peterbirks (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
peterbirks) wrote2010-06-18 04:15 pm
peterbirks) wrote2010-06-18 04:15 pm
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Rome seems to have the ability to impose minor mishaps on me that send all my best-laid plans awry. It's a city far more suited to people who just head out and follow their nose. Indeed, if I were capable of enjoying myself while doing that, then it is definitely what I would do.
Yesterday I had intended to get to the Catacombs (about a mile and a half south-south-east of the Colosseum) while the temperature was still high (because the Catacombs are COLD, man), returning north-north-west via the Coloseum and thence north to the Fontana di Trevi, AKA Three Coins In The Fountain.
It didn't take long for that plan to get screwed.
After I hopped off my second bus at the Largo Argentina (about half a mile north-west of the Colosseum), I decided to take a quick picture of the cats that live in the Roman ruins on that square. They don't look that healthy, TBH. But I took a snap anyway, only to be told that there was "No Card In Camera".
Yep, I'd forgotten to take the SD card out of the card reader connected to the Netbook and re-insert it in the Pentax.
The logical thing now was to look for a camera shop, a venture I have followed before, but in Cannes. I headed north up Via Corsa (this is the wrong direction to get to the catacombs), and got about half-way up before I saw a shop down a side street that seemed to be an optician's and a camera shop. You walk in and a bloke in a white coat is sitting behind a desk. You have to approach this bloke (no wandering around the shop, thank-you-very-much) and explain what you want. He sent an assistant off to get the relevant card, who returned, wrote out a receipt, and put it on the cash desk, where you had to pay someone else (a bit like the old system at Foyle's).
I rushed to the shade of the Galeria Alberto Soldi, the nearest thing that Via Corsi has to a shopping mall, and they've made quite a nice job of it. I then spent a good few minutes actually trying to extract the card from its vacuum-packed plastic. Have you ever tried to open one of those without a sharp implement to hand? Not easy, not easy.
The Galeria splits into a "Y" shape as you enter from the Via Corsi. The old pillars remain, but have glass doors behind them to enable air-conditioning and to have a clear "no smoking" area. There is a cafe in the aisle of the left "Y" that is not cheap, but is a pleasant and cool place to stop for a cake and a coffee.
All of this shenaniganning meant that it was already two hours after I had left the flat, and I had been nowhere! Since I was now nearer to the Fontana di Trevi, I decided to make that my first destination, despite the heat.
What I found was a rather pretty fountain:
and one hell of a lot of people:
This is clearly a place that it is better to visit at night. There were tour guides everywhere, holding up their "identifying sticks". How many people a day, I wonder, forget exactly what identifying stick their guide is carrying, and end up following a different tour back to a different starting place? Then, completely lost, they wander round Rome all night looking for their hotel, which they can't remember the name of, only to end up as one of those Rome bums that you see on the street, rescued a year later when the tour guide returns?
I managed to take a wrong turn coming out of the Fontana di Trevi, taking myself north-east rather than south-west (impressive, huh?) and ending up on Via del Tritone. A quick look at the map in The Rough Guide showed me that this was not such a disaster.
It was only "a quick look" at the map because, after four days, I was finally getting the hang of The Rough Guide's maps. Basically, the Guide splits Rome into 11 sections. It has maps at the back, and maps within the text. The problem is that the maps within the text are not to the same scale and do not interlink with each other. This makes it very difficult to orientate yourself when you head from one section of The Rough Guide to another section. I had in fact wandered from the Guide's "Tridente" section to its "East Central Rome" section (these are five chapters apart, despite their geographical proximity). Fortunately the night before I'd actually done some diligent reading of much of the book, just to see if there was anything that I really shouldn't miss, so I had a "mental map" and I had also seen all the relevant maps within the text.
By such means, I now had in my head that I was quite near the Piazza Barberini and after that the Palazzo Barberini. I'd actually knocked these off my list of "must see's", but, since I was nearby, I re-included them.
The Piazza Barberini contains a fairly sensational Bernini (and a Hotel Brisol Bernini behind it) that is only slightly near-fatal to try to reach.
The Barberini family were the greatest patrons of Bernini. This is the Fontana di Tritone, which gave the name to the street down which I had just walked. Bernini finished this in 1644.
We tend to lump a lot of the "Renaissance" stuff together, but on yesterday's walk it became clearer how much progress was made between stuff that was produced in the late 15th century and stuff like this produced in the mid-17th century.
A short walk north-west up the Via Vittorio Veneto brought me to the Santa Maria della Concezione, which as the painting of "St Michael Trampling On The Devil" by Guido Reni in 1636.
The interesting thing about this is that "The Devil" is considered to be a likeness of Pope Innocent X, for whom Guido Reni had a less than healthy respect.
