Rome – page 3

Saturday 19th

Excess

This was my room.  It was tiny.  The bathroom is basically the only part of the room not pictured.  I spent a lot of time here lying on that bed in my underwear.  The reason for this was the heat outside (83 the one time I found a thermometer in Fahrenheit) combined with the fact that I averaged 8 hours a day on my feet.  The surprise for me was that my back had none of the associated aches.  I think there is something to be said for a hard European bed.

Hotel Serena’s most modestly priced room

I got out around 10:30 and took the subway north to Piazza del Popolo.  (the trick to getting a subway ticket is walk past the line of clueless tourists in front of the one operational ticket machine and go up to the little newspaper stand with the big sign over it that says: “Tickets sold here”.  It takes 10 seconds instead of 10 minutes and you don’t need exact change).  Today was my first time out far enough to see the city wall.  For some reason I really like city walls.  I think I would have enjoyed standing on the ramparts throwing hot oil and masonry debris at barbarian invaders.  I’ll show you a picture of the city walls later (lord knows I took plenty).

Piazza del Popolo

Piazza del Popolo is a good-sized square just inside the major northern city gate (Porta Popolo).  There are three churches on Piazza del Popolo and you can see them all in this picture.  They are all named “Santa Maria”, as are at least half the churches in Rome.  That big thing in the middle is an Egyptian obelisk and I’m convinced there are more ancient Egyptian obelisks in Rome than there are in Cairo.  The cross on top is just a little reminder of who’s in charge now.  The church on the far left is Santa Maria del Popolo – I went inside:

Crucifixion of St. Peter and the Assumption of the Virgin Mary

What we have here is a Caravaggio on the left and a Carracci on the right.  As you know, following the dark ages came the Renaissance. This was a time of increased stability and private wealth which was able to fund the arts (which was a big deal after 1000 years of “Plague and murder! No time to paint!”).  The thing was, the Renaissance art just picked up where it left off 1000 years before.  Around 1600, about 100 years later, the styles began to change and we call this subsequent 100 year period the Baroque.  

Caravaggio was the first influential artist of the Baroque.  He is also a rock-star in Roman art historian circles.  They love this guy – he was a brawler, a drinker, a slanderer, a murderer, possibly homosexual, known to pull stunts like blatantly using an infamous prostitute as his model for the virgin Mary and painting his saints with dirt on their feet and imperfect faces.  He was banished from Rome and ultimately was murdered himself. 

So… the two pictures above were both painted in the early Baroque.  The one on the left is ‘new school’ and the one on the right is ‘old school’.  Both are quite good but to the modern sensibility the one on the left is refreshingly cheese-free.  Notice the fact that some guy’s rear-end takes up a prominent position in the painting and his feet are black.  Also notice that the guy getting crucified actually looks a little bit worried about the fact.

Santa Maria had some excessive and impressive marble work.

check out all the marble

Santa Maria del Popolo contains the Chigi Chapel which is probably well known because it was designed by Raphael.  Here I am observing the esoteric brilliance of the high Renaissance alter piece.  Or maybe I just liked the colors (actually, it appears that the artist, Sebastiano del Piombo, was Venetian and this is an example of  “the colors of the Venetian school”, so maybe I was on to something).  I looked up and was amused to see God looking down at me.  Turns out this ceiling mosaic was also designed by Raphael.

Just east of Piazza del Popolo is the Villa Borghese, a huge park area on the north end of the old city.  Somewhere on the other end of Villa Borghese was the Galleria Borghese where I had a reservation and a strict ½ hour window in which to pick up my ticket.  Apparently the art collection there is so great they can get away with being complete fascists about letting people in to see it.

Aside from being big, the park itself isn’t very impressive; a lot of Roman pine trees, some dirt, a few benches and not much else.  After I got my ticket I had an hour to kill before my entry time so I wandered around and took pictures of things that are not quite interesting enough to warrant a space on this page.  That is, except for this picture of a gypsy crone:

Gypsy Crone

In America we have bums – bums are generally grizzled drunk men in their early 50s or manic-eyed heroin addicted women in their mid 30s.  In Rome bums are Gypsy Crones.  Gypsy Crones are tiny, pathetic old women that resemble a sack of potatoes in both size and weight.  For some reason there are no homeless men in this city.  There are hooligans that drink half liter Peronis on the steps of Maria de Maggiore but they look like they probably crash on the couch in uncle Vito’s basement.  As you can see in this picture, a gypsy crone is so twisted by the fickle bitch that is life that she can’t even hold her head up above 90 degrees.  Sometimes I would see them prostrated on the sidewalk moaning their gypsy beggar chants and shaking their little tin cup like it was a death rattle.  Talk about freaky.

