To ancient Rome via the Gertrude street tram

 

Earlier this year, J had a minor bit of surgery in one of the big city hospitals in Melbourne.

 Last week it was time for her post-surgical review, and that meant another trip to the city.

 The time of her review was such that we would need to stay two nights in Melbourne, and since the hotel had a three nights midweek for the price of two deal, we decided to take the deal and have ourselves a day in the city.

 Doing so gave J an opportunity to visit a decent art store and pick up new paints and brushes, and let us do a bit of face to face rather than online shopping.

 We also did some fun things like a trip to a proper Japanese sushi restaurant where in true Tokoyo style you picked your plates off a conveyor belt and stacked the colour coded plates on your table, and paid on the basis of the number of plates (two blue, one green, one yellow, etc)

As a fun twist the restaurant also had a range of specials, which you ordered via a touchscreen on your table and were delivered by a little delivery robot that ran along a track on top of the sushi conveyor belt.

 Silly, but fun.

 It also gave me an opportunity to visit the Ancient Rome exhibition at the Melbourne museum.

 This was a touring exhibition from Italy of mainly early imperial period sculpture, artefacts and frescos, and included something I had only read about – a removable marble hairpiece for a sculpture.

 

The Romans used these on statues of Imperial ladies so that they always had a fashionable hairstyle.

 There were other interesting items, a cute little pottery pig from a child’s grave, mass produced Samian ware and some Roman glassware.

 The exhibition is structured around various aspects of Roman life, such as the baths, formal dinners, death, religion and so on.

 The focus is on early Imperial artefacts, probably because that is the most materially rich period, but they do attempt to show the rise of Christian belief as the dominant religious belief in Rome and how it provided a degree of continuity with the period after the formal end of the empire in 476CE.

 Getting to the exhibition was fairly simple – we took the 96 tram from the city to the corner of Gertrude Street and walked past the exhibition building – which was hosting a graduation ceremony for the University of Melbourne that day – and into the museum.

 Unlike some visiting exhibitions this one was not particularly busy, giving you plenty of time to look at the artefacts. Obviously, your mileage may vary on this – when we visited, it was a typical cold damp Melbourne winter day, and the tram system was warning of disruption to trams running past Parliament House, as it was the day of the One Nation/Pauline Hanson school strike.

 As  it was, we didn’t see anything of the demo, and by the time we rode the tram back to Parliament station to change to a Metro train back to our hotel, the manifestation was most definitely over, and the greatest risk was crowds of newly minted graduates and their proud parents making their way home.