April 27, 2007
Tunis, Tunisia
The past few days have been totally exhausting, finishing up with Rome and then flying across the Mediterranean to spend our first few days back in Africa, this time in Tunisia, one of the more important provinces of the Roman empire. I have been unable to keep up with the pace of the trip—trying to get enough sleep and see everything that I have wanted to see in Rome has been really difficult, and I feel like I left just when I was reaching my stride. But this trip is always go go go, and we had to move on… only a few more weeks and I am left to my own devices. I am really excited to finally be moving out on my own.
Wednesday was Liberation Day, and many of the government buildings in Italy were closed for celebration. However, that did not mean that our trip was stopping; we got up bright and early and loaded the subway, emerging from the ground close to St John of the Lateran, but bypassing it for the moment and heading to the smaller church of San Clemente, which overlaid some very early roman houses and a later basilica. The early houses, at the lowest level of the foundation, were dated from the late 1st C AD, and may have held the Mithras cult. However, these early buildings were overtaken by the Christians in the 5th C, a three aisle church as per usual with an apse at the far end, two colonnades down the middle and lots of spolia dating from earlier structures. Neither of these two incarnations are still visible, however. The basilica we saw dated to the 12th C, a much narrower structure with internal decoration that reminded me of the eastern churches we had seen, complete with a blue and gold patterned apse dominated by a huge cross, and parades of sheep along the bottom.
The floors contained an elaborate patterns in triangle shapes of colored marble, winding its way up and down the aisles of the church, concluding at the massive apse with its mosaic and frescoed decoration. Other than that, the majority of the interior was largely left plain, with the exception of a few fragmented frescoes on the walls, the one near the back was particularly well preserved, and I later discovered from Toumazou that it was by Masaccio.
Then we were back into the morning light, and walked the short walk over to St John of the Lateran, one of the most important churches in Rome, and important also because it most closely of all of the churches we had seen resembled a basilica of the Roman period. Constantine built the original building as a five aisled basilica. To the side is a smaller bapistry modified from a circular plan to an octagonal building. Walking into both of these spaces was wonderful—the bapistry was a much more intimate space, but lavishly decorated in frescoes and mosaics, with the elaborate keys of the Vatican emblazoned on the floor. The ceiling rose in a gilded dome above the baptismal font, meeting in the sign of a white dove overhead.
St John of the Laterans was huge, a towering immensity of space well lit by windows high overhead, the central aisle having a tall flat ceiling elaborately carved and painted in tons of bright colors. All of the surfaces of the buildng were covered with vast frescoes of the Renaissance, and we walked in the echoing halls contemplating the glory all around us. Standing on one of the aisles, we could look down the whole length of the church, and then staring sideways we could look across all three aisles to where the sides of the church faded into chapel after chapel that dotted the sides. It was truly magnificent.
And we were out into the sunlight again, our day not done yet. We took a bus over to the Via Appia, the site of one of the first major roads in Rome, which was well paved as most Roman roads were, and dotted on each side with funerary monuments. On the site of the remains of an old church, its bleached bones laid open to the bright summer sky, we stopped and lectured about the opposite monument—a huge rotunda in bright white stone, dedicated to an unknown woman of the Augustan period. The building has later been incorporated into a fortification, so the upper levels of regular white stones degenerate into smaller darker stone that fragment away up into the sky. We stopped here and moved inside the huge tower, down into the bottom of it where we could look up to the sky, and around the outside where we could survey it from top to bottom. And we were off again, to the Villa of Maxentius.
