Happy Birthday, Rome!

Ancient Romans accepted 21 April 753 B.C. (in our current Gregorian calendar) as the traditional date of the founding of their city, and celebrated its "birthday" with the festival Parilia...More...

Here's my snap of the Antonine column in Rome, taken on the 5th of July, 2006, at 8:30 A.M. Commodus commissioned this column in honor of his just deceased father (guess who?!), my favorite, Marcus Aurelius. It now is found in the Piazza Colonna aptly named, not after the column, but after the enormous palazzo (to the right, out of the view of this photo) dominating the space, which had belonged to the powerful Colonna family, though the presence of the column in the piazza surely is no coincidence.

So, calculating OUR date based on the date of the founding of Rome (as some of them actually did, other times the dates were based on the ruling periods of the consols), today would be April 21, 2764, that is, two thousand and sixty four years after the founding of Rome.

For more info, see, for example:

http://www.all-art.org/history100-3.html;

http://medlibrary.org/medwiki/History_of_Rome (with references, yeah!, but it is drawn from Wikipedia, so take everything with a grain of salt, until you can verify the sources for yourself...I've been hunting for more than an hour for a university web site page with something similar, and no such luck, so you'll just have to make do, and hunt for yourself, if interested);

and the ever helpful about.com pages (for everything!): http://ancienthistory.about.com/od/cityofrome/p/RomeFounding.htm.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, ROME!