Quilted: Dealing with the Spring "'Chill," ala Romana

It's that in between season, when you don't know whether to bundle up or go for the lighter jacket. Romans know how to handle the spring chill: they're bubble wrapped, happy in their quilted outerwear. Based on a few informal surveys, about half--no joke--of our Re-di-Roma-area sample (or via Nazionale, as in the 2nd photo, or Valle Aurelia, as in the other non-manikin photos) were sporting quilted garb. It's a thing.

Bill 

Footware: Shades of Ancient Rome

Roman women don't wear togas (at least not yet). But they do wear the shoes that go with them, or what we imagine to be those shoes--open-toed, tied up across the ankle and up the leg with wide, often criss-crossing straps. We found them in side-walk displays, in the windows of shoe stores, on the feet of Roman women, on the feet of men in a fresco in the the early-16th-century Villa Farnesina (above left), built for Agostino Chigi and located in Trastevere, its back to Lungotevere--even on a 1940 statue in EUR (above right). It proved more difficult than we (in case you haven't figured it out, that means Bill) thought to capture footware in the flesh, so to speak: if the women are moving, they, and their feet, are gone in seconds; if they're standing still, one risks getting caught taking a picture that some women would consider inappropriate. But hey, it's all for science! Bill

Gimme an R, gimme an O, an M, an A, an N, an S...what's it spell?

We're taking a break from the Roman heat, vacationing in Southern California, where the mercury hit 107 a few days ago. While cruising white hot Olympic Boulevard, we noticed that Los Angeles High School's athletic teams had adopted the name "Romans." That made some intuitive sense--Romans are competitors (Charleston Heston on a chariot in Ben-Hur [1959]) and are often identified with gladiators (Russell Crowe in Gladiator [2000]--and see our August 23 post). The symbol on the school's facade resembles a centurion--a commander of Roman soldiers.

It's unlikely that the committee that selected the name chose it from a list of potential mascots linked to Italian cities, for an odd list it would be: Palermos, Napolitanos, Milanos, and so on; if named after a city, Rome was the only possibility. More likely the choice had something to do with the large, powerful and aggressive Roman Empire (see map). The competition with other empires was weak; we've never heard of a football team named after any other empire--not the Assyrian, or the Persian, or the Ottoman, or the Han, or the Gupta, or the Holy Roman, or the Mongol (although Go Mongols! has a nice ring to it). Bill