The Stoicism of the Hellenistic Boxer

All photos taken by me 13th March, 2024

Rome is crammed with relentlessly astonishing and intriguing places; home to a panoply of sites which anywhere else would be the most famous thing in town but which here are under-visited and overlooked. There are, quite simply, just too many things. This is, of course, what makes my job so incredibly stimulating: over the course of the last week I have taken folk on eleven different tours without repeating the same route twice (or indeed being tangled up in crowds).

In between wandering between churches on the Esquiline Hill glittering with early Christian and medieval mosaics and exploring the excavations under the Basilica of San Clemente, on Wednesday lunchtime I dropped in on the excellent Palazzo Massimo alle Terme near Termini railway station. I’ve written here of the glorious painted garden of Livia advertising the gilded and perpetual spring of the Augustan era which is to be found on the top floor of the museum.

This time I popped in to say hello to the bronze statue of a boxer which was found in 1885 during the dramatic razing of large sections of the Quirinal and Esquiline Hills to provide the capital of the newly established Italian Kingdom with its machines of state.