On the Move - Italy (19 of 23) -
Sep. 19th, 2001 07:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lillibetIn the morning Jason discovered the one major flaw of our lovely flat. No hot water. I called the booking agent and she said there was a boiler. I responded that yes, I was certain of it, but we couldn't positively identify it (there were a couple of candidates) nor determine how to make it work. She called the owner and called us back in a few minutes to say that he had explained it to her, but that it was too complicated and confusing for her to understand, much less to translate into English for us, so the owner would come by sometime in the afternoon and fix it.
We took the tube to the Vatican--the name of the stop is "Ottaviano" which is the last name of one of my best friends from elementary school--and walked into the vast space of the Piazza San Pietro, designed by Bernini with curved colonnades on either side. It was a zoo. Apparently Wednesdays are papal audience days and there was some big ceremony happening on the porch of the basilica that involved about ten women in bridal gowns--do nuns still do that for their investiture? or maybe it was a mass wedding--and a whole army of priests. It was interesting to see all the different religious garb of people we passed during the day. There were a variey of nun-styles--from Flying Nun to Mother Theresa, a wide-range of different-colored priest-suits, and a couple of monks in brown habits--I noticed that one of them was wearing Tevas.
After finding out that the dome was closed until the afternoon, we went around back to the Vatican Museums. I have to give the Vatican extremely high points as a well-run tourist attraction. They were moving large numbers of people through very quickly. There were frequent toilet facilities and they were clean and had toilet paper, paper towels and soap. Their cafe, where we had lunch, served my favorite pizza of our whole trip. Tickets to the museums are not cheap, but there's a whole lot to see inside.
We started with the Pinacoteca, the gallery of paintings, where the highlights included fragments of a stunning fresco and the Rafael room, as well as Leonardo's unfinished "St. Jerome" and Caravaggio's "Descent from the Cross." We skipped the Museo Gregoriano Profano (classical sculpture), the Museo Pio-Cristiano (Roman sarcophagi, etc.), the Museo Gregoriano Etrusco (Etruscan relics, which neither of us have really been able to get into on this trip), and the Museo Missionario Etnologico (artifacts sent back to base by missionaries all over the world). We walked quickly through the Museo Egizio (Egyptian artifacts) to the overwhelming Museo Chiaramonti, a 300-meter long gallery lined with hundreds of busts of Roman matrons, senators, emperors, gentlemen and dieties. The Library and the Braccio Nuovo gallery were closed to the public. We moved on to the Museo Pio-Clemention, which includes the Apollo Belvedere, the Laocoon (depicting a Trojan priest and his sons crushed by serpents for issuing a warning about Greeks bearing gifts), and the Belvedere Torso, the remains of a first-century statue thought to be "a near-perfect example of male anatomy." Michelangelo based Christ's pose in "The Last Judgment" on the torso's position and Rodin used it as the basis of "The Thinker."
We moved on to the Sala Rotonda with its gorgeous white marble statue of Hadrian's favorite, Antinous, as Bacchus. Next was the small Greek Cross Room, containing two porphyry sarcophagi of Constantine's mother and daughter and a statue believed to be the only genuine likeness of the famous Cleopatra. The signs pointing us toward the Sistine Chapel took us down the Galleries of Candelabra, Tapestries, and Maps and through the Room of the Immaculate Conception (decorated with 19th-century frescoes of the declaration of this doctrine) and the Sobieski Room (named for the painting of John III Sobieski, King of Poland in battle) to the walkway leading into the Raphael Rooms, which were decorated by Raphael--and his assistants, for up to ten years after his death--at the behest of Julius II, Leo X and Clement VII. These rooms are considered the beginning of Mannerism, as the assistants moved from the Renaissance aesthetics of Raphael and Michelangelo toward a more exaggerated style.
It was good to have a break between Raphael and Michelangelo in the form of the Collection of Modern Religious Art, a vast array of works including vestments designed by Matisse, a crossless crucifixion by Dali and countless others.
