With the help of NCSA’s advanced technology, Trentin can open doors to understanding what life was like in the Middle Ages. While modern graffiti is often seen as destructive to public buildings, historical graffiti is a key to unlocking the past. Trentin has found over 2,000 individual instances of graffiti at San Marco, in places high and low, hidden and obvious, dating from this century to nearly a millennium ago. Instead, she focuses on something many of us would barely notice: the graffiti. But Mia Trentin, a postdoctoral fellow with the Cyprus Institute, an international partner of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at Illinois, hasn’t spent years studying the soaring architecture and glittering mosaics of San Marco. Presumably some kind of barrier will prevent future tourists from adding their own autographs for posterity.Visitors to San Marco Basilica in Venice, Italy are likely to feel a sense of awe: the sheer mass of the thousand-year-old structure and the details of its ostentatious decoration are undeniably impressive. Officials in Rome say they plan to open this passage to the public once the restoration work is done. Milber wanted the world to know that he had traveled from the city of Strasbourg. "They were making a mark to emphasize their presence." "Writers were aware of being in a historic place," said Benefiel. "You left space."īy the 19th century, the Colosseum was a famous monument, and its graffiti had become a tangled, overwritten record of tourists' visits. "There was a different understanding of writing on a wall," said Benefiel, a classics professor at Washington and Lee University. In the Roman period people rarely wrote their messages on top of existing graffiti. "That was the single most popular image to draw in ancient graffiti," she says. In the area above what looks like the large "S," meanwhile, Roman graffiti expert Rebecca Benefiel sees the faint gray profile of a face. Today, the meaning of the designs in this particular spot is a mystery, though patches of newly cleaned plaster on other parts of the wall show a palm frond in red (a symbol of victory) and the letters "VIND," which may be part of the word vindicatio, or vengeance. There, women, children, and slaves perched in the cheap seats to watch the bloody spectacle of gladiators and wild beasts battling for their lives on the arena floor 60 feet (18 meters) below.Įven in the dim light of this passage, the designs painted in red would have been easy to see against a background of white plaster. The wall in this picture flanked a passage that led to an upper tier. ( Read about Rome's border walls in National Geographic Magazine.) Its numbered entrances and covered passages were designed to get spectators in and out quickly and to separate the high and mighty from the hoi polloi. Removing the accumulated grime and calcification, experts discovered layers of inscriptions on the section of a wall seen here-designs in red and faded gray from antiquity, and lettering in black left by visitors in modern times.īuilt in the first century, the Colosseum may have held crowds as large as 50,000 people. A facelift of the Colosseum in Rome that began last fall has revealed centuries of graffiti.
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