Museo e Galleria Borghese

At the museum, the fascists informed me that there was an unscheduled guided tour for the same price as the audio tour.  Sweet.  We got a fussy little meterosexual Italian who told us everything we needed to know about the Borghese Cardinal, Bernini and Caravaggio (Although I found it concerning that he couldn’t explain why St. Jerome was pictured with a skull when even I know that St. Jerome is almost always pictured with a skull just so you can tell it’s St. Jerome.  There is something of an unwritten code of iconography to help you identify who anyone is in old religious art and after you’ve seen a few dozen St So and Sos you pick up on what his icons are).  They didn’t allow any photos in the Museum, so I had to be very sneaky. 

St. Jerome

Who painted this?  You get one guess.  St. Jerome was the guy who translated the bible into Latin directly from Hebrew.  He also spent a lot of time in Rome and his remains are claimed to have been stashed in St. Maria Maggiore, right around the corner from my hotel.

This next one I’m rather proud of, so I’m going to let it be big.  In a museum full of masterpieces, this is probably the one the museum is the most proud of and I could see why. My time was up anyway, so I figured I’d whip the camera out and take a proper picture.

Apollo and Daphne

This is a Bernini sculpture and it’s quite impressive.  The story here is that Apollo was smitten by the nymph Daphne.  She wasn’t interested.  He chased after her.  She pleaded to her father for help.  He turned her into a tree to prevent Apollo from having her.  The statue captures Daphne mid-transformation from girl to tree.  The cool thing is that the degree of her transformation changes as you change your viewing angle.  From this angle, she is mostly girl.  You can kind of see her hand and her hair turning into branches and you can definitely see the bark forming up around her legs.  The detail is just ridiculous and the sculpture is in perfect condition (which is such a contrast to nearly every other sculpture in this city, where you have to wonder just how much weathering it has endured).

The gallery also has a statue of Napoleon’s wife (Venus Victrix) that they are exceedingly proud of and the Rape of Proserpine was really nice (but my photo came out blurry).

I reentered the city proper at Porta Pinciana.

Hey, now that is a nice-looking city wall:

So I had developed this plan that I would try to eat multi-course lunches while I was out and about.  This would allow me to sample all of the culinary locales without going far at night.  I soon discovered the danger of this plan.  First off, the restaurants around Porto Pinciana don’t open until 12:30 at which time I was completely out of my mind and floating on a cloud ten feet over the sidewalk.  When I finally got seated, I ordered two courses; a wine risotto and Artichoke Veal.  When the risotto arrived it was huge and contained more rich, smelly cheese than it did rice.  My stomach closed down before I even finished it.  Then they brought me a plate covered in cubes of veal.  I’d never had veal.  It’s really not all that great, kind of like lamb.  I was not about to leave a plate full of food so I managed to stuff most of it down.  I figured I’d sit around for a half hour and then be on my way.  I didn’t get very far before I found myself sitting on a stoop wishing I was passed out on my bed.  Somehow I managed to get back to the edge of Villa Borghese, where I dropped into the first park bench I found and spent the next hour idly reflecting on things like; what constitutes Italian features, what makes a race masculine or feminine, why tourists are statistically more attractive than locals, the merits of the four humors, and the likelihood that an important cross section of the Roman population had relocated to the beach (the young and attractive).

Right before all this, when I was still hungry and confused I photographed this palazzo.  I have no idea where it was or what it is, but it sure looks cool.  The place is built on a hill.  You can kind of see what looked like a crypt basement level, through the gate.  Typical Roman pine on the left – Villa Borghese was basically just thousands of this tree.

One hell of a house

Eventually, I became well enough to walk and I set out in search of the Spanish steps.  According to the map, it should be right around this – holey shit!  Is that?  How many?  It turns out this is where the children of Rome are; all 30,000 of the self-absorbed little Italians were packed into the Piazza di Spagna and Via Corso.  You add to this just as many tourists and you have complete chaos.  It was overwhelming.  There appeared to be many interesting shops but the bustle and chatter of Eurospawn drowned out everything. 

The Spanish Steps from above

Under better circumstances I would have had no problem with the crowd, possibly even enjoyed it.  But I just wanted to lie down.  I hid out in a church for a few minutes.  It looked like this:

Half the time I entered one of these churches, I heard Carmina Burana’s O Fortuna in my head

I psyched myself up and then made a dash for it.  Evidently I was going the wrong direction and when I found daylight again I had reemerged at the Piazza del Popolo.  It was just as well, at least I knew there was a subway entrance nearby.

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