The Via Appia, in addition to being a huge cemetery, was also considered by the wealthy Romans to be a good resort town, that emperors and other notables in Roman society would use to get away from the hustle and bustle of the city. Looking around, I could see why a place like this would have been chosen: the sun filtered down through the tall trees and glinted off of the grass, and the air was littered with the chirping of birds. Maxentius, one of the emperors, made his home here and built a chariot racing track almost as big as the Circus Maximus, and much better preserved. Brick walls tumbled out of the high grass, rising around the curves at each of the end and about half way down one side of the track where it held the emperor’s box, raised so that the emperor himself could be seen, and could witness the most exciting parts of the race, the turns, the start, and the finish, which would run right by him. Most of the track itself was overgrown with wildflowers and tall grasses, but we all took a casual stroll up and down the area before moving on.
The last place we visited that day were the Catacombs of San Sebastian, located deep in the underbelly of the church. This place was significant because it was one of the first places where the early Christians living in the Roman period were buried. Walking down narrow, slick passages we followed each other around the maze, finally emerging in an area that in antiquity would have been open to the sky, but now stood covered by the floor of the church that stood above. We stopped here to admire the houses made for the dead, elaborately decorated with frescoes and stuccoed design, before moving into the church itself.
Like many of the other churches, this one was a typical three aisle basilica that betrayed nothing of the ruins that lay underneath its platform. To one side stood a crypt that housed the grave of San Sebastian, who lay carved in marble on top—a young man who lay wounded, the arrows still poking out of his stone flesh. We were finally done with the day, in the early afternoon, which was great for me! I had identified some churches and some works of art that I really wanted to see, and had informed the other artsy people in my group, Ambrice and Katie, where I wanted to go. They wanted to come along, so we all took the bus back into town and began that afternoon’s adventure. It turns out, that Katie wanted to go back to the hotel first, to get her friend Jess Eisenberg, so Ambrice and I went on alone. We got off of the metro at Cavour and walked up a steep flight of stairs before arriving at San Pietro in Vincoli.
Besides being notable because it shares the name of one of the kids on the trip, San Pietro is famous for housing a massive sculpture by Michelangelo, one that depicts Moses seated with a set of horns, and the chains that once bound St Peter. We walked inside the massive church and into the quiet sanctity of the vast space. San Pietro was smaller than St John of the Lateran, but had a much wider central aisle in comparison to the side ones. They were added, almost as an afterthought, to the rest of the building, and in the far right, isolated from the altar but set apart from everything else, we saw the huge sculptural group: Moses sitting, his torso twisting around to peer to one side, one of his hands grasping his long beard which fell long past his knees, his body massive and powerful. In the niches to each of his sides stood maidens, framed by the arches that held them and standing in quiet poses. The rest of the sculptures were fitted neatly into niches that wound their way up the sides of the building, scrolls and seashells that held the busts of various church notaries with more figures presiding above.
The rest of the church was not to be neglected either, the altar was completely surrounded by a beautiful fresco in bright colors, and the other side of the altar contained a niche devoted to the Virgin Mary. All down the sides of the churches various little altars had been erected, marked out by statuary or by the change in floor color, and we looked at them all as we made our way back to the door. Jess and Katie had not contacted us yet, so we stopped at a local café to grab a cappuccino freddo before finally giving up and moving toward the next place.
Dr Toumazou had mentioned that Santa Maria Maggiore was another one of the churches that resembled the early Christian type basilicas, and since I had passed by it a few nights back without being able to see the inside, we went there now, going just a little ways up the Via Cavour, headed in the direction of Termini. Unlike some of the other churches which look kind of plain from the outside, Santa Maria was just as beautiful on the exterior as on the interior, set off from the street by a wide courtyard at both the front and the back, with huge pilasters and a tripartite façade at the front, marked out by beautiful mosaics. We stepped into the dim light of the three aisled church, roofed unlike many of the others with what looked like a timber pitched roof, covered with a flat series of coffers, instead of the later barrel vaulting. It was lit by a series of small windows above the upper story that led up to an elaborate gilded altar, and each side of the altar rose in a series of arches to an oval dome at the top. The building was decorated along the walls, but the most impressive parts were the ceilings were full of elaborate carvings in gold and wood, painted and swirling with figures of drapery.
