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| Italy 2012 / 20120609y_MuseoPompeiiMosaic
Ruth Milner, rmilner plus web at bookofmarvels dot net 3/18/2013 |
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Archeological Museum, Naples After leaving the ruins of Pompeii, we collected our stuff from the hotel and took the train back to Naples for our last night in Italy. Our hotel (which was very nice inside but difficult to find off a rather grotty square) was a few blocks away from the famous Museo Archeologico Nazionale. Again only the adults had the stamina – and interest – to visit the museum after a long morning walking around Pompeii. But we only had two hours left to visit it that afternoon anyway. We were very surprised to find that, even around such a major tourism and heritage site, Naples remained grotty: trash everywhere, graffiti everywhere, pavement and building walls dingy with grime. However, the museum was bright and clean, with beautiful displays from Pompeii, Herculaneum (another city buried by the eruption of Vesuvius), and elsewhere. This mosaic of a harpy is composed of tiny tesserae, as shown by the scale of Dale's fingers. It is hard to believe anyone could make such small pieces uniform, let alone handle them well enough to create art with them. |