Image Details

Elizabeth Lyding Will

However common, the amphora’s faintly human shape has, for the ancients as well as for us moderns, suggested the idea of immortality. Author Elizabeth Lyding Will took the photo above in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome; the capital-shaped tombstone is surmounted by an ancient olive oil amphora from Spain. And just outside ancient Pompeii’s Nolan Gate, the Roman official Herennius Celcus built a lovely tomb for his wife, Aesquillia Polla, marked by a tall marble column crowned with an amphora. An amphora in relief also graces the tombstone of 20th-century Harvard professor Charles Eliot Norton, founder of the Archaeological Institute of America.