The Naples Museum by Julia

Text by Julia, photos by Julia, Kelli and Weston

Today we woke up a bit earlier in order to have breakfast, grab the sack lunches that the people at Villa Rosalia prepared for us, and get on the bus to make it to the Naples Museum in time for their 9 o'clock opening. The museum holds a wide variety of Roman art, including statues, mosaics, frescos, glass, and metalwork, indicating daily ancient life. The contrast of the massive and imposing statues followed by the intricacy as fragile beauty of the cameos was stunning gave an even greater sense of scale to what was already impressive. 

Cameos (photo by Julia)

Shawn has a replica of this one at Overlake!

Though finding the museum closed yesterday was disappointing, we couldn't have picked a better day to actually go to the museum as Doryphorus, a piece from the AP Art History curriculum, was on loan from another museum. It was a wonderful surprise to turn the corner and see a piece that I had heard of but didn't know it was there.

Doryphorus, photo by Julia

Another Art History piece, the Alexander Mosaic, was in the Naples Museum as well. 

Mosaic Photo by Weston

Though it is very large and impressive, there were certainly other mosaics just as incredible.

It was also a great day to go the museum as it holds many artifacts from Pompeii, which we will be visiting this afternoon. There was also this incredibly detailed model of Pompeii that is nice to have seen right before actually going there. 

After walking through the museum (and its pretty great gift shop), we got back on the bus for a drive of about an hour to Pompeii and Herculaneum.

The motorcycles fill the streets of Naples