Rome, Italy
Alan's Log:
Joan's Log:
Our Roman Holiday!
January 2008
We had planned all along to do some inland travel during our winter stay in Barcelona, and Italy was at the top of our list! Airfares are ridiculously low right now for inter-Euro travel, so we took advantage of a great fare and decided to spend a week in Rome. We had heard how crazy-packed Rome is in the summer, Alan's Mother told us how they couldn't even see the Trevi Fountain last summer because of the crowds. We figured January should be fairly quiet, and it was, in fact it couldn't have been more perfect. All the sites were easy to access, the restaurants weren't jammed and the weather was incredible, a little cold, but with almost blinding sunshine. We lucked out, we hear it can be pretty rainy in the winter.
Rome was beautiful, much more so than I expected; charming and fashionable. The Romans were dressed to perfection, giving me the urge to shop! To buy a whole new wardrobe and be as beautifully put together as they are. As hard as I tried not to, we just stood out as American tourists, maybe it was the comfortable Nike athletic shoes, guide book, and back-pack?
We stayed in a centrally located hotel on Via Nazionale, within walking distance of the Roman Forum, Colliseum, Shops galore, National Museum of Rome and the Borghese Park & Museum, Trevi Fountain and Spanish Steps. We carried a pedometer on our city walks and found we were averaging 5 miles a day. It sounds a lot and it felt a lot and occasionally we had to be rescued by taxi in the evening. But we would need the exercise - as you will read below Joan had proscribed a rigorous exploration of Rome's restaurants and calories had to be burned!
Everywhere in Rome there is beautiful architecture with gorgeous details and mouldings, and everything is old, I mean really old, the city itself dates back to 750 BC! There are ancient Roman antiquities sandwiched between larger buildings all over Rome, and every block or turn in the road is another ruin of a temple, or part of the old wall, or a toppled column by the side of the road. Then there are the fountains, statues and monuments! The Romans themselves, were warm, welcoming and friendly. And last but not least there was the food! and the gelato! and the cappuccinos! Next to Paris, it's my most favorite city ever.
It is also not an easy city to see in just a few days, there is so much to see that it can very easily be overwhelming, you really need a game plan for each day. It pays to do some research ahead of time and I'm really glad I did. We had five full days within the city walls, which was just enough time to hit all the major sites in the city without getting exhausted. We are planning to visit sites outside Rome later this year by boat. This will include Ostia Antica, a town that for 600 years was Rome's main port and which contains well preserved buildings including an 1,800 year old apartment complex and Pompeii and the Amalfi Coast further south.
My absolute favorite was The Galleria Borghese, (mine too, this was my one required tourist stop in Rome!) we both were stunned by the unbelievable beauty of the Bernini statues.
I really don't think I've ever seen any sculpture more beautiful than these. What a genius Bernini was! My heart raced, I wanted to cry, I felt weak in the knees, he had taken a huge block of hard, cold marble and turned it into soft, pliable, warm, living flesh! My favorites were Apollo and Daphne,and Pluto and Proserpina, in which Pluto is abducting Proserpina and stealing her away to his home in Hades. The emotion and fear on her face is moving, there are even tears streaming down her cheeks, the soft flesh of her thigh squeezes between the fingers of Pluto's strong hand. I know I sound like a Harlequin Romance novel, but I'm not kidding! The Apollo and Daphne is equally as moving, and to think Bernini was only 24 when he sculpted it!!! There were many more Berninis, and a special temporary exhibition of Canovas, also paintings by Caravaggio, Botticelli, Raphael, and Ruebens just to name a few, were included in this extraordinary collection. I highly recommend visiting this gallery if you go to Rome You'll need to make a reservation ahead of time but all the information is on the Borghese website.
Of course half of the fun of visiting Rome is simply walking around and allowing yourself to be surprised by whatever is around the next corner.