However, the really interesting thing about this church is the cemetery/crypt next door, where the bones of some 4,000 monks are artfully arranged into verious patterns on the ceiling and around the semi-preserved skeletons of monks still in their habits. Weird is not the word for it. This is the kind of thing you would expect to come across in Mexico, where they have a rather more gruesome line with Christianity. The chapels are called a monument to "Our Sister of Bodily Death".
Outside again on the Via Veneto, I was struck once again how Rome just seems to have missed a trick with what it could do with the city. I'm sure that visitors to London felt the same and may do feel the same. But over the past 20 years London has done a lot to improve itself as a visitor-friendly city -- the paving over of the north side of Trafalgar Square being perhaps the most impressive recent move. But I can also remember when Leicester Square was considered a "vital" road traffic square. It's now completely pedestrianized.
Via Veneto was a hip tree-lined street of the 1960s and 1970s, where Fellini would shoot movies of the hip and stylish sipping their espressos. Now it just seems a bit lost, and you have to use your imagination to see what could be done with it.
Part of the reason for the fading of glamour is that this is also the home to many of Italy's Ministries, a kind of Rome Whitehall. The Ministry of Economic Supply is an interesting Mussolini-era building:
After this I would walk back down the hill to the Piazza Barberini and then left up the Via Barberini, to visit the Palazzo Barberini. What could go wrong? After all, surely it's reasonable to assume that the Palazzo Barberini would be on the Via Barberini? Particularly when the Rough Guide gives the address as Via Barberini 18.
So I trekked up the street, turned right into the entrance, and met a mass of iron mesh. Totally closed off.
Oh.
Looking again at the map, I saw that there was another possible entrance on the Via Delle Quattro Fontane. So, yet another victory in the quest of Rome to slow me down.
Ten minutes later I arrived at a much more promising entrance:
Unfortunately the Palazzo is still only half-way through a complete renovation. There's no entrance to the Gran Salon, and the number of paintings on display (and rooms that you can access) is only about 33% of the whole. On the plus side, it's only E5.00 to get in, and there are quite enough paintings to be going on with.
I'm a slow "reader" of paintings. I can't really manage more than a dozen or so good ones in an afternoom. So the 12 or so rooms on display were plenty for me.
Once again, no photographs were allowed, but highlights that I can recall were:
La Fornarina, by Raphael. Probably the love of his life. Note the armlet with his name on it. You can also just see a wedding ring on the upper part of the woman's ring finger. Raphael actually painted this out, perhaps not wanting to appear too presumptious, but the "restorers" have brought it back.
Venus and Adonis, by Titian
Judith beheading Holofernes by Caravaggio. Gotta love that face on the old woman looking on. Brilliant.
And a Holbein of Henry VIII.
Rather cheatingly, they have above this the famous "Portrait of Thomas More", only to mention on the card that it is a 17th century copy.
Also a famous portrait of a young man by Carracci, the title of which I can't recall, plus Caravaggio's St Francis, a couple of El Greco "preparatory" paintings, a Tintoretto, and many more minor paionters ("Francia" was rather good, I thought) whose paintings would doubtless fetch well into seven figures on the open market.
So, that was a pleasant 90 minutes or so (I toured each room twice). It's compulsory to deposit your bags in lockers downstairs, for E1.00 deposit. I took three tries to find a door that worked. However, you don't have to enter the gallery to use the toilets, so these are definitely the poshest public toilets in Rome! George Castanza would make an out-of-the-way trip just to visit these.
As one walks down the steps, there's a rather classy bath sitting in the middle of the room, for no real reason that I could establish.
There was an interesting light effect in the picture below, when I did a white balance.
The walls came out oddly green. Actually, I think that they were this colour, but the ambience of the sourroundings makes the visitor see them as less green.
Here's the original picture that I took, with the familiar "yellow" effect.
But this picture, taken after adjusting for white balance, turned walls which I saw in the dimness as being a sort of apple-white, into this:
Weird, huh?
After I left the Palazzo, I saw a couple of nice apartments in the buildings opposite. An expensive area to live, I suspect.
A walk south-east down Via dello Quattro Fontane (many of the streets in Rome are in a roughly grid fashion, but do not run north-south and east-west. Different areas run north-west/south-east or north-north-west/south-south-east. This makes it even easier to get lost.) brought me to the eponymous "Four Fountains":
This small junction lies at the top of the Quirinal Hill. Rome celebrates the fantastic views that one gets from here by making it a near-lethal traffic junction.
A view down Via Delle Quattro Fontane from the Quirinal Hill.
Right on the corner of this peak is San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, by Borromini.
The interesting thing about this church is that it was built on an impossibly tiny space. The roof is about twice as high as the floor space.
