30 October 2007

Excavating Ostia

Ostia is where St. Monica died, supposedly in an inn. I wish I had thought about visiting the city when I was in Italy. Check out the Ostia-Antica website for oodles of information, a video, a quiz and some pics. The information below is from the site.



Ostia
The ancient Roman city of Ostia was in antiquity situated at the mouth of the river Tiber, some 30 kilometres to the west of Rome. The shoreline moved seawards, due to silting, from the Middle Ages until the 19th century. Therefore Ostia is today still lying next to the Tiber, but at a distance of some three kilometers from the beach. Ostia is Latin for "mouth", the mouth of the Tiber. The river was used as harbour, but in the Imperial period two harbour basins were added to the north, near Leonardo da Vinci airport. The harbour district was called Portus, Latin for "harbour".

The remains of St. Monica
The first church of Aurea may have been built in the fifth century. The orientation was precisely the opposite of that of the present church. In the floor and around the church many graves were found. The church was renovated c. 700 AD by pope Sergius I, c. 800 AD by Leo III, and c. 850 AD by Leo IV. In 1430 the relics (of St. Aurea) were removed from the urn and taken to Rome, together with those of Monica (Acta Sanctorum, May I, p. 490).

Maybe if I start saving now, I'll have enough money to go with hubby and the kids when they are a bit older.

14 comments:

Vincenzo said...

http://i10.tinypic.com/4ortg61.jpg

swissmiss said...

Vincenzo:
That is so cool! You can do all this with Photo Shop? Wow! I asked for it for Christmas so I can create a nice header banner for my blog instead of the current pic. Everyone has a cool banner. It will probably take me until the next Christmas just to get around to actually making the banner :)

Vincenzo said...

"You can do all this with Photo Shop?"

Yep. I'm using an old version of Paint Shop Pro, however. :)

Vincenzo said...

Show me what you like and maybe I can make something. I just made this really fast: http://i10.tinypic.com/6241d74.jpg

swissmiss said...

That would be great. Let me think about it for a bit and see if I can find some photos or something for a background. I haven't given it much thought yet and we are watching It's the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown right now!

Terry Nelson said...

Vincenzo doesn't like me anymore because I took that one post down of you in the swiss miss outfit when I thought you were offended. But I put it back up, with his comments intact. I feel bad.

Monica - it is your fault. :(

swissmiss said...

A blatant case of blaming the victim!

I really don't think you saw the pic he did of you on my prior post on 12 October - Hot off the press. Since you don't always come back to read comments, you miss so much :) Vincenzo worked his magic on you again. Hopefully, you will catch it this time!

swissmiss said...

Vincenzo:
I just uploaded some pictures to Photobucket. I haven't used Photo Shop or Paint Shop Pro to know if this is a lot of work or not. Don't kill yourself on this...I can wait until I get Photoshop myself and do it!

The blog with the banner style I like is here

My photos can be foundhere
here
here
here

I hope the links work. You don't have to use all the photos, just giving you something to work with! I would also like to keep the image of St. Monica on the header banner too. Kind of like the one you just did where she is in shadeow or whatever it's called :)

Thanks!!

Vincenzo said...

"Don't kill yourself on this..."

Ok I'll try to make something tonight :)

Vincenzo said...

"I hope the links work. You don't have to use all the photos, just giving you something to work with! I would also like to keep the image of St. Monica on the header banner too. Kind of like the one you just did where she is in shadeow or whatever it's called :)"

http://i7.tinypic.com/6hho48p.jpg

swissmiss said...

Vincenzo:
You totally rock! Thank you so much! I put up the new banner. If you can, could you make it a little less celtic cross and a wee bit more Swiss. Maybe the bottom left where the Abbey is, you could add the chalets since it's kind of hard to see the one (sorry to be a whiner). I'm totally beat. The kids made a haul trick-or-treating. Need to get to bed so I can get up and run them to bible study in the morning and make Mass.

Didn't you do any trick-or-treating or hand out any candy?

Thank you so much for doing this. It really is cool!

Vincenzo said...

Is this ok?

http://i2.tinypic.com/34t7exv.jpg

"Didn't you do any trick-or-treating or hand out any candy?"

No, but I carved pumpkins. :)

Vincenzo said...

Here's a minor adjustment to the last one (brings the grass over to the bottom left):

http://i10.tinypic.com/33njck7.jpg

Vincenzo said...

I noticed some freak-formatting issues with the blog now that the new wider banner image is there. I'm not sure how one edits these since I don't have one, but looking at the source code, if possible you might want to try editing the number under "#header-wrapper." Change the width setting from 400 to 684. I *think* that's the right setting for that border around the image. I'm not yet sure how to center the image over the rest of the blog content.