Category: Roman

I was standing in a damp, half-collapsed Romanesque doorway near Ravenna last Tuesday, my fingers tracing the uneven grit of a limestone voussoir, when I realized how much we misinterpret the simplest things. Most textbooks will try to sell you…

I was kneeling in the dust of a crumbling site near Ostia last autumn, my knees aching and my camera lens fogging, when I saw it again: that stubborn, defiant refusal of the material to simply give up. Most people…

I was kneeling in the dust of a site near Ostia last autumn, my knees aching against the uneven ground, when I saw it again—that same, frustratingly vague explanation in a textbook about how Roman concrete was made. They always…