Outside, you can see that, even then, buildings were pushed "up to the edge":
A little further down Via del Quirinale was a Bernini-designed church. At the time these would have been near the Palazzo del Quirinale when it was the residence of popes.
Sant'Andrea al Quirinale isx an oddity in that it's about three times as wide as it is long. So you can only get about seven rows of seats in it.
This is a view of the front door from about as far back as I could get.
But that doesn't stop Bernini going to town with the ceiling,
or elsewhere.
Between the two churches I came across this oddity, which I assume is an ancient guard point (15th century?)
This was opposite the "long wall" of the Palazzo del Quirinale. TBH, a number of the pavements in Rome are boring because, as is the tradition in southern Europe, residences are built around central courtyards that are inaccessbile and in the main invisible to travellers. Historically this made a lot of sense, although attempts by mid-20th-century architects to recreate something similar with modern apartement blocks were a total failure, for reasons that would have been obvious to the planners if they had half a brain.
I thought that I had found a fifth police force (I have seen the building of the "Finanza Guardia", but not the actual police), in that I thought these were the Security Guard for the Palace, but I suspect that they are an arm of the Polizia Statale.
Continuing south-west along the Via del Quirinale, it was approaching 6pm. The Piazza del Quirinale faces the front of the eponymous Palazzo, which is now the residence of the Italian President. As I neared the Piazza, I could hear music.
This proved to be one of the more fortuitous events of my various delays and diversions, as I was to come across the Italian version of the Changing of the Guard. This isn't even mentioned in the Rough Guide, so I have no idea how often it takes place.
First to arrive are the Navy, 'cos they are the band.
Then comes the Army:
And finally The Air Force, which was the force in situ
You then get a rather impressive rendition of the Itlaian National Anthem, sung by all of the members of the military present.
Then the actual guard-changing takes place, an intriguing ritual whereby you get one member of the Air Force leading three army guys in, and one Army guy leading three members of the Air Force out. Meanwhile, the Navy plays on...
And off they go. Bit sloppy on the rifle-bearing at the back, I think. Confined to barracks for a month!
Well, that was a pleasant half-hour! Took me more than twice as long to upload it!
It was at this point that I mislaid my lens cap. I ended up retracing my steps to the last two churches I'd been to, but another photo I took here (in the piazza) shows me holding it. I thought that I had put it in my pocket, but shortly after taking the following picture, I noticed that I didn't have it. So I must have put it down and someone snaffled it. Sigh.
Actually, it was probably only a matter of time before this happened, because I've left it behind countless times, in Nice and in Rome, only to return a few minutes later to pick it up.
About 15 minutes after the display, all of the participants walk back up the steps at the back of the Piazza, and get in their lorries to go back to barracks. Apart, that is, for the two poor bastards left to stand guard.
So, by now I was retracing my steps, but there was method in my madness.
I couldn't resist stopping off to take a picture of this statue, which depicts I know not what, but shows the Italian passion for big statues.
I had worked out that, by returning whence I came, I was not far from Stazione Termini, which is not just the main railway and bus station, but is also an interesting piece of architecture.
First of all I came across an interesting theatre.
The Via Nazionale is much more like a "modern" city street than the tourist theme park parts of Rome. It's also noticeably seedier. Just like in London when you head towards King's Cross!
It's true, you can see the Vittorio Emanuele II monument from everywhere!
The multi-architect designed station
I was rather running out of time by now (I still wanted to make it to the Colosseum before it got dark), so I haven't got a picture of the famous friezes.
The advertising pillar completely wrecks the aesthetic of the front of the station, to my mind.
The inside. I looked to see if it was possible to buy a ticket to the airport at one of the automatic ticket machines (the queue for the ticket office was very long). Of the six machines, the lights were out for all languages bar Italian on all but one of them, so they had put a bloke there to help non-Italian speakers (probably the vast majority of people who actually needed to buy a ticket) buy tickets. Of course, theoretically, he could have been in a ticket office, selling tickets....
Proof that, if you have to have a kebab, just head for any city's main railway station.
Incidentally, the "Termini" is from "Thermae", because the site is where Roman Baths were. Nothing to do with it being a Terminus!
From here I walked south-west along Via Cavour, which would take me towards the Colosseum and, once again, from one chapter in the Rough Guide to another. But I'd roughly worked out that I would be able to get to the Esquiline Hill and thence the Colosseum. However, the vagaries of the Rough Guide caught me out, because in a completely different chapter is mentioned a church that I cam across without even knowing it was there.
This is the back of the Santa Maria Maggiore,
and this is the front, described curiously by The Rough Guide as a "dull eighteenth-century exterior". This, one of the five great basilicas, is tucked away in the "Monti and San Giovanni" sector of the Rough Guide, and the description of the outside as "dull" apparently relates to how impressive the Byzantine interior is. Whatever, by now it was 7.30pm and it was shut. Actually, it looked completely shut for restoration anyway.
