The Spring ‘10 collection of designer Beatrice Ong includes a shoe inspired by the Greco-Roman god Hermes or Mercury.  The wings on the back are elegant, sassy, and sexy.  We’re pretty sure that wearing these could provoke an apotheosis.

We just spotted this fabulous ad campaign on the great Blogging Pompeii site!  To raise awareness of Visa’s sponsorship of a Pompeii exhibit at the National Museum in New Zealand, the TBWA\Tequila advertising agency devised a hot lava flow that ran around the baggage carousel in Wellington Airport!  That’s hot stuff!

Advertiser: Visa
Advertising Agency: TBWA\Tequila, Auckland, New Zealand
Executive Creative Director: Andy Blood
Creative Director: Guy Roberts
Art Director: Tamryn Kerr
Copywriter: Michael Goldthorpe
Producer: Mark Paisey
Retouchers: Paul Hewson, Grant Allen
Account Manager: Sam Attenborough

We’re happy to announce that The Times has declared Rome to be one of the world’s top 12 sexiest cities. We can’t argue.

If you’re not in Rome now, get your Rome-ance on by perusing Susan Sanders’ photos of the Eterna on her Rome With A View blog.  (BTW, she promises a big update in the coming weeks, so stay tuned!)

One of our favorite museums in Rome, the Centrale Montemartini (click here to read more), has announced a new program that sounds just divine.  Starting on Friday 9 April, the museum will offer live jazz and tastings of local wines curated by the Enoteca Regionale Palatium between 8pm and 10pm.

They’re kicking things off on Friday 9 April and Saturday 10 April with a performance by the Stefano Di Battista jazz quartet.

Programming continues through May and early June with the following performances:

• 16  and 17 April: Remo Anzovino trio
• 23 and 24 April:  MJQ Sounds
• 30 aprile there’s a special concert called “Music of Yesterday and Musicians of Today and Vice Versa”
• 7 and 8 May: Enrico Pieranunzi
• 15 May:   Notte dei Musei Gegè Telesforo Quintet
• 21 and 22 May: Maurizio Giammarco jazz quartet
• 29 May Danilo Rea
• 4 and 5 June:  Roberto Gatto Quartet

Except for the special concert on 15 May, the tickets for the concerts/wine tastings are €7 and can be bought in advance (starting on 30 March) at the ticket window of the Centrale Montemartini from Tuesday – Sunday from 9:00am to 6:30pm.

Admittedly, we don’t know that much about this ad.  We found it on an Italian blog and fell instantly and madly in love with it.  It’s fabulous.  It couldn’t be better.  It makes us happy.

Of course, it’s not so terribly unusual for Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam scene to be recycled into advertising.  In just the past years, the divine maestro’s most famous work has been used to push an artists’ award and Peugeot scooters — to name just a few of its appearances in advertising.

But, without a doubt, this is our all-time favorite.  It was put up by Dr. Kim, a plastic surgeon, theoretically in the building in which he works.  The tagline at the bottom of the ad says “Be born again.  Dr. Kim, Plastic Surgeon, 3F.”

Here at the eCool Compound, we’re grateful to Caroline Lawrence, author of the Roman Mysteries series of books and tv series for kids, for letting us know about the excellent Cave Canem Project now underway at Pompeii.

If you’ve visited Pompeii, you probably know that the ancient city is home to lots of affectionate stray dogs who spend their days sunning themselves on the cobblestones of the ancient streets and  befriending tourists and following them about the archaeological site.  While Rome has stray cats, Pompeii is home to their canine compatriots.

An admirable new project called Cave Canem (Cave Canem means “beware of the dog” in Latin and the phrase is famous because it is inscribed on a mosaic found in the doorway of a home in Pompeii) aims to find proper homes for these dogs.  To this end, they’ve put up a website at which you can browse the dogs that are in search of owners and download the paperwork necessary for adoption.  They come with charming ancient Roman names like Polidia and Vesonius; they’re chock-full of knowledge about Pompeii as they’ve been on many a guided tour; and they are healthy, vaccinated, and spayed or neutered.