After that, we were ready for more early 16th century art, in the form of the breathtaking Sistine Chapel. It's one of those places that actually is just as wonderful as everyone keeps saying it is. Michelangelo's work on the ceilings, with dozens of nude figures, each different, and depictions of key events and figures of the Old Testament...it's all just stunning. "The Last Judgment," painted on the altar wall twenty years after the ceiling was completed is a wonderful opportunity to see clearly the directions in which Michelangelo's art was moving. And Michelangelo is hardly the only reason to visit the chapel. I hadn't known that the side walls were decorated with scenes that are masterpieces in their own right by Botticelli, Perugino, Rosselli and Ghirlandaio. We spent quite some time moving through the crowds around the chapel with our guidebook open to recognize all the different panels. I wish I could have seen the chapel before the restoration work, to appreciate its current glory more fully. The colors are so brilliant--and God looks quite fetching in pink.
Leaving there, we joined the line for the dome. That took about an hour...the longest line we stood in on our whole trip, but there was a souvenir shop there, so I bought postcards and wrote a few of those. Finally we bought our tickets and took the lift up to the roof and then climbed up into the dome. Like the Duomo in Florence, the climb gives you access to a balcony above the church, right at the base of the dome, so we could see the decoration up close. It is lovely and quite simple, but the view into the church is much more striking. From there we climbed up through a very narrow, tiled stairway to the top of the dome and looked out over all of Rome. It was another gorgeous day and we had a great view.
The exit from the dome let us out directly into the basilica, which was magnificent. The artistic highlight was certainly Michelangelo's "Pieta," now behind glass after it was damaged in a 1972 attack. There are very few actual paintings in the church--most of the altarpieces are mosaic copies of paintings, made with tesserae so fine that it's hard to tell you're not looking at oils. I really liked the alabaster window in the apse, depicting the dove of the Holy Spirit bursting through amber sunbeams. We saw the bronze statue of St. Peter, whose foot has been burnished to smoothness by countless pilgrims over the years, especially since one pope declared a 50-day indulgence for anyone kissing the statue's foot after confession. The high altar--where only the Pope can say mass--is under a monstrous bronze canopy and over the Tomb of St. Peter, from which sconces like tongues of flame lick out into the church. There were many extravagant memorials to various popes and other illustrious figures, including Queen Christina of Sweden, who renounced her crown rather than her faith and retired to Rome, and the Stuarts, the deposed royal family of Scotland and England. We paid the extra fee to see the Treasury, which wasn't particularly interesting, although it did include an embroidered cloak said to have belonged to Charlemagne, a plaster cast of the Pieta that you can see close up and which was very helpful in the restoration work after the attack on the original, and the bizarre bronze memorial of Sixtus IV, builder of the Sistine Chapel. Leaving there, we walked up the nave again, this time noticing the bronze inlays of the pavement which illustrate the relative lengths of other famous churches of the world. Finally we exited onto the porch and looked around there before descending the steps to the piazza once more.
After a drink (and a donut for Jason, who'd been craving one for days) from a handy stand, we set out to walk down the river to the Trastavere area for dinner. The Tiber is oddly set apart from Rome. Unlike the Thames or the Seine, which are so central to London and Paris, the Tiber seems deserted. We enjoyed our stroll under the plane trees and were almost to our turn-off when I noticed a couple walking toward us and thought "They look like Steve and Trish. Wait, it is Steve and Trish!" We all laughed and hugged and we decided to turn around and go back up to the Vatican area to have dinner with them at a place recommended by their neighbor, who was here last year. Since we couldn't walk through the botanical gardens at that hour, we hailed a passing cab (he dropped off his fare down the block and then reversed up the one-way street to pick us up--ah, Italy!) and were deposited right behind St. Peter's Basilica again.
Our destination, the Quattro Mori, was not quite open. While the others took a seat at one of their sidewalk tables, I walked down to the corner store I had spied and got more yogurt for the next day's breakfast. When Trish saw that, she thought it was a good idea, so she went and got one, too. We split two orders of their mixed antipasto, which was a wider variety than we'd previously seen--roasted onions, green peppers, red peppers, mushrooms, eggplant and what seemed to be plantains shared the plate with three different kinds of salami. Steve chose their vegetable soup as a primi, while Jason got the delicious shrimp risotto and I had a plate of gnocchetti (little baby gnocchi) with tomato & basil sauce. Jason's lamb chops were quite greasy, but tasted good, while Trish had veal scalloppine and a mixed salad and Steve had the roasted "Sardignian pigling" and I had the bocconcini ("mouthfuls") of veal in white wine sauce. Leaving there, we stopped for gelato before walking back through the Piazza San Pietro. We said goodbye to Steve & Trish on the corner of Via Germanico and they went down the street to their hotel for one last night, while we took the tube back to Piazza Barberini and turned in.