At this point I left behind my Rough Guide, but a nice man chased me across the road and handed it back to me. A clear sign that tiredness was setting in.
I headed west-south-west of the Esquiline Hill, spotting this loyal and (clearly) aged Italian fan:
The Esquiline Hill on my right gave way to these very pleasant residences.
And then, just I was to turn right (heading west-north-west to the Colosseum) I saw this interesting building.
I'm sure that the Rough Guide mentions these two spiral staircases, but I can't find it at the moment.
Walking through the park to the south of the Domus Aurea, you get a nice sunset view of the Colosseum --- cue another photo shoot.
Behind these young lovers there is a long straight pathway to the park's exit, giving a view of the Colosseum in the background. About 200 yards behind this shoot, a couple of guys were allowing through the "general public" whom they thought would make a good background shot, but not anyone who interfered with their aesthetics of "reality". Of course, this results in a great artificiality. Clearly the image being cultivated was some kind of late 19th century promenade -- sophisticated pairs of men or women strolling along on a pleasant summer's eveing, discussing world affairs or Jimmy Choos, loving couples walking arm-in-arm with the woman bearing a parasol (most of these such couples are of course by-this-time near-fucking in Borghese Park). Most certainly NOT part of this "world image" were (a) photographing tourists (b) blokes on roller blades (c) trios of giggling American girls (d) families with young kids who want a wee somewhere, or, indeed, any of the types who make up 99% of the people in the park.
I was reminded here of the marvellous Italian TV mini-series "The Best Of Youth", which, on reflection, displayed a particularly old-fashioned morality only dressed up in modern times. The lead character's daughter eventually marries the first boy that she "seriously" goes out with. The lead character himself loses his virginity when abroad (to a Norwegian girl), thus not sullying the concept of Italian girls as virgins when they get married. Nearly all marriages survive, and those that do not, do not fail because of adultery.
And so, finally, I made it to the Colosseum!
And here's the proof.
From the Via Dei Fori Imperiali, the traffic congestion that clogs this part of town can't help but detract from the experience.
While sunglasses are the normal things touted on the streets (with fake D&G bags coming second in certain areas), the second that the rain starts falling, somehow stocks of umbrellas mysteriously appear. But around the Colosseum there was an even more interesting phenomenon. As the sun went down, a number of hawkers laid out tripods! I wonder what their mark-up was on these?
The Arch of Titus, I think. I was getting tired by now.
I wanted to get a picture of the Roman forum with the monument behind, but I just couldn't get the cloud effect and the forum visible at the same time.
Some pictures of the Roman Forum taken from the Via Dei Fori Imperiali, as I walked north-north-west back to my starting point, some six hours earlier!
To the back is where I took my pictures of the forum a few days ago. The Arch of Septimius Severis can be seen (in part) poking out from behind a building in front.
The arch of Septimus Severis seen through a church on the right and something else on the left.
The Campidoglio, which I never managed to visit, even though I twice came close to it. Typical of my whole visit, really!
The Renaissance viewed through the pillars of Ancient Rome.
And back to where I started the week! Pictured at sunset.
By now it was past eight-thirty, and I was knackered. There looked to be an opportunity to get a picture of a good sunset at the Vatican, but it proved to be just a little bit too far away.
And, just to prove what a hot and tiring day it had been:
I know that this is a long post, but I wanted to get over the nature of what I actually do get through in seven hours or so. And hence my feeling of it having been a bit of an Open University Course in a Summer Camp.
I decided to give going into Rome a miss today, and I'm not sorry. Writing this up has taken quite a long time! But it's worth it, if only as my own diary.
Will I come to Rome again? Well, if I do, it will be on different terms. I'll get better at the language, and I'd probably come in November or December. I'd stay somewhere where it didn't take me the best part of 45 minutes to get anywhere where I could "get going". And damn the cost.
But I may not come again. Perhaps Venice, perhaps Florence. Perhaps Sicily (if I really did learn the language), although I'm not sure about the last one.
I'd really like to love the Italians, but their personality is really fundamentally completely different to mine. I don't think that this is my problem or theirs. It's just the way that it is.
Still haven't decided how to get to the airport, but I think I will try for the train, just because it will be a new experience and this trip has been one of "getting the first time out of the way".
____________
Yesterday I had intended to get to the Catacombs (about a mile and a half south-south-east of the Colosseum) while the temperature was still high (because the Catacombs are COLD, man), returning north-north-west via the Coloseum and thence north to the Fontana di Trevi, AKA Three Coins In The Fountain.
It didn't take long for that plan to get screwed.
