[ July, 2015 ] If you ask someone from Calabria what you should see there, he or she would say “The Bronzes of Riace”.
These are the statues found by a diver, who was diving offshore of Riace and reported that “there was something that vaguely resembled a human arm”.
These statues are warriors who were about 2 metres tall and both of them have a great muscular body.
The scholars think they were made around the 5th century BC and during the transportation from Greece to Rome around the 1st century BC, they sank because of a shipwreck.
They are treasured in the unfinished museum in Reggio di Calabria, now.
When we tried to enter this room from the other room through a half open door, a staff member rushed over to us and said ” you have to go around to the other door”.
In fact, all the visitors have to go into a room for sterilization for about three minutes before going into the exhibition room.
Then why was the other door half open?
Among the two statues, the one with the rich hair (called A) was made some decades before B and his teeth are made of silver.
B has lost one eye and the beard was made less elaborately.
By the way, there was another mourning curator here.
Apparently, when they started showing these bronzes, there were as many as 10,000 visitors every day, forming long queues, but now, for example, only 200,000 people came during the whole of last year.
They thought the Milan EXPO this year was a good opportunity to invite people here, so they were doing some campaigns such as reducing the air fare from Milan, but because of the lack of advertisement, not many people have come, he said.