We wandered throughout the halls, up and down each of the aisles, until Katie and Jess Eisenberg finally called, but they got lost on the way to meet us and it took a long time before we finally made contact, meeting them on the steps on the front porch of the church just in time to see the skies open and the rain start to fall from the grey skies. Nevertheless, we decided to press on, I had discovered earlier that day that a famous sculpture by Bernini called The Ecstasy of St Theresa was in a little known church off of the Piazza della Republica. We walked up to and through Termni, coming out where the two arches of a huge hotel extend in an arc, centered on a big fountain and faced on the other side by another big church, one designed in part by Michelangelo over the ruins of the baths of Diocletian. We continued on, winding down side streets, until we came to the small church of Santa Maria Vittoria.
The outside of the church was straightforward, the façade rising in a series of voluptuous curves and pilasters until it tapered overhead to a raking cornice and a narrow pitched roof. Entering the building we entered a scene of crowded but sumptuous color—the inside was full of baroque florals and paintings, no surface of the church was left undecorated. At the far end of the church we could see the altar—huge rays of gold extending in a big burst out and away from the dove which flew in the center. Below the altar, candles on massive gold bases paraded in rows above the white tableclothed altar.
On the left hand side, we spotted her—St Teresa in Ecstasy by Bernini, her body arching back from the rays of gold that etended overhead to vanish in the alcove above, her dress falling in whirls of fabric as she swoons in the magic of the moment. To her left, a small playful angel holds an arrow to prick her, smiling secretly to himself as the mortal woman is completely overwhelmed. We walked straight up to St Teresa, examining the intricate folds in her garment, her thrown back head, the delicacy of all that surrounded her, and then stepping back farther to admire the grand dark green columns that placed her in the niche, and the statues on either side that showed what looked like a council of elders that from their windowboxes looked over to watch the scene unfolding before their eyes. She took all of our breath away. We settled in the front pews to sketch for a while, and were about to enjoy our visit, the four of us breathing in the quiet incense of the church, when Ambrice’s body went stiff—it was then that she had realized that she had lost her camera. Katie and I agreed to wait while she and Eisenberg went back to the previous church to see if perhaps she had lost it there. We settled in to draw, but less than five minutes later a group of priests came in and began a service—we had been so absorbed by what we were seeing that we had failed to notice the worshippers coming in behind us.
So we left the church, only to discover a rapidly cooling night and rain coming down from the skies. We could not leave, though, so we returned to the front hall of the church, crouching on the cold tile floor to wait for Ambrice to return. She did, only after a very long wait, and realizing that there was no way to make it to the Piazza Navona to see the other Caravaggios, so we settled with eating dinner and heading back home. Ambrice and Jess really wanted to go to an expensive restaurant by the Spanish Steps, which I was not keen on, but since Ambrice had just lost her camera I did not have the heart to tell her no, so we went.
The meal was actually quite good- I had a pasta with artichokes and bacon (I am really getting into artichokes, I need to look up more recipes with them…) but it was much too expensive and since we had all ordered wine my wallet was hurting. But we did leave the restaurant eventually, and were walking back to the metro when we realized that it had closed for the night, it was past 9, and although everyone in Italy eats late, they must either walk there or take the cab, because all public transport turns to bunk after the late evening. So we got a cab, adding more injury to my wallet, before heading home and turning in for the night. I was exhausted, and a little frustrated that I had not gotten to see the Caravaggios that I had wanted to see, and had paid way more for a meal than I felt was necessary. But it was done, there was nothing I could do, and we were leaving Italy the next day.
Caravaggio will have to wait until I return to Rome.
