Editor: I hate that song. Anytime I hear it, I immediately turn the station from the song to anything else. Writer: I totally agree. It's a funeral dirge masquerading (good New Orleans reference with that last word!) as a deep, meaningful song. It's terrible. Editor: Is this the first Editor's note where we've actually agreed? Writer: Probably! If you do like The House of the Rising Sun, don't tell me, unless you don't want to be friends anymore.
It's actually called the House of the Amphitheatre, because it's really close to the Amphitheatre, even if GPS sends you to a dead end that runs right into a fence surrounding it, and then you walk around the property in the exact wrong direction, whilst the actual entrance would have been just up the hill if you could have seen it from where GPS wanted you to go instead of guessing wrong.
Editor: Well, somebody is having a bad day. Writer: Nah, just relating one of the travails of travel. The house, once we got there, was great.
When we started out that morning, I didn't share my concern with Carol that the Monumental ticket was only good for one day. Well, it turns out it is good until you've been to all the sites, even if takes multiple days. So that was good.
Located just outside the original city walls (which don't exist in that area, but archaeology figured it out), the House of the Amphitheatre (HoA for the rest of this) was lived in for about 800 years, much like most American houses today.
Built in the 3rd century BC and inhabited into the 5th century AD, the house is quite large. There is also the smaller House of the Water Tower (HoWT) within the complex. The HoWT seems to have only lasted around one hundred years, during the 1st century BC.
You see the HoWT first, but it was destroyed by a stream (not sure when).
Copied and pasted from the Tourism of Merida website:
The House of the Amphitheatre is a large domestic complex. Part of it was built around a porticoed, trapezoidal courtyard with a garden in the centre where you can also find a well and a fountain. One of the rooms that come out onto this courtyard, possibly a dining room or triclinium, has got a mosaic floor. In its central emblem you can see realistic scenes of the grape harvest and mashing of the grapes as well as a Venus accompanied by a cupid. On the northwest side of this part of the house you can find the kitchen and a thermae complex.
Towards the southeast there is another group of rooms. One of them, which is considerably big, was probably a dining room and has a mosaic floor which shows a large and realistic collection of marine fauna. In the area nearest to the Amphitheatre, we can see the remains of the mausoleum of Gaius Julius Succesianus from the 2nd century but which was modified during the following centuries.
We pretty much had the place to ourselves that morning. After wandering around, our next destination would be the Roman circus.
No comments:
Post a Comment