The Temple of Saturn stands in the Roman Forum quite close to the Arch of Septimus Severus and the Old CURIA or Senate. The foundations of the sanctuary date back to the times of Tarquin the Proud, last of the mythic Seven Kings of Rome, the list of these important archaic monarchs headed by Romulus himself.

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Saturn was a titan, and he fathered most of the Olympic Gods but proceeded to swallow each one, as he was aware that their generation would depose him and the other titans and titanesses, heralding a new age -- or reset ! -- which would make the universe quite different and eventually beget the race of humans.

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The inhabitants of the LAZIO region of Italy told tales in Latin, their Lazian language, from times immemorial -- that is, before time -- of a city named after himself by the titan Saturn when he was ousted from the heavens by Jupiter, Neptune, and Pluto (the Greek Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades), and found haven in the very hillock where the temple of Saturn we see in ruins has stood since almost 500 B.C.  Because Saturn's reign before he fell from his throne and most likely also the luminary that shepherds and sailors were associated with forces of abundance or GOLD, eventually in the Forum of Republican Rome the site of that old Saturnine hill was blessed and respected as the house of riches, the treasury of the city, and it housed chambers guarded under strict surveillance where wealth was stored, in addition to files and records of these sums and artifacts. Plutarch and Dion Cassius, among other authors, even tell us that the Treasury of Saturn was a sort of visitors' registry where forastieri arriving in the Caput Mundi were required to report as soon as they entered the city walls -- as immigration, as we would say today, was a potential source of wealth or dirth in the public sphere.

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By good fortune, some planetary orbits of months ago, a young gentleman stopped by my studio on Via di Sant Ignazio and expressing interest in several works in pen and ink in my workshop window, several of these being ink drawings that seemed to be of mosaics, asked if it would be possible to draw, as if it were a mosaic, a cornucopia, in black and white, for the floor of a foyer in a house located close to the Forum, in the neighborhood that goes to the Circus Maximus. Of course, I replied, and before long, I notified this gentleman that his drawing was ready.