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It’s that time again eCoolers when we offer a roundup of links about Rome that we’ve found interesting.  If you’re a Facebook Fan of eCool, then you may already have seen these and we apologize for the repetition.  Others of you may want to click over to Facebook to join our fan club (link above) or you may prefer to take advantage of the hot new Facebook fan box we’ve added to the sidebar of this blog.

Here’s what we’ve been reading in the past few weeks:

• After its triumphal tour of Greece, the Euphronios Vase–recently returned to Italy from the Metropolitan Museum of Art–takes up a permanent place in the Villa Giulia.  Michael Kimmelman of the NY Times reports.

• The Sacramento Examiner tells us what healthy, low-cost food to serve at an ancient Roman toga party or wedding.

• The Onion brings us news that Hercules is struggling to complete his 13th Labor.

• Awesome Athena comic books from Dynamite Entertainment.

• The Discovery Channel alerts us to the discovery of lotion that is over 2000 years old, left almost intact in the cosmetic case of an aristocratic Etruscan woman. Taking your cosmetics to the grave gives a whole meaning to the brand Bed, Bath, and Beyond.

• USA Today has an article on daily life in Pompeii.

• Divina Cucian tells us how to make Sicilian Tomato jam. Yummm!

• Speeding nuns moving a bit too fast in a Ford Fiesta refuse to pay their fine.

• A reporter from the Globe and Mail went to gladiator school in Rome.  After we published this link, faithful reader Star let us know about another great article on the same subject from the Telegraph called “I Came, I Saw, I Conked Him.”

• The remains of a Bronze Age warrior with an arrow sticking through his skeleton was found in Nettuno.

• An account of a culinary vacation in Campania made us really really hungry.

• Curators of the shrine of Italian saint Padre Pio have enlisted scientists to provide the technology for a 60-metre statue of the friar capable of collecting and recycling solar energy.

• The Etruscan masterpiece, the Chimera of Arezzo, has gone on show at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles as part of a cooperation deal with Italy after the museum agreed to return contested antiquities.

• Hype about the possible discovery of the summer villa of the Roman Emperor Vespasian had been discovered was followed a brief article by classicist Mary Beard that clarified the process (or non-process) by which the identification (or non-identification) of the villa was made.

• The same Mary Beard visited the Roman Forum on a trip to Rome and registered complaints about the lines, the disrepair of the monuments, and the decision to install a contemporary art exhibit in the ancient downtown of the city.

In case you’re wondering, that “Your Teens” photo above is by Susan Sanders.  Click over to her photo blog, Rome With a View, to see more wonderful photos of the Eternal City.

More than 400 people follow us on Facebook (you can too – click on over to facebook.com/eternallycool and show us the love).  As a Facebook fan, you’ll get daily Rome updates!

Not on Facebook, but still want to know what’s going on in the Eterna?  Then you’re sure to find a link or two below that will appeal:

• Bruno Heller says he wants to produce a theatrical wrap-up to his critically beloved and prematurely canceled HBO drama “Rome.”  Oh please let them make a Rome movie!

• The Aurelian Wall is a bit less sturdy than was thought.  There are fears for the future of Rome’s ancient Aurelian walls after chunks collapsed.

• Bldgblog.com visits the Crypta Balbi Museum near Largo Argentina and describes it as “a city-block-sized core sample of Rome, threaded through with staircases, tunnels, and elevated walkways for visitors.”

• The New York Times provides a schedule and some details about usually-closed monuments in the Forum and Palatine that are open to the public this summer.

• The Timesonline.co.uk reviews David Watkin’s new guidebook to the Roman Forum and gives it two thumbs up, saying, “More successfully than any writer before him, Watkin makes his reader aware of the multilayered, fascinating history of this unique site.”  We’ve been passing the book around the Compound for the past few months and we concur.

• At SeriousEats.com, Gina DePalma shows us how to stay cool this summer by doing as the Sicilians and eating ice-cold gelato, granita, and sorbetto for breakfast.  Oh yeah!

• The NYTimes has an article today about the Euphronios Vase, now on display at the Villa Giulia, and Vernon Silver’s new book, “The Lost Chalice: The Epic Hunt for a Priceless Masterpiece” which they rate as a “first-class page turner documenting the stolen krater’s travels from ancient Greece to Etruscan Italy to New York and then back here — and of the travails of another work also by the sublime Euphronios.”

• Trenitalia cancelled their lost and found service.  That struck everyone in the eCool Compound as hilarious.

• Restorers working on Michelangelo’s frescoes in the Pauline Chapel at the Vatican claim to have found a self-portrait of the artist.

• The Pope announced that bones in a grave excavated at San Paolo fuori le mura belong to St. Paul while archaeologists announced that the oldest known representation of St. Paul was recently discovered in the catacombs of St. Tecla on Via Ostiense.  All that news came as the Vatican’s Year of St. Paul drew to a close at 29 June.  Make of that what you will.

• Venice got its first female gondolier.  Brava!

• Smithsonian Magazine covered the work of French amateur archaeologist, Bruno Tassan, who’s fighting to preserve a neglected track of the ancient Via Aurelia in Provence.

• Awwww cute.  The Rome Zoo (aka Bioparco) celebrated after a zebra foal was born there for the first time in over ten years. They named him Primo, but that’s hjust a temporary name and  a more permanent one will be chosen by children who visit the zoo.