Word: catacombs
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...soup-thick British accent, and floats out an occasional sowbelly vowel. Monk opened the Downstairs early in 1956, now emcees the show, also fills in when one of the two pianists doesn't show up. He is also busy planning the Downstairs evacuation to another, larger catacomb. Selecting the site will not be easy. Says Monk's man Matthews: "People like to think they're discovering us." The problem: finding a new cavern capacious enough for another 50 or so intrepid spelunkers. carefully crummy enough to make them think they have discovered something...
...below the dizzying spires of cinematic art (musicals, adult westerns), lower even than the swarming, unswept streets of cinematic commerce (cops-and-robbers films, childish westerns), lies a dank catacomb, for years the lair of wound-up scientists, unwound mummies, vampires, hyperpituitary apes, cat men, spacemen and skirt-chasing tyrannosaurs. Here budgets are low, actors obscure (Bela Lugosi is dead and Boris Karloff has graduated to TV) and taglines visceral: The Man Who Turned to Stone ("Incredible revelations from the blackest annals of medicine!"), Zombies of Mora Tau ("A tide of terror!''), Half Human ("Half-man, half-beast...
This hitherto unsuspected Jewish art may in turn have influenced the Christians of the catacombs. Except for representations of Jesus as the Good Shepherd, most of the earliest catacomb wall paintings illustrate scenes from the Old rather than the New Testament-scenes that may first have been rendered in the Dura synagogue's murals...
Digger Ferrua believes that the catacomb, to judge from its artistic style, dates from the 4th century A.D. It was probably the burial place of a group of families and not used for religious ceremonies. This would account for its absence from ecclesiastical records. Many of the pictures are about obscure subjects, and much work will have to be done before their significance can be determined...
...ancient street branching off the Appian Way, noticed small holes in the earth. The news was passed to the Pontifical Commission for Sacred Archaeology, which ordered Engineer Mario di Santa Maria to excavate further. Entering through a shaft bored in the ground, he and his colleagues penetrated an elaborate catacomb, but found that all loose objects of value had disappeared. Fact was that the catacomb had been discovered 20 years before, and covered quietly by the landowners to avoid an official veto on building over...