The next morning we woke up altogether too early and set out, this time to the church that we had spotted the previous day in the Piazza della Republica. The church was called Santa Maria dei Angeli, and was constructed in the ruins of the Baths of Diocletian, some of the largest baths in imperial Rome, whose remains got turned into the hotel and the church visible today. The church of Santa Maria dei Angeli was located along the swing of the curve that defined the caldarium of the ancient bath, and moved into the tepidarium, occupying and taking over the columns and the arches of the ancient structure. The design was the brainchild of a very old Michelangelo, who incorporated the ruins of the baths in such a way to showcase their previous grandeur into a new building that was tall, light and airy. However, later on the project was modified by a subsequent architect named Van Vitelli, who changed the axis of the church so that it would face into the newly built piazza, closing off many of the windows and changing the interior into a highly decorated, baroque structure.
We walked in the curved face of the entrance, to be bathed in the peaceful light of the church. Above us the ceiling rose in a huge dome, that rose up to an oculus filled with delicate stained glass, through which the bright morning sun filtered down to throw rainbows all over the floor. We continued on, into the main hall of the church, a huge arching space with vaults that met in a criss cross of pattern high over head. The walls were filled with frescoes and each end of the big cross of the church was filled with an altar, carved and gilded as always. Near the front end of the church, a big roped off stripe of marble on the floor indicated a sundial/zodiac, with bronze inscribed near the floor with the signs of the animals, and inscriptions in latin, which were illegible to me. A small chamber off of the main hall of the church led to a museum that described the church’s history and the various plans for its construction and subsequent renovation. I liked the idea—converting a huge roman ruin into a church, still exposing the framework of the old building but making room for the new, and watching as it evolved into its current form, which was different from Michelangelo’s original vision but no less beautiful.
And we reluctantly pulled ourselves out of the church and into the noise of the city, going to one more place—the National Museum of Rome, situated in a red neoclassical structure, that contained three full floors full of mosaics and painting and sculpture. The most notable of the works there was the Boxer, a bronze Greek original of a massive muscle bound athlete, scarred with the efforts of his trade, resting on a stool. His massive hands hang between his legs, elbows on the knees, bound up in a variety of huge leather straps that leave only the tips of the fingers free. His battered face turns upward, exposing the swollen nose and cauliflower ears characteristic from repeated blows to the head.
By this time, however, I was so tired I had to fight walking through the museum like a zombie, and would stop every few minutes to sit down. I was utterly and completely spent—the whirlwind days of Rome were catching up to me, and I was glad to be boarding a plane to go see something new, and perhaps catch a little bit of a break.
We returned from the museum to the hotel just in time to grab our things and head to the airport, arriving in Tunisia well past midnight. It took a long time to finally get to the hotel—first Dr Toumazou had to get a visa, and none of us had the Dinars necessary to buy it, then we arrived to realize that the bus provided for us was much too short, and we had to stack all of our bags in the seats and on our laps before it finally fit. But we made it to the hotel around 1:30, just in time to drop our bags, plug in our spent computers and go to sleep.
We woke up brutually early, it seemed, and my eyes stayed half open all day. The nonstop pace of this trip coupled with the lack of free days is finally starting to catch up to me, I think, because I spend all day today in a daze, absorbing some but not much of what I saw. I followed the group around, a dead mute, and the rest of us were in much the same state. Whenever Toumazou asked us if we had any questions, we could just painfully shake our heads back and forth in a weak “no.”
Tunisia itself seems pretty cool. Today we went first to Carthage, a short drive from the modern city of Tunis, where we had spent the night, to a cemetery dating all of the way back to the pre-Roman period, to the time when Tunisia was ruled by the Phonecians. Here the cemetery stood, riddled with tombstones containing crude depictions of human figures, surrounded by a wall of Roman date, and sweeping with dust from the limestone walls. We did not stay here long, but quickly loaded the bus again to set off to our next destination.
