BFT23 - Art and the City

 

We didn’t do everything together while we were in Rome.

Kim and Oliver are much more interested in fine art than Lauren or I, and one of the things that they very much wanted to do while they were there was visit the Galleria Borghese, a place that Kim and I had not quite managed to get to last year.

The Galleria is home to a good chunk of the art holdings of the Borghese family and a short internet search reveals that this collection was started by Cardinal Scipione Borghese in the early 1600s. Whatever his religious qualities might have been, the Cardinal was apparently a shrewd judge of artistic talent and was a patron of such luminaries as Bernini, Caravaggio, Titian, Raphael, and Rubens, all of which are on display. The Galleria sits in one of the largest parks in Rome, and if you’re an art lover this really is one of the places you should see.

You have to sign up for a tour in advance, and with that safely achieved Kim and Oliver headed over fairly early one morning for their visit. When they got to the park the cicadas were in full roar, to the point where it was difficult to hold a conversation, and the day had already begun to heat up. But they were soon admitted to the Galleria which was a) air conditioned and b) chock full of the magnificent art that they were hoping to see.

Bernini was an astonishingly prolific sculptor and there were a lot of Bernini statutes at the Galleria. This, for example, is Apollo and Daphne, from 1622.

This one is known as The Rape of Proserpine, from 1621.

Truth Unveiled by Time dates to the late 1640s, and the bust of Scipione himself is from 1632.

There were all sorts of other marvels and you really could spend a day there if you wanted to do so. You could see statues.

Or mosaics.

Or even paintings.

The tour lasted about an hour and a half, after which the guide let them loose for the rest of their two-hour slot so they could wander around on their own. By the time it was over it was the full heat of the day and getting on lunchtime, so they found their way to the corner grocery in our neighborhood and then to the apartment, where lunch and siesta awaited.

Meanwhile Lauren and I were on walkabout. Both of us preferred to wander the city and see what we might see – art, perhaps, but also street scenes, city life, and assorted other things. In the end everyone was happy with their choices and really that’s what the goal should be, after all.

We decided to walk from Testaccio into Trastavere, just across the Tiber, though we stopped at our local pasticceria for sustenance on the way. You can’t wander the city on an empty stomach. It isn’t healthy. Not that pastries are healthy either, really, but they’re far more pleasant than being hungry and that has to count for something.

We crossed over the nearest bridge and ended up on a river path from which there appeared to be no escape. It was pretty though, and from what we could see it would turn into either a market area or social hub at some point later in the day – it was full of booths and places to eat, all closed at the time – but at that hour of the morning it was just a path. After a while we climbed a steep staircase up to Trastavere and set about wandering through the neighborhood. It’s an old neighborhood, and if you enjoy urban scenery it’s a great place.

Eventually we found our way over to St. Cecelia’s, which is a gorgeous place. They were setting up for some event when we were there – a wedding, perhaps, since the flowers seemed too cheerful for a funeral – so we looked around a bit and then found the little gift shop where for a couple of euros you can go down a narrow little staircase and see the underground part.

Most of the underground part is kind of drab, to be honest – you can tell it was a working area – but at some point you turn a corner and find yourself in one of the most lovely chapels I have ever been in.

It’s completely underground, and while this makes sense in our electric age you have to imagine what it would have been like in a world lit only by fire. It’s the kind of place that sits you down and makes you quiet for a while.

When we left we decided to find the two temples that Kim and I had considered “our temples” last year because we went by them almost every day – the Tempio di Fortuna Virilus (Temple of Manly Virtue, which raises more questions than it answers), and the Tempio di Ercole Vincitore (Temple of Hercules Victor), so we wandered over the Isola de Trastavere and found them right where Kim and I had left them not long ago. Apparently the British Museum is slacking off these days. But it was nice to see them.

In the foam of the river in the picture above there are a couple of plastic bottles that just churned endlessly in the current, never really moving from that spot. We watched them for a while. It was peaceful.

After the temples we tried to see the Boca della Verità – the Mouth of Truth – a sculpture which is housed maybe a hundred meters away. The story is that if you place your hand in the mouth of the sculpture and tell a lie it will bite your hand off and this seemed like something worth testing, except that the line to get in was exceedingly long and the sun was exceedingly hot by then so we decided that we’d just keep our hands to ourselves instead and hopped on a bus to central Rome.

We wound up at Campo di Fiore because Lauren was interested in the market that they have there. It’s a bright, colorful sort of space where you have to be extremely careful not to make any kind of eye contact with the vendors or engage with them in any way unless you plan to be browbeaten into making some sort of purchase. We did end up getting some fruit, though, since we were hungry, and eventually we decided that this was a sign that we should stop and get lunch at one of the places that ring the plaza. They’re touristy places, but in Rome even the tourist traps have good food.

After that we just sort of wandered around. We found a gorgeous church and explored that a bit.

We stopped in all sorts of random shops and went down similarly random streets before finding a likely looking gelato place. There is nothing better on a hot summer day than lemon gelato. No, not even that. Or that. This is the final answer, and all others are misguided.

Eventually the heat and the walking got a bit much and we went back to the apartment to join Kim and Oliver in their siesta.