In the summer of '09, the great Sara Baldwin sent me a link to a story about a Roman mosaic that had been discovered and preserved in Lod, Israel. The image above is the whole mosaic. It's a hi-res, so click it if you want a better view.

The mosaic was enormous, nearly 2,000 square feet and it was in a nearly pristine state. It had been discovered in 1996 and then buried again until 2004. By 2004, the Israeli Antiquities Authority had a plan and in that same year, they put that plan into action.

I have a thing for Roman art and mosaics, I've written about that on this blog a lot. So does Sara and that shared love of ancient mosaics is what drew the two of us together in the first place. I wrote about the Lod mosaic in June, 2009.

I added it to a very long list of things I wanted to see but figured I never would some time after I wrote that post.

At some point this past fall, another great woman and lover of all things Roman, JoAnn Locktov told me that the Lod Mosaic was coming to the US on a tour while the Israeli Antiquities Authority built the museum that will house it eventually. The first stop on that tour is the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

The exhibit opened at the end of September and it runs through April 3, 2011. So in what has to be one of the coolest coincidences ever, I went to see the Lod Mosaic on Saturday afternoon.

No matter how many photos of it I'd seen nothing prepared me for it fully. It's significantly larger than I thought it would be and the colors are shockingly bright.

To read the rest of Paul’s blog and see more photos of the mosaics, gohere.