Yes, we know that we showed you this last year.  But some of you are new here.  And others of you love Romulus and Remus as much as all of us at the eCool Compound do.  So, we’re going to show it to you again.

Of the hundreds of uses to which the She-Wolf is put in Roman advertising, this is our all-time favorite, so we’re happy that it’s almost time for Motodays Roma and that their logo is once again embellishing the Eterna, as it’s been posted  on billboards, buses, and signs citywide.

We like to think of Romulus and Remus wearing leather.  And we’re betting the She-Wolf did as well.

In 1685,  Vittoria della Rovere (portrait on the right), the Grand Duchess of Tuscany and the wife of Grand Duke Ferdinando II commissioned a gem-studded gold crown that she donated to the Carmelite nuns of Borgo Pinti in Florence as a symbol of her devotion to a new canonized saint, Maria Maddalena dè Pazzi, famous for her spiritual ecstasies.

That crown, embellished with 412 diamonds, 114 rubies, and 80 emeralds, was thought to have been lost–hidden away during the Napoleonic raids of the early 19th century–but it  has been recently rediscovered in a convent in Florence, according to Piero Pacini, a scholar of Santa Maria Maddalena dè Pazzi, who has published photographs and an article about the crown in Medicea. Rivista interdisciplinare di studi medicei, an academic journal devoted to the study of the Medici family.

The crown for the saint was made by Giovanni Comparini  and Giuseppe Vanni–the two goldsmiths that most often had the privilege of serving the Medici family in the 17th century–and cost 1800 scudi.  It was begun in the summer of 1684, when Vittoria della Rovere, along with her goldsmiths, paid an unexpected visit to the Carmelite convent at Borgo Pinti and ordered the nuns to show her all the jewels that “belonged” to the saint.  The Grand Duchess told the nuns that she intended to use the jewels to have a crown made for the saint and the project was completed in 10 months.  For about two centuries after the crown was finished, it displayed to the saint’s faithful devotees on occasions when the saint’s incorruptible body was exposed and venerated.

In the past months, the Flash Mob movement has been growing in Rome:  large groups of people  assemble suddenly in a public place, perform an unusual and pointless act for a brief time, then quickly disperse.

Yesterday was a gorgeous day in Rome–it seemed as if spring had suddenly appeared after a long, cold, and wet winter–and so it was the perfect day for flash mobbing at the Spanish Steps.  At 3pm, thousands of people arrived on the site, took a place on the steps, and reached for the sky.

There are other Flash Mob events on tap for March, so if you want to join in, just click over to the  Flash Mob Roma website to find out about them.   You’ll see that on Sunday 7 March, a group will be assembling at the Teatro Ambra Jovenelli to protest the fact that it’s slated for closure and possible destruction.

And on 27 March, a flash mob will appear in Piazza Santa Maria in Trastevere to stage a 5-minute shaving cream war, this being, of course, the natural evolution of the annual pillow fight staged in the same place!

Things have been a bit dark and dreary in the eCool Compound for the past few months.  Never mind that it’s been raining in Rome for most of the winter, so the climactic conditions haven’t much  helped our moods.  But, among the things cheering us up in the past few days is a video by the band Hold Your Horses for their song “70 Million.”

If you don’t already know them, Hold Your Horses is a Franco-American band and they’re cheeky!  As you’ll see in the still we’re including in this post, the “70 Million” video offers a wink at art history as band members playfully reconstruct famous paintings in an off the wall lyrical interpretation that’s all their own.

Here, we’re showing you some of the Italian paintings they create, including Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam, and Caravaggio’s Salome with the Head of John the Baptist. There’s some other fine stuff too that you can see if you click over and watch the whole video on Vimeo — from Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa to David’s Death of Marat and from Munch’s The Scream to Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, it’s rocking version of art history that’s definitely going to be hitting our classrooms in the next weeks!