After I hopped off my second bus at the Largo Argentina (about half a mile north-west of the Colosseum), I decided to take a quick picture of the cats that live in the Roman ruins on that square. They don't look that healthy, TBH. But I took a snap anyway, only to be told that there was "No Card In Camera".
Yep, I'd forgotten to take the SD card out of the card reader connected to the Netbook and re-insert it in the Pentax.
The logical thing now was to look for a camera shop, a venture I have followed before, but in Cannes. I headed north up Via Corsa (this is the wrong direction to get to the catacombs), and got about half-way up before I saw a shop down a side street that seemed to be an optician's and a camera shop. You walk in and a bloke in a white coat is sitting behind a desk. You have to approach this bloke (no wandering around the shop, thank-you-very-much) and explain what you want. He sent an assistant off to get the relevant card, who returned, wrote out a receipt, and put it on the cash desk, where you had to pay someone else (a bit like the old system at Foyle's).
I rushed to the shade of the Galeria Alberto Soldi, the nearest thing that Via Corsi has to a shopping mall, and they've made quite a nice job of it. I then spent a good few minutes actually trying to extract the card from its vacuum-packed plastic. Have you ever tried to open one of those without a sharp implement to hand? Not easy, not easy.
The Galeria splits into a "Y" shape as you enter from the Via Corsi. The old pillars remain, but have glass doors behind them to enable air-conditioning and to have a clear "no smoking" area. There is a cafe in the aisle of the left "Y" that is not cheap, but is a pleasant and cool place to stop for a cake and a coffee.
All of this shenaniganning meant that it was already two hours after I had left the flat, and I had been nowhere! Since I was now nearer to the Fontana di Trevi, I decided to make that my first destination, despite the heat.
What I found was a rather pretty fountain:
and one hell of a lot of people:
This is clearly a place that it is better to visit at night. There were tour guides everywhere, holding up their "identifying sticks". How many people a day, I wonder, forget exactly what identifying stick their guide is carrying, and end up following a different tour back to a different starting place? Then, completely lost, they wander round Rome all night looking for their hotel, which they can't remember the name of, only to end up as one of those Rome bums that you see on the street, rescued a year later when the tour guide returns?
I managed to take a wrong turn coming out of the Fontana di Trevi, taking myself north-east rather than south-west (impressive, huh?) and ending up on Via del Tritone. A quick look at the map in The Rough Guide showed me that this was not such a disaster.
It was only "a quick look" at the map because, after four days, I was finally getting the hang of The Rough Guide's maps. Basically, the Guide splits Rome into 11 sections. It has maps at the back, and maps within the text. The problem is that the maps within the text are not to the same scale and do not interlink with each other. This makes it very difficult to orientate yourself when you head from one section of The Rough Guide to another section. I had in fact wandered from the Guide's "Tridente" section to its "East Central Rome" section (these are five chapters apart, despite their geographical proximity). Fortunately the night before I'd actually done some diligent reading of much of the book, just to see if there was anything that I really shouldn't miss, so I had a "mental map" and I had also seen all the relevant maps within the text.
By such means, I now had in my head that I was quite near the Piazza Barberini and after that the Palazzo Barberini. I'd actually knocked these off my list of "must see's", but, since I was nearby, I re-included them.
The Piazza Barberini contains a fairly sensational Bernini (and a Hotel Brisol Bernini behind it) that is only slightly near-fatal to try to reach.
The Barberini family were the greatest patrons of Bernini. This is the Fontana di Tritone, which gave the name to the street down which I had just walked. Bernini finished this in 1644.
We tend to lump a lot of the "Renaissance" stuff together, but on yesterday's walk it became clearer how much progress was made between stuff that was produced in the late 15th century and stuff like this produced in the mid-17th century.
A short walk north-west up the Via Vittorio Veneto brought me to the Santa Maria della Concezione, which as the painting of "St Michael Trampling On The Devil" by Guido Reni in 1636.
The interesting thing about this is that "The Devil" is considered to be a likeness of Pope Innocent X, for whom Guido Reni had a less than healthy respect.
However, the really interesting thing about this church is the cemetery/crypt next door, where the bones of some 4,000 monks are artfully arranged into verious patterns on the ceiling and around the semi-preserved skeletons of monks still in their habits. Weird is not the word for it. This is the kind of thing you would expect to come across in Mexico, where they have a rather more gruesome line with Christianity. The chapels are called a monument to "Our Sister of Bodily Death".
Outside again on the Via Veneto, I was struck once again how Rome just seems to have missed a trick with what it could do with the city. I'm sure that visitors to London felt the same and may do feel the same. But over the past 20 years London has done a lot to improve itself as a visitor-friendly city -- the paving over of the north side of Trafalgar Square being perhaps the most impressive recent move. But I can also remember when Leicester Square was considered a "vital" road traffic square. It's now completely pedestrianized.