We kept driving, past the two Phonecian ports of Carthage, carved into the ground to prepare the way for the export and import of grains—Carthage would later become the breadbasket of the Roman empire, and the richness of the land showed everywhere we went. We only stopped to snap pictures out of the windows of the bus before we continued, stopping finally at the remains of a substantial bath complex, which our tour guide told us were the Baths of Antoninus, built in the second century AD. While much of the stone has subsequently been taken to built some of the later Arab buildings, a good core of the baths remained, spread out in a crooked series of walls, half broken arches, and columns below us. We were released to walk down among the yellow dust of the ruins, stopping occasionally to find high ground and watch as the maze of walls grounded itself, and then swept out to the horizon where the sky met the land, and then the blue haze of the sea. Two columns had been re-erected by later excavators, showing us just how tall the baths were originally—some 37 meters high, by some estimates.
Then we loaded the bus again and stopped at a small Andalusian village on our way to the Bardo Museum, our stop for the afternoon. Now largely regarded as a tourist stop, this charming place with its whitewashed walls and bright blue doors reminded me of Siphnos or other areas around the coast of Greece. However, here instead of the simple square shutters over the windows, the doors swept up with huge bell curves tapering to pointed tips, and the horizontal bars holding the doors together were studded with huge metal studs. The windows were not shuttered, but barred with a swirling floral design that swelled outward at the bottom before coming in close to the wall near the very top. Every alley had stalls of vendors selling traditional goods—ceramics which reminded me of the ones I had so loved in Turkey, with elaborate floral and geometric patterns, closely packed in brilliant blues and other colors. Other stalls had row after row of huge silver jewelry, bracelets and bangles and chandelier earrings, others sold hookah—big pipes for smoking flavored tobacco, scarves, leather purses and sandals, rugs, and a variety of brilliantly colored objects, all with a certain degree of Arab flair.
It was beautiful, but I was almost too tired to notice anything individually—I paid enough attention to take note for further excursions in Tunisia, but I was too tired to care except when we finally sat down to have some lunch, and I could give my eyes and my mind a little bit of a rest. On the way, the bus stopped at an American cemetery, one devoted to the victims of the world wars, and we walked in and among the immaculate green lawns, spaced evenly with rows and rows of white crosses, here and there a star of David, listing the names and the states of the fallen soldiers, or where none would suffice, an inscription that read “Here lies a fallen comrade, known only to God.” Our tour guide informed us that this was the only American cemetery in Tunisia, and simultaneously with the call to prayer, we heard the bells of the cemetery chime with songs familiar to us, ones like “America the Beautiful.”
And then we finally went to the Bardo Museum, an Arab palace that had been converted into a museum in the 19th century, and most of it still contains the original ceilings and tiles from when it served as the home for a high dignitary and his harem. We walked in and were confronted with a huge amount of mosaics, ranging in size from ones that would cover an entire floor in the great halls of the building, to very small and delicate ones that were framed and hung up on the wall like pictures. Every room had a new surprise for us, and I revived somewhat at the lush surroundings. One of the rooms had a ceiling that rose up in a big bellied dome, and then dipped down to a point again, where a venetian chandelier had been hung. It looked like an inverted picture of a drop on the water, and was completely covered in the lacelike patterns characteristic of the Ottomans. Another room contained a ribbed dome, the inside of which was covered in carved stucco, in tiny tiny rosettes and florals that repeated themselves endlessly up the insides, highlighted in some areas by spots of color, but in other places left stark white. The juxtaposition of the two cultures I found especially interesting—the white sculpted gods of Rome, and the huge mosaics with satyrs, naiads and dolphins riding the waves of tesserae, and the ceilings completely overtaken with geometrical repeats of flowers and vines, which wound themselves around in a delicate order. It was beautiful.
By the end of the museum, my energy levels were nearing zero, and it was all I could do to struggle back to the bus, where we had a short drive to the hotel, I threw my stuff on the floor, and crawled into bed. I had the longest nap of my life. We got there at around 4:30, and I was dead to the world until 7, when Ambrice came and got me for dinner. Angela and Catherine and Jess E and us all had some pizza at a local place, and had some very good gelato for dessert. After that, it was a short TV watching session—Sam and Vincoli have really gotten into The West Wing, and have convinced me to try some episodes. Somehow I only manage to watch the last parts of them, but the ones I have seen are enough to convince me to watch some more. I went back to my room to try to catch up on my reading and my blog, but I couldn’t focus very well.
