Primilla and Claudia Victoria

My feet are ready to drop off and, soon, so will I. First thing this morning, we said 'au revoir' as we delivered our friends (blippers Flossie and Tiedmark) to Nimes airport, before we drove north to Lyon. After visiting so many lovely small towns, the city seemed very noisy and busy. It seems it's about to host some sort of international football fest. There are tricolores flying from lots of windows, and fans are gathering. One household, with no flag to fly, lined up blue, white and red towels over their balcony instead. (See my Extra.) Fortunately, we'll be out of here before the big event and so hope to avoid any drunken-footie-fallout. 

Today, though, we headed off on a further leg of the ancient-Roman-site-seeing with a bit of modern-Lyon-sight-seeing at the same time. With a very basic - not hugely helpful - map, we managed to lose our way, walk three sides of a square to end up with a steep uphill climb. Glowing cobs, and weary-footed, I still managed a cheery grimace as we passed la Rue de Perserverance.

It meant we saw more of Lyon than we might have, including the absolute nastiest of all French public loos I've ever seen - and I've seen some pretty disgusting ones. This one proudly announced that when you close the door on exit it auto-cleaned itself. Well, I never did shut the door on exit, cos having opened it fleetingly, I never entered. It looked like the aftermath of some terrible occurance, where an animal had given birth in a sewer, causing an army to arrive, throw up, defecate, die and rot there. Apologies that I can't provide more detail (!), but I didn't stop to look further.

Enough of that. From the revoltingly disgusting to the sublimely poignant: there's nothing like the death of a child to bring history to life. In the museum of Gallic-Roman antiquities we saw two touching memorials to daughters who died in childhood. One father's epitaph offers her daughter up to the gods - "in memory of Primilla, his daughter, Terentius Pritto had this tomb built" - and there she is, pulling a pearl necklace from her jewellery box.

The other, also dedicated to the gods, was a touchingly beautiful deathmask of one mother's daughter. Keeping the cast of her daughter's face, she buried the plaster mould and other offerings in the child's tomb, with the words "... in memory of Claudia Victoria, dead at the age of 10 years, one month and 11 days: Claudia Severina raised this tomb to her beloved daughter ..."  

It should come as no surprise that the pain of losing a child was no different over 2000 years ago than it is today. This blip further preserves their memory. May the gods keep them in eternal care.