Via Veneto was a hip tree-lined street of the 1960s and 1970s, where Fellini would shoot movies of the hip and stylish sipping their espressos. Now it just seems a bit lost, and you have to use your imagination to see what could be done with it.
Part of the reason for the fading of glamour is that this is also the home to many of Italy's Ministries, a kind of Rome Whitehall. The Ministry of Economic Supply is an interesting Mussolini-era building:
After this I would walk back down the hill to the Piazza Barberini and then left up the Via Barberini, to visit the Palazzo Barberini. What could go wrong? After all, surely it's reasonable to assume that the Palazzo Barberini would be on the Via Barberini? Particularly when the Rough Guide gives the address as Via Barberini 18.
So I trekked up the street, turned right into the entrance, and met a mass of iron mesh. Totally closed off.
Oh.
Looking again at the map, I saw that there was another possible entrance on the Via Delle Quattro Fontane. So, yet another victory in the quest of Rome to slow me down.
Ten minutes later I arrived at a much more promising entrance:
Unfortunately the Palazzo is still only half-way through a complete renovation. There's no entrance to the Gran Salon, and the number of paintings on display (and rooms that you can access) is only about 33% of the whole. On the plus side, it's only E5.00 to get in, and there are quite enough paintings to be going on with.
I'm a slow "reader" of paintings. I can't really manage more than a dozen or so good ones in an afternoom. So the 12 or so rooms on display were plenty for me.
Once again, no photographs were allowed, but highlights that I can recall were:
La Fornarina, by Raphael. Probably the love of his life. Note the armlet with his name on it. You can also just see a wedding ring on the upper part of the woman's ring finger. Raphael actually painted this out, perhaps not wanting to appear too presumptious, but the "restorers" have brought it back.
Venus and Adonis, by Titian
Judith beheading Holofernes by Caravaggio. Gotta love that face on the old woman looking on. Brilliant.
And a Holbein of Henry VIII.
Rather cheatingly, they have above this the famous "Portrait of Thomas More", only to mention on the card that it is a 17th century copy.
Also a famous portrait of a young man by Carracci, the title of which I can't recall, plus Caravaggio's St Francis, a couple of El Greco "preparatory" paintings, a Tintoretto, and many more minor paionters ("Francia" was rather good, I thought) whose paintings would doubtless fetch well into seven figures on the open market.
So, that was a pleasant 90 minutes or so (I toured each room twice). It's compulsory to deposit your bags in lockers downstairs, for E1.00 deposit. I took three tries to find a door that worked. However, you don't have to enter the gallery to use the toilets, so these are definitely the poshest public toilets in Rome! George Castanza would make an out-of-the-way trip just to visit these.
As one walks down the steps, there's a rather classy bath sitting in the middle of the room, for no real reason that I could establish.
There was an interesting light effect in the picture below, when I did a white balance.
The walls came out oddly green. Actually, I think that they were this colour, but the ambience of the sourroundings makes the visitor see them as less green.
Here's the original picture that I took, with the familiar "yellow" effect.
But this picture, taken after adjusting for white balance, turned walls which I saw in the dimness as being a sort of apple-white, into this:
Weird, huh?
After I left the Palazzo, I saw a couple of nice apartments in the buildings opposite. An expensive area to live, I suspect.
A walk south-east down Via dello Quattro Fontane (many of the streets in Rome are in a roughly grid fashion, but do not run north-south and east-west. Different areas run north-west/south-east or north-north-west/south-south-east. This makes it even easier to get lost.) brought me to the eponymous "Four Fountains":
This small junction lies at the top of the Quirinal Hill. Rome celebrates the fantastic views that one gets from here by making it a near-lethal traffic junction.
A view down Via Delle Quattro Fontane from the Quirinal Hill.
Right on the corner of this peak is San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, by Borromini.
The interesting thing about this church is that it was built on an impossibly tiny space. The roof is about twice as high as the floor space.
Outside, you can see that, even then, buildings were pushed "up to the edge":
A little further down Via del Quirinale was a Bernini-designed church. At the time these would have been near the Palazzo del Quirinale when it was the residence of popes.
Sant'Andrea al Quirinale isx an oddity in that it's about three times as wide as it is long. So you can only get about seven rows of seats in it.
This is a view of the front door from about as far back as I could get.
But that doesn't stop Bernini going to town with the ceiling,
or elsewhere.
Between the two churches I came across this oddity, which I assume is an ancient guard point (15th century?)
