Exhibition: Ancient Rome invades Lens

We don't go enough to Lens (Pas-de-Calais) on — short — vacations.

This northern Louvre full of Japanese transparencies, the slagheaps on the horizon, which have become walks.

And a trip to "Rome, the city and the empire", at the museum, which benefited from the temporary closure of the Roman rooms of the Louvre, in Paris, to house an anthology of more than 300 masterpieces, out of five centuries.

All of Rome in a handful of rooms, from Pompey, Augustus, Hadrian, to athletes and ephebes, to the personification of power through a statue of Victory.

We are particularly fascinated by this marble hair with the curls of breathtaking refinement of Roman hairstyles.

There are then a thousand ways to have one's hair done, as Ovid writes.

For women but also for men.

Layers of curly locks frame the face.

It was also customary to buy hair, as add-ons.

Romans of both sexes dyed their hair and there was no question of losing their hair, a symbol of power.

Replanting techniques already existed.

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But we get lost, even if these stone loops constantly attract the eye.

The exhibition also and above all shows how Rome, the city, managed to unify an immense empire, stylistically and geographically.

Until the dislocation with the advent of Christianity.

“Rome, the city and the empire”,