Good Grief!! (twice)

I realized this morning that I had never posted about the Roman Arenas or the Roman Museum both of which I enjoyed very much.  The Arenas because I am always stunned by ancient ruins and the thought that they could accomplish such massive structures back then.  The museum because it had a lot of wonderful "stuff" but also many, many mosaics - floors, fragments, etc. - and I have discovered that I love mosaics.  The second good grief is because I started a post about it this morning and was finished with the arenas part and was ready to go into the museum.  But apparently I didn't save it as a draft so I will start over.  There won't be much verbiage about the arenas because there they are, they're huge and one is still used as a concert venue!

This last one is the one used for concerts.

It was a beautiful morning but getting warmer by the minute and I looked for an entrance to the museum, found it (2 big glass doors saying (Entree) went through the first pair and the second pair was locked.   Saw a woman sitting at what would be the reception-type desk, tapped on the door and she looked up and with her arm waved me away.  God forbid she should come and tell me where to go since there was no sign on the door.  So I went out and finally in the various groups of people found one who told me the I had to go up all those stairs you're looking at which I did more and more slowly only to come to one more stair case you can't see but was probably about half the height of this one.  But I got to another entree door at about the same time a couple appeared opposite from me coming from what I bet you anything was a street.  So I chalked it up to this being a trip that is fraught with difficulty.  But when I went in, I explained to the guy who could understand me that really, truly - you need to put a sign on the door downstairs.  He wasn't really all that interested.

So, moving on, I will post pictures and if I know anything about them (except that I liked what I was seeing) I'll say so. 

The museum displays start in the Bronze age and these are some bronze implements.

 Really exquisite and so very old ...

 This was interesting.  It looks like a storage container but in this case what goes inside is a driver because this is a chariot pretty much entirely made of bronze! They did say it wasn't used for races or battle.  

 And the rear end of a bronze horse statue.  So many of these very ancient items have been found in and around Lyon (don't forget - we're still there because I forgot to get this posted) - and sometimes the info card made it sound like they were lying in a field or near a river or whatever.  Amazing!

This apparently didn't have any English because I really would have liked to know what these were.  Same with the strange creature below.

And after reading the above, the tablets below, the tablets below hold at least some of the message and below them is the sarcophagus that the whole family ended up resting in eventually.

A model of a temple explained below. 

This one didn't have English but it was the only female I'd seen in the building (not counting sarcophagi)

 Some mosaics - pretty much complete

And above and below are models of the theater that in an earlier post I tried to get a video of the curtain raiser to work and couldn't.

 Isn't this a beauty?  And below is part of a children's area which I like to see in museums

 These three pottery pieces are so lovely

Huge and perfect - I wonder what the swastika meant way back then.

 A potter's kiln...

 Someone else liked cobalt, Chris.

 I decided this must be their "room of stuff" because there were all sorts of different things.

 How about this for a mosaic?  And I kid you not, I went up close to make sure and I don't think any of the tiles were bigger than 1/4".  The picture below shows how many it took to make the big triangles.  And the picture after that shows a few fish up closer

Another gorgeous one  - I took the one below to show the outside border.

Like I said, they had a LOT of mosaics!

Now we're the fancy stuff...

These 5 guys just tickled me - they didn't look mad or fierce - they looked more distressed or distraught...I have no idea what they were (and maybe the museum didn't either - they were just sitting up there) but I certainly enjoyed them.

This was a section with toys for children.

And THIS was miniatures for girls to give their dollies tea parties, huge dinners, etc.  This was a first for me - I can't remember seeing ancient miniatures for children to play with.

And thank heavens, that is the end of this post.  It will now be out of order because I typed it when I was 3 days into Florence already.  Now I have to get going on yesterday's Florence post.