Next, an excursion to Hadrian's Villa...
We took the tube to the Vatican--the name of the stop is "Ottaviano" which is the last name of one of my best friends from elementary school--and walked into the vast space of the Piazza San Pietro, designed by Bernini with curved colonnades on either side. It was a zoo. Apparently Wednesdays are papal audience days and there was some big ceremony happening on the porch of the basilica that involved about ten women in bridal gowns--do nuns still do that for their investiture? or maybe it was a mass wedding--and a whole army of priests. It was interesting to see all the different religious garb of people we passed during the day. There were a variey of nun-styles--from Flying Nun to Mother Theresa, a wide-range of different-colored priest-suits, and a couple of monks in brown habits--I noticed that one of them was wearing Tevas.
After finding out that the dome was closed until the afternoon, we went around back to the Vatican Museums. I have to give the Vatican extremely high points as a well-run tourist attraction. They were moving large numbers of people through very quickly. There were frequent toilet facilities and they were clean and had toilet paper, paper towels and soap. Their cafe, where we had lunch, served my favorite pizza of our whole trip. Tickets to the museums are not cheap, but there's a whole lot to see inside.
We started with the Pinacoteca, the gallery of paintings, where the highlights included fragments of a stunning fresco and the Rafael room, as well as Leonardo's unfinished "St. Jerome" and Caravaggio's "Descent from the Cross." We skipped the Museo Gregoriano Profano (classical sculpture), the Museo Pio-Cristiano (Roman sarcophagi, etc.), the Museo Gregoriano Etrusco (Etruscan relics, which neither of us have really been able to get into on this trip), and the Museo Missionario Etnologico (artifacts sent back to base by missionaries all over the world). We walked quickly through the Museo Egizio (Egyptian artifacts) to the overwhelming Museo Chiaramonti, a 300-meter long gallery lined with hundreds of busts of Roman matrons, senators, emperors, gentlemen and dieties. The Library and the Braccio Nuovo gallery were closed to the public. We moved on to the Museo Pio-Clemention, which includes the Apollo Belvedere, the Laocoon (depicting a Trojan priest and his sons crushed by serpents for issuing a warning about Greeks bearing gifts), and the Belvedere Torso, the remains of a first-century statue thought to be "a near-perfect example of male anatomy." Michelangelo based Christ's pose in "The Last Judgment" on the torso's position and Rodin used it as the basis of "The Thinker."
We moved on to the Sala Rotonda with its gorgeous white marble statue of Hadrian's favorite, Antinous, as Bacchus. Next was the small Greek Cross Room, containing two porphyry sarcophagi of Constantine's mother and daughter and a statue believed to be the only genuine likeness of the famous Cleopatra. The signs pointing us toward the Sistine Chapel took us down the Galleries of Candelabra, Tapestries, and Maps and through the Room of the Immaculate Conception (decorated with 19th-century frescoes of the declaration of this doctrine) and the Sobieski Room (named for the painting of John III Sobieski, King of Poland in battle) to the walkway leading into the Raphael Rooms, which were decorated by Raphael--and his assistants, for up to ten years after his death--at the behest of Julius II, Leo X and Clement VII. These rooms are considered the beginning of Mannerism, as the assistants moved from the Renaissance aesthetics of Raphael and Michelangelo toward a more exaggerated style.
It was good to have a break between Raphael and Michelangelo in the form of the Collection of Modern Religious Art, a vast array of works including vestments designed by Matisse, a crossless crucifixion by Dali and countless others.
After that, we were ready for more early 16th century art, in the form of the breathtaking Sistine Chapel. It's one of those places that actually is just as wonderful as everyone keeps saying it is. Michelangelo's work on the ceilings, with dozens of nude figures, each different, and depictions of key events and figures of the Old Testament...it's all just stunning. "The Last Judgment," painted on the altar wall twenty years after the ceiling was completed is a wonderful opportunity to see clearly the directions in which Michelangelo's art was moving. And Michelangelo is hardly the only reason to visit the chapel. I hadn't known that the side walls were decorated with scenes that are masterpieces in their own right by Botticelli, Perugino, Rosselli and Ghirlandaio. We spent quite some time moving through the crowds around the chapel with our guidebook open to recognize all the different panels. I wish I could have seen the chapel before the restoration work, to appreciate its current glory more fully. The colors are so brilliant--and God looks quite fetching in pink.