This was opposite the "long wall" of the Palazzo del Quirinale. TBH, a number of the pavements in Rome are boring because, as is the tradition in southern Europe, residences are built around central courtyards that are inaccessbile and in the main invisible to travellers. Historically this made a lot of sense, although attempts by mid-20th-century architects to recreate something similar with modern apartement blocks were a total failure, for reasons that would have been obvious to the planners if they had half a brain.
I thought that I had found a fifth police force (I have seen the building of the "Finanza Guardia", but not the actual police), in that I thought these were the Security Guard for the Palace, but I suspect that they are an arm of the Polizia Statale.
Continuing south-west along the Via del Quirinale, it was approaching 6pm. The Piazza del Quirinale faces the front of the eponymous Palazzo, which is now the residence of the Italian President. As I neared the Piazza, I could hear music.
This proved to be one of the more fortuitous events of my various delays and diversions, as I was to come across the Italian version of the Changing of the Guard. This isn't even mentioned in the Rough Guide, so I have no idea how often it takes place.
First to arrive are the Navy, 'cos they are the band.
Then comes the Army:
And finally The Air Force, which was the force in situ
You then get a rather impressive rendition of the Itlaian National Anthem, sung by all of the members of the military present.
Then the actual guard-changing takes place, an intriguing ritual whereby you get one member of the Air Force leading three army guys in, and one Army guy leading three members of the Air Force out. Meanwhile, the Navy plays on...
And off they go. Bit sloppy on the rifle-bearing at the back, I think. Confined to barracks for a month!
Well, that was a pleasant half-hour! Took me more than twice as long to upload it!
It was at this point that I mislaid my lens cap. I ended up retracing my steps to the last two churches I'd been to, but another photo I took here (in the piazza) shows me holding it. I thought that I had put it in my pocket, but shortly after taking the following picture, I noticed that I didn't have it. So I must have put it down and someone snaffled it. Sigh.
Actually, it was probably only a matter of time before this happened, because I've left it behind countless times, in Nice and in Rome, only to return a few minutes later to pick it up.
About 15 minutes after the display, all of the participants walk back up the steps at the back of the Piazza, and get in their lorries to go back to barracks. Apart, that is, for the two poor bastards left to stand guard.
So, by now I was retracing my steps, but there was method in my madness.
I couldn't resist stopping off to take a picture of this statue, which depicts I know not what, but shows the Italian passion for big statues.
I had worked out that, by returning whence I came, I was not far from Stazione Termini, which is not just the main railway and bus station, but is also an interesting piece of architecture.
First of all I came across an interesting theatre.
The Via Nazionale is much more like a "modern" city street than the tourist theme park parts of Rome. It's also noticeably seedier. Just like in London when you head towards King's Cross!
It's true, you can see the Vittorio Emanuele II monument from everywhere!
The multi-architect designed station
"is characterized by the extremely long, modernist façade in travertine and by the gravity-defying double curve of the cantilever roof in reinforced concrete. Because of these, it carries the nickname the Dinosaur."
I was rather running out of time by now (I still wanted to make it to the Colosseum before it got dark), so I haven't got a picture of the famous friezes.
The advertising pillar completely wrecks the aesthetic of the front of the station, to my mind.
The inside. I looked to see if it was possible to buy a ticket to the airport at one of the automatic ticket machines (the queue for the ticket office was very long). Of the six machines, the lights were out for all languages bar Italian on all but one of them, so they had put a bloke there to help non-Italian speakers (probably the vast majority of people who actually needed to buy a ticket) buy tickets. Of course, theoretically, he could have been in a ticket office, selling tickets....
Proof that, if you have to have a kebab, just head for any city's main railway station.
Incidentally, the "Termini" is from "Thermae", because the site is where Roman Baths were. Nothing to do with it being a Terminus!
From here I walked south-west along Via Cavour, which would take me towards the Colosseum and, once again, from one chapter in the Rough Guide to another. But I'd roughly worked out that I would be able to get to the Esquiline Hill and thence the Colosseum. However, the vagaries of the Rough Guide caught me out, because in a completely different chapter is mentioned a church that I cam across without even knowing it was there.
This is the back of the Santa Maria Maggiore,
and this is the front, described curiously by The Rough Guide as a "dull eighteenth-century exterior". This, one of the five great basilicas, is tucked away in the "Monti and San Giovanni" sector of the Rough Guide, and the description of the outside as "dull" apparently relates to how impressive the Byzantine interior is. Whatever, by now it was 7.30pm and it was shut. Actually, it looked completely shut for restoration anyway.
At this point I left behind my Rough Guide, but a nice man chased me across the road and handed it back to me. A clear sign that tiredness was setting in.
I headed west-south-west of the Esquiline Hill, spotting this loyal and (clearly) aged Italian fan:
The Esquiline Hill on my right gave way to these very pleasant residences.