And then, at around midnight, my brain shut down again and I went to sleep.
Monday, April 30, 2007
St Peters, The Vatican, and Caravaggio
April 24, 2007
Rome, Italy
Yesterday was a big big day for art history. We got to see the most famous museums in the world, those of the Vatican, and then I went on my own to see the basilica of St. Peter’s—that most iconic church in Rome with its huge dome and encircling arms. By the end of the day yesterday I was ready to collapse, but we had a big dinner at a place familiar to Jess Dwyer, one of the girls on the trip, who had agreed to take the whole party there. I am glad I stayed awake long enough to go—the whole evening ended up being tons of fun, and today was no less wonderful, a short visit to the Trastevere area of Rome, followed by some Frisbee in the Circus Maximus and then a quest to find some Caravaggio—a wandering around Rome that ended up turning up some lovely little art galleries and cute places near the Piazza Del Popolo, places I would have walked right by if I hadn’t been in a wanderlust mood. I am glad I was: the whole day was incredibly rewarding.
We woke up early as usual, and I needed my cappuccino that morning as we struggled to get the sleep out of our eyes and get to the Vatican. It turns out that we had a LOT of time to wake up. The line to buy tickets to the Vatican museums stretched around the block, all of the way back toward St. Peters, stretching around the massive enclosure walls of the small city-within-a-city. We ended up standing in line for about two hours, from 10 until noon, as the sun rose and beat down upon us. Luckily we could talk for a while to keep each other occupied, but after such a long time with so little movement and as the heat levels rose, the talk petered out and we all just stood as still as possible, trying to stay cool and away from the touch of the crowd of others in the line, waiting until we could finally get inside the walls to the museum itself.
Ambrice and I in our desperation unfolded umbrellas, as the line slowly inched toward the entrance. Then, at noon, we were finally allowed in the building, an entrance with as high security as an air port, full of metal detectors screens and throngs of people chattering excitedly. We all got through the security and met on the other side, by a long line of ticket booths, and once we had gotten our tickets were were released into the echoing halls of the Vatican.
Beyond the wonderful classical sculpture we found, placed almost casually in the niches of the spacious porticoes, there was a treasure trove of Renaisssance and Baroque painting. We wandered through the classical halls first, surrounded by wave after wave of chattering tourists. Walking down a grand hall, we came to an open air courtyard, with two of the most famous sculptures in the whole museum… the Laocoon, the famous Hellenistic sculptural group that depicts the great seer who warned against bringing the Trojan horse into the city, but was punished by his words at the clutches of a great snake. In the sculpture, Laocoon rages against the encircling sinew of the snake, violently twisting his torso and agonizing at the sky. On each side of him, his two sons try desperately to escape the snake’s clutches, but are unsuccessful. Despite the press of the people and the confustion of the museum, I was happy to be there, and fought to stay in front of the sculpture in admiration for a good few minutes, before moving on to the other treasures at the great museum.
IN the same courtyard as the one that held the Laocoon was the Apollo Belvedere, another wonderful sculpture of the rather effeminate looking god standing in a classical pose, one arm outstretched, head inclined gently in the same direction. His cloak swept over his shoulder and cascaded down his arm in the eloquent sweep of fabric as he looked above all of our adoring heads. And then, in a small niche off of another grand corridor, the Apoxeomenos jumped out at us. This sculpture, a rather good roman copy of the Greek original by the sculptor Lysippos stood, the new epitome of classical beauty with a leaner body and a smaller head, the whisperings of Hellenistic pathos around his eyes, performing the duties of an athlete. He stands in the contrapposto typical of his time, but one of his arms is stretched directly before him at the viewer, the other crossing over his chest, equipped with a strigil to scrape off the oil and sweat from his athletic activity. I was overawed again, standing there in a hallway with some of the most famous pieces of classical art, the streams of tourists flowing by.
