The BBC News has a set of pictures covering a procession that occurred today in Rome in order to celebrate it’s legendary foundation on 21 April, 753 BC by the twin sons of the war god Mars, Romulus and Remus.

Click here to view the pics - and Happy Birthday Roma!

Untitled -  © All rights reserved  Primvs Pilvs 2008

We now have 112 members in our flickr group who have joined up to provide 3,318 beautiful pictures so far.

We would love to see your pictures of anything Ancient Roman so please do join our group.

One of the Romanitas.net home grown pictures hosted in flickr has been chosen to be added to a directory of interesting places to visit in France.

Schmap is a leading publisher of digital travel guides for 200 destinations throughout the United States, Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. 

Click here to view the entry for our very own picture taken whilst on a trip to visit the Roman site at Oppidum d’Ensérune. 

…well at the very least I wouldn’t ask him to pass me any food with his hands!

In an earlier post I asked you which Ancient Roman you would take lunch with after today’s victorious Silvio Berlusconi said he could easily dine and converse with Caesar. Check out the video taken from the bonus features of the I, Claudius DVD (about 9 minutes in - although I’d recommend watching it all) to see why my choice of Augustus now suddenly feels like the wrong one.

It could have been worse, at least there weren’t any Daleks. Doctor Who, the much loved UK BBC drama was set in Pompeii this week. 

Whereas purists would have given this a wide berth, anyone with a bit of fun in their hearts would have watched it and I have to say it was a lot of fun. How great would it be to actually go back and walk the streets of Pompeii (pre-eruption of course). 

Highlights imho included the way the Doctor and his accomplice had a special translation mechanism that made their speech into Latin and the Roman’s speech English - but when the Doctor / accomplice spoke Latin to the Romans the locals thought they were speaking Welsh?! The costumes and the reconstruction of the disaster were spectacular too. 

Check out BBC iPlayer in the UK if you want to watch the programme over the next few days before it expires. Here’s a link to the Wikipedia low down on Pompeii also. 

Here’s a list of the places we’ve featured on Platial so far:

Colosseum: The Colosseum or Coliseum, originally the Flavian Amphitheatre (Latin: Amphitheatrum Flavium, Italian Anfiteatro Flavio or Colosseo), is an ellipticalamphitheatre in the centre of the city of Rome, Italy, the largest ever built in the Roman Empire. It is one of the greatest works of Roman architecture andengineering.

Maison Carree: The Maison Carrée at Nîmes in southern France is one of the best preserved temples to be found anywhere in the territory of the former Roman Empire.

Roman Baths, Bath: Aquae Sulis was a small town in the Roman province of Britannia. Today it is known as Bath, located in the English county of Somerset.

Vindolanda Fort: Vindolanda was a Roman auxiliary fort (castrum) located at Chesterholm, just south of Hadrian’s Wall in northern England, near the modern border with Scotland; it guardied the Stanegate, the Roman road from the River Tyne, to the Solway Firth. It is famous for the find of the Vindolanda tablets, one of the most important finds of military and private correspondence (written on wooden tablets) found anywhere in the Empire.

Pont Du Gard: The Pont du Gard is an aqueduct in the south of France constructed by the Roman Empire, and located in Vers-Pont-du-Gard near Remoulins, in the Garddépartement.

Pantheon: The Pantheon (Latin Pantheon, from Greek Πάνθειον Pantheon, meaning “Temple of all the gods”) is a building in Rome which was originally built as a temple to all the gods of Ancient Rome. The intended degree of inclusiveness of this dedication is debated. The generic term pantheon is now applied to a monument in which illustrious dead are buried. It is the best preserved of all Roman buildings, and perhaps the best preserved building of its age in the world. It has been in continuous use throughout its history. The Pantheon is currently the oldest standing domed structure in Rome.

Cyrene: The ruler of the town, Apion bequeathed it to the Romans, but it kept its self-government. In 74 BC Cyrene was created a Roman province.

Dougga/Thugga: Dougga or Thugga is a Roman ruin in northern Tunisia located on a 65 hectare site. Dougga was originally a fortified Berber village (the name Thugga meant “pastures”). Later, it served as the seat of the Numidian king Masinissa in the2nd century BC. The Romans occupied the city in the late 2nd century BC.

Pompeii: Pompeii is a ruined and partially buried Roman city near modern Naples in the Italian region of Campania, in the territory of the comune of Pompei. It, along with Herculaneum (its sister city), was destroyed, and completely buried, during a catastrophic eruption of the volcano Mount Vesuvius spanning two days on 24 August 79 AD.

Herculaneum: Herculaneum (in modern Italian Ercolano) is an ancient Roman town, located in the territory of the current commune of Ercolano. Its ruins can be found at the co-ordinates in the Italian region of Campania. It is most famous for having been lost, along with Pompeii, in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius beginning on August 24, AD 79, which buried them in superheated pyroclastic material that has solidified into volcanic tuff. Since the discovery of bones in 1981, some 150 skeletons have been found. Herculaneum was a smaller town with a wealthier population than Pompeii at the time of its destruction.

Vesuvius: Mount Vesuvius was regarded by the Greeks and Romans as being sacred to the hero and demigod Heracles/Hercules, and the town of Herculaneum, built at its base, was named after him.

Battle of the Teutoburg Forest: The Battle of the Teutoburg Forest took place in the year 9 A.D. (probably lasting from September 9 to September 11) when an alliance of Germanic tribes led by Arminius, the son of Segimer of the Cherusci, ambushed and destroyed three Roman legions led by Publius Quinctilius Varus. The battle began a seven-year war which established the Rhine as the boundary of the Roman Empire for the next four hundred years, until the decline of the Roman influence in the West. The Roman Empire made no further concerted attempts to conquer Germania beyond the Rhine.

Check out all of the above locations on our Platial map. Why not add your own locations?

There’s a couple of news stories for you to peruse on the BBC News website from the past week:

A rare 2,000-year-old Roman skull has been returned to the cave beneath the Yorkshire Dales where it was discovered by divers in 1996.

A stroll around the ancient city of Pompeii will be made possible this week thanks to an omni-directional treadmill developed by European researchers.

Check out the del.icio.us links on the sidebar to read these stories.

“Lend me your ears”

You’ll see in our del.icio.us news links that we’ve added added a story from the BBC regarding Italian opposition leader Silvio Berlusconi’s comments this week that his Latin is so good that he could engage in lunchtime conversation with Julius Caesar.

Which Ancient Roman would you ‘do lunch’ with, and what questions would you like to ask them?

We’re assuming you’ll not be dining with Livia as it may be your last meal!

Your nominations please, either add a comment to this post or sign in to flickr as an existing member of our group (or join flickr for free and join our group - we’d love you to join us!) and add your comments to the discussion there.

“Tiberious, would you mind passing the garum? Mmmm, what lovely figs…”

A huge thank you to the people at Platial for featuring us on their blog. Platial enables anyone to find, create, and use meaningful maps of Places that matter to them.

If you’d like to browse and/or add Ancient Roman related sites to our Platial map then click the Roman Remains link on our Platial map that appears in the side bar on the right.

Just a quick note to say hi to the 107 people who have popped in to have a look so far during the past 4 days. Please do get in touch if you have any suggestions or contributions for these pages. contact@romanitas.net

Also, I’ve added a few lines to outline the reason for this site in an ‘About Romanitas’ page which you can link to from the right hand side bar on this page. Another new link on the right is our new ‘Romalink!’ page which aims to list any sites mentioned or found during the updates to this site so you can get access to them from a single place.

Hope you find these updates useful and of value.