And then, just I was to turn right (heading west-north-west to the Colosseum) I saw this interesting building.
I'm sure that the Rough Guide mentions these two spiral staircases, but I can't find it at the moment.
Walking through the park to the south of the Domus Aurea, you get a nice sunset view of the Colosseum --- cue another photo shoot.
Behind these young lovers there is a long straight pathway to the park's exit, giving a view of the Colosseum in the background. About 200 yards behind this shoot, a couple of guys were allowing through the "general public" whom they thought would make a good background shot, but not anyone who interfered with their aesthetics of "reality". Of course, this results in a great artificiality. Clearly the image being cultivated was some kind of late 19th century promenade -- sophisticated pairs of men or women strolling along on a pleasant summer's eveing, discussing world affairs or Jimmy Choos, loving couples walking arm-in-arm with the woman bearing a parasol (most of these such couples are of course by-this-time near-fucking in Borghese Park). Most certainly NOT part of this "world image" were (a) photographing tourists (b) blokes on roller blades (c) trios of giggling American girls (d) families with young kids who want a wee somewhere, or, indeed, any of the types who make up 99% of the people in the park.
I was reminded here of the marvellous Italian TV mini-series "The Best Of Youth", which, on reflection, displayed a particularly old-fashioned morality only dressed up in modern times. The lead character's daughter eventually marries the first boy that she "seriously" goes out with. The lead character himself loses his virginity when abroad (to a Norwegian girl), thus not sullying the concept of Italian girls as virgins when they get married. Nearly all marriages survive, and those that do not, do not fail because of adultery.
And so, finally, I made it to the Colosseum!
And here's the proof.
From the Via Dei Fori Imperiali, the traffic congestion that clogs this part of town can't help but detract from the experience.
While sunglasses are the normal things touted on the streets (with fake D&G bags coming second in certain areas), the second that the rain starts falling, somehow stocks of umbrellas mysteriously appear. But around the Colosseum there was an even more interesting phenomenon. As the sun went down, a number of hawkers laid out tripods! I wonder what their mark-up was on these?
The Arch of Titus, I think. I was getting tired by now.
I wanted to get a picture of the Roman forum with the monument behind, but I just couldn't get the cloud effect and the forum visible at the same time.
Some pictures of the Roman Forum taken from the Via Dei Fori Imperiali, as I walked north-north-west back to my starting point, some six hours earlier!
To the back is where I took my pictures of the forum a few days ago. The Arch of Septimius Severis can be seen (in part) poking out from behind a building in front.
The arch of Septimus Severis seen through a church on the right and something else on the left.
The Campidoglio, which I never managed to visit, even though I twice came close to it. Typical of my whole visit, really!
The Renaissance viewed through the pillars of Ancient Rome.
And back to where I started the week! Pictured at sunset.
By now it was past eight-thirty, and I was knackered. There looked to be an opportunity to get a picture of a good sunset at the Vatican, but it proved to be just a little bit too far away.
And, just to prove what a hot and tiring day it had been:
I know that this is a long post, but I wanted to get over the nature of what I actually do get through in seven hours or so. And hence my feeling of it having been a bit of an Open University Course in a Summer Camp.
I decided to give going into Rome a miss today, and I'm not sorry. Writing this up has taken quite a long time! But it's worth it, if only as my own diary.
Will I come to Rome again? Well, if I do, it will be on different terms. I'll get better at the language, and I'd probably come in November or December. I'd stay somewhere where it didn't take me the best part of 45 minutes to get anywhere where I could "get going". And damn the cost.
But I may not come again. Perhaps Venice, perhaps Florence. Perhaps Sicily (if I really did learn the language), although I'm not sure about the last one.
I'd really like to love the Italians, but their personality is really fundamentally completely different to mine. I don't think that this is my problem or theirs. It's just the way that it is.
Still haven't decided how to get to the airport, but I think I will try for the train, just because it will be a new experience and this trip has been one of "getting the first time out of the way".
____________
Next time?
I wonder -- how do Third World countries in the middle of Europe manage to charge these outrageous prices?
The ossuary-stucco church was astonishing. My knowledge of Mexico is limited to the DF, but I've never seen anything quite so intentionally in-your-face day-of-the-dead. Mexico City generally limits itself to vast murals by Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, which are impressive in their way, but don't quite convey the stench of blood, guts and still beating hearts. You get a better sense of the place from watching "A Fistful of Dynamite..."
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Eat my flesh!
What next? A visit to the Bellagio in Las Vegas and a photograph of something with big gold taps and a naked Arab sheik playing with vintage champagne bubbles, and you're going to tell us it's a sarcophagus?
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Also read about the new threat to the peaceful existence. Peace or world war 3. http://worldwar3orpeace.blogspot.com/