Here I am for the first time in my life celebrating Easter with friends in my summer home in Terracina, Italy. My family (daughters, mother, sister, brother in law, nieces, their husbands, grand nieces and nephews) all in NYC.
My friends and guests came from Rome, Florence, Venice and Priverno to spend time together. My apartment is filled with laughter, good food, wine, grappa, home-made limoncello, on and on. Our breakfast, cappuccino e bomba con la crema were consumed at our favorite bar on the piazza where all in one place we could see and feel history spanning from the Roman through modern times. My long walks on the beach were used for introspection and assessing my past, planning my future but most of all enjoying and living in the present, that instant moment which soon would become the past.
Because most of my guests were not from Terracina, I showed them my favorite sites among them the town orphanage, the best villa ever. We decided to take a guided tour of the centro storico. The guide a handsome, distinguished man, an historian-archeologist shows us a statue of a Roman nobildonna (might be Caelia Macrina) recently found while excavating the Roman Theatre on the Piazza Municipale. A Roman woman - Caelia Macrina from Terracina. Having lost a young son, in his memory, founded and funded an orphanage for boys and girls. The sum was so large that the impoverished children were well taken care of long after she had died and her tradition is still carried out today.
I was so taken by her story that I quickly went to the best bookstore in town trying to find out more, after all she is a woman after my own heart, but no books were written about her, no pictures, the statue was headless. I searched the internet but not much there except
http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/eascfa/dinner_party/heritage_floor/search.php?psgroup=14
“Caelia Macrina
Flourished circa A.D. 150, Tarracina, Italy
Little is known about the Roman woman Caelia Macrina except that some time in the second century A.D., in the town of Tarracina southeast of Rome, she donated a large sum of money for the construction of a building and for a food fund to support 200 impoverished children. A dedicatory inscription originally attached to the building reveals that Caelia's welfare grants were somewhat unusual in that they were more generous to girls than was typical of the time.”
A few years ago, I was there at the Brooklyn Museum to see the exposition of the Dinner Party by Judy Chicago and did not take note of this woman Caelia, so admired by me at this very moment. Seeing her statue, the place where she lived, the building she funded was very emotional and memorable. This guided tour has opened a new world of interest of the Roman women and their roles they played in molding who we are today.