I feel I have had a lifetime's fill of churches and had agreed to go inside only one while in Rome and that was to be St Peters at the Vatican. However the Pantheon changed my mind. It is a delight! Its massive squat presence dominates the Piazza della Minerva and draws you in. Its external ugliness (lacking most of its original marble cladding) belies the crisp interior. The ceiling looks very modern and lets in a tremendous amount of light through the open center. The interior space is vast and free of any supporting pillars. It is hard to think of it as dating back to 128 AD when its last reconstruction was supervised by Hadrian. Apparently the dome is so pleasing to the eye because it is a perfect half sphere, rather than the normal elipsoid dome. This shape made it significantly harder to build and to this day it is the widest masonry dome ever erected. Its weight is supported by cylindrical walls that are 21 feet thick at the bottom. Each massive exterior column appears to be made of a single piece of granite. Inside in a niche is the dark coffin in which Raphael is buried. Above his coffin are two bronze doves and an inscription which reads (in latin);
"Here lies Raphael by whom Nature feared to be outdone while he lived, and when he died feared that she herself would die."
Walking past the National Museum of Rome we saw that it had a temporary exhibition of frescos and mosaics from Pompeii (normally in a Naples museum). Our Roma pass allowed us access so we wandered in and snapped some pix..
Of course Romans, like most Europeans, drive far smaller cars than we are used to in the U.S., and the Smart car, which is so short it can be parked in a normal parallel parking space, but at right-angles, is very popular. So it was perhaps not so surprising to see that the diminutive vintage "'Chinquechenta'" Fiat 500 is making a comeback.
I also loved the Vatican Museum and Sistine Chapel, the only trouble is it's overwhelmingly huge, so it's impossible to see all of it in one day. We just hit the highlights, of which there are many! The Vatican is so vast, and complex that we decided to hire a guide to find our way to the items that most interested us. An oftly quoted statistic is that if you were to spend 15 seconds looking at each work of art, it would consume 15 years of your life - and we only had a morning! We had an excellent guide, a native of Chicago, who is a perpetual student of art with 30 years living in Rome under his belt. First stop the 1st Century AD Lacoon (below) who with his sons were consumed by serpents for trying to warn of the danger of the Trojan horse. This amazing sculpture was found largely intact in 1506. Amazingly his missing right arm was only found in the 1950's and reattached!
We started in the sculpture halls and strangely I was apalled! We were at one end of a long long corridor stacked floor to ceiling with unlabelled Greek and Roman statues packed shoulder to shoulder and gathering dust. We walked past 100 or 200 dusty statues then stopped to look at a couple, then walked past another hundred or so before stopping again. We entered a room full of beautiful and violent animal statues, I could not get it out of my mind that these were all historical works of art dating back a couple of millenia and that almost no one here at the Vatican will ever appreciate them because of the density of the display and the limited amount of time visitors get to spend here - as they march to the Sistine Chapel and St Peters. It seems to me that as treasures of the church (for they are certainly not religious artifacts) they could at least be parceled out to Catholic Churches around the globe in a series of traveling museums where they could be appreciated by and inspire a more interested audience.
The statues led to reception rooms with beautiful mosaic tiled floors and then to the rooms painted by Raphael and his followers, and they led to the Sistine Chapel. Raphael's and Michelangelo's colors are bright and fresh after their restoration and it is clear that Raphael had some fun in one of his paintings at Michaelangelo's expense. It seems that everyone noticed that Michelangelo preferred to paint muscular men (even when he was painting women, who looked like bodybuilding men with breasts stuck on) and when Raphael decided to include Michelangelo in one of his murals, he painted a likeness of Michelangelo's face then added Hercules' legs! Michelangelo also added a number of personal details to his "Last Judgement", (not shown) including a self-portrait and an image in a dark corner of hell with donkey ears and a snake biting his privates. It turns out this was a likeness of a Courtier who had strongly objected to Michelangelo's copious use of nudes in the fresco.
Next....Antipasti, Pasta, Gelato and so much more! (the real reason we came to Rome)
Or.......If you're not into food try this link to go Back to Barcelona for a couple of side trips, one along the coast and another by plane to Budapest Hungary. Then Alan's parents visit us in Barcelona.