But we had only a day to see the huge museum, so we moved on, to a wide gallery now closed, but with brillant white statuary glowing in the dim light and proliferated with animals—fighting, walking, and resting on their pedestal bases. And we went on, past a huge circular room full of larger than life statues of gods and emperors—this was very roman, and the massive figures of muscle bound Hercules’ with the faces of various Roman notables impressed upon us their power and their majesty. And we were on, to a room with huge dark red marble sarcophagi, an elaborate mosaic on the floor and huge paintings on the walls, and on to the Egyptian wing…
By now we were deep into the belly of the museum, and were quickly becoming oversaturated with images—the walls and floors and ceilings of this place were positively packed with images, marble, and gilded and floraled everywhere it could be. We entered a hall with ancient maps of Rome and Italy, and another hall of paintings, and another, we lost track of time in all of the madness. We entered the taller but more dimly lit halls of the Raphael wings of the museum, containing floor to ceiling frescoes by the Renaissance artist. And, just when I was beginning to wonder if the great work was actually there, we stumbled onto it—The School of Athens, one of Raphael’s most famous works that shows all of the world’s great philosophers and artists standing in the halls of a huge basilica, Plato famously pointing up at the ceiling while Aristotle looks down to the real world before him. Another wave of disbelief sahed over me as I stood in front of the fresco, its signs of age and the vitality of the painting bleeding through.
Then we moved down, into the basement of the museum, where, on the way to the Sistine Chapel I stopped to see a painting that looked like a Dali, during his religious period with a Christ shown hovering in the air on a dark ground with the characteristic barren landscape behind. And upon closer inspection I realized that it was a Dali, with another one sitting right beside it, and would have been completely overlooked in the quest to find Michelangelo… and another modern art piece that extrapolated from an image forever burned in my head from the Survey of Western Art class—the Isenheim Altarpiece by Grunewald, showing the crucifixion of Christ in all of its human suffering, the outstretched hands curling against the pain. The hand sat here, reproduced in a series of bright colors that completely contrasts the dark pain of the original painting, but striking nonetheless in its capture of that most emphatic gesture of the original painting.
But we moved on, coming to a series of warm rooms that opened up to the bustling noise of the Sistine Chapel. Although the ceiling was tall, the sheer amount of people in the space made it warm and humid, and we pressed ourselves into the crowd to contemplate the great Michelangelo painting. We stood and stared, the story of mankind unfolding with all of the fanfare of the Reniassance, the muscular figures twisting and moving in their panels on the long hall of the ceiling. It was amazing, but the crowd of people made viewing the work exhausting and I stood for a long time before becoming completely overwhelmed and retreating back down the elaborate hallways to the main entrance.
There, Jess Bradshaw and Scott and I all had some food and drink—I desperately needed something to revive me after wandering around in the maze of huge halls, and the long lines in the sun earlier that day had completely wiped me out. I had to sit for a long time, resorting to a Coke and some pizza to recover, talking about what we had seen and what we still wanted to see before exiting the Vatican that day. Jess was impatient to move on, so I continued to sit for a while before Jess Dwyer recommended that I visit the picture gallery on the top floor of the museum. She told me it was much less crowded than the rest of the place and contained a good number of wonderful paintings.
So I walked up the stairs and into the quiet hallways of this place, moving first among the rigid early Christian and Byzantine works, pictures of saints in their gilded frames, staring out at the space before them. As I worked my way into this section the early works gave way to the Renaissance, and I found myself looking at another work from my art history class, the Resurrection? Of Christ by Raphael. At the end of the hallway this huge painting stood, in all of its soft glory, Christ surrounded by a glowing cloud while those below him stand in astonishment. There were chairs near this part of the museum, so I sat for a while and watched people file in