longer to write, with an agonizing six-month block and two different emigrations in between. Now living in Rome (via Paris) the part Ghanaian, part Nigerian, British-born, American-educated author of the widely admired Ghana Must Go, is writing the second book set in the city she now lives.

Pictures of the Day / 23 June 2017 / The Sistine Chapel

Pictures of the Day: 23 June 2017

A man looks at "Up Close: Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel", an exhibit of museum quality, near-life size reproductions of the master's frescos that adorn the Sistine Chapel in Rome, on display during a press preview at The Oculus at Westfield World Trade Center in New York. The exhibit debuts in New York running June 23-July 23, 2017.

TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

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