The Italian Sklog

The first sklog from Italy, drawn while we sat in St. Peter's Square, resting after our ordeal in the Vatican Museum; we staggered shoulder to shoulder with about 50,000 other suckers through endless hallways filled with monotonously beautiful paintings and sculptures and decorations and finally ended up jammed into the Sistine Chapel with everyone in Europe, looking up at Michelangelo's frescoes and not really feeling anything but an intense desire to leave and enjoy some fresh air (or relatively fresh air, as fresh as it gets in Rome, anyway). I've seen those images too many times to get anything new from it. I did feel an immediate sympathetic connection to the miserable souls depicted in the Last Judgement on the one wall, though.

I don't remember what else we did that particular day, it was the second day in Rome and we'd already seen the ruins of the forum and the Collosseum and I kept wondering what part of the ruins were really the ruins and what part had been slightly re-built, because I'd always thought that 2,000 year old ruins would be all stoney, like gray rocks, and these ruins had a lot of brick in them. Can reddish bricks be 2,000 years old?

It doesn't seem right, and I kept thinking that maybe in the intervening 2,000 years - everyone knows that the people living in rome would take marble and stones from the old temples and buildings for a while, and use them on their own houses and such, which seems natural, why not? And really, after 500 years, wouldn't they tear down buildings that nobody lived in? And if people still lived in them, they probably repaired them, shored up the walls, added bricks or whatever. So at what point did they stop taking marble and rock and stop adding brick and decide that what they had there were not buildings or a source of building materials or anything with any practical value, but were RUINS, to be preserved exactly as ruins, for future generations of tourists? What do you do with ruins? Do you try to re-build them and make a theme-park, or do you let them slowly dissolve, integrity intact?