Leaving there, we joined the line for the dome. That took about an hour...the longest line we stood in on our whole trip, but there was a souvenir shop there, so I bought postcards and wrote a few of those. Finally we bought our tickets and took the lift up to the roof and then climbed up into the dome. Like the Duomo in Florence, the climb gives you access to a balcony above the church, right at the base of the dome, so we could see the decoration up close. It is lovely and quite simple, but the view into the church is much more striking. From there we climbed up through a very narrow, tiled stairway to the top of the dome and looked out over all of Rome. It was another gorgeous day and we had a great view.
The exit from the dome let us out directly into the basilica, which was magnificent. The artistic highlight was certainly Michelangelo's "Pieta," now behind glass after it was damaged in a 1972 attack. There are very few actual paintings in the church--most of the altarpieces are mosaic copies of paintings, made with tesserae so fine that it's hard to tell you're not looking at oils. I really liked the alabaster window in the apse, depicting the dove of the Holy Spirit bursting through amber sunbeams. We saw the bronze statue of St. Peter, whose foot has been burnished to smoothness by countless pilgrims over the years, especially since one pope declared a 50-day indulgence for anyone kissing the statue's foot after confession. The high altar--where only the Pope can say mass--is under a monstrous bronze canopy and over the Tomb of St. Peter, from which sconces like tongues of flame lick out into the church. There were many extravagant memorials to various popes and other illustrious figures, including Queen Christina of Sweden, who renounced her crown rather than her faith and retired to Rome, and the Stuarts, the deposed royal family of Scotland and England. We paid the extra fee to see the Treasury, which wasn't particularly interesting, although it did include an embroidered cloak said to have belonged to Charlemagne, a plaster cast of the Pieta that you can see close up and which was very helpful in the restoration work after the attack on the original, and the bizarre bronze memorial of Sixtus IV, builder of the Sistine Chapel. Leaving there, we walked up the nave again, this time noticing the bronze inlays of the pavement which illustrate the relative lengths of other famous churches of the world. Finally we exited onto the porch and looked around there before descending the steps to the piazza once more.
After a drink (and a donut for Jason, who'd been craving one for days) from a handy stand, we set out to walk down the river to the Trastavere area for dinner. The Tiber is oddly set apart from Rome. Unlike the Thames or the Seine, which are so central to London and Paris, the Tiber seems deserted. We enjoyed our stroll under the plane trees and were almost to our turn-off when I noticed a couple walking toward us and thought "They look like Steve and Trish. Wait, it is Steve and Trish!" We all laughed and hugged and we decided to turn around and go back up to the Vatican area to have dinner with them at a place recommended by their neighbor, who was here last year. Since we couldn't walk through the botanical gardens at that hour, we hailed a passing cab (he dropped off his fare down the block and then reversed up the one-way street to pick us up--ah, Italy!) and were deposited right behind St. Peter's Basilica again.
Our destination, the Quattro Mori, was not quite open. While the others took a seat at one of their sidewalk tables, I walked down to the corner store I had spied and got more yogurt for the next day's breakfast. When Trish saw that, she thought it was a good idea, so she went and got one, too. We split two orders of their mixed antipasto, which was a wider variety than we'd previously seen--roasted onions, green peppers, red peppers, mushrooms, eggplant and what seemed to be plantains shared the plate with three different kinds of salami. Steve chose their vegetable soup as a primi, while Jason got the delicious shrimp risotto and I had a plate of gnocchetti (little baby gnocchi) with tomato & basil sauce. Jason's lamb chops were quite greasy, but tasted good, while Trish had veal scalloppine and a mixed salad and Steve had the roasted "Sardignian pigling" and I had the bocconcini ("mouthfuls") of veal in white wine sauce. Leaving there, we stopped for gelato before walking back through the Piazza San Pietro. We said goodbye to Steve & Trish on the corner of Via Germanico and they went down the street to their hotel for one last night, while we took the tube back to Piazza Barberini and turned in.
Next, an excursion to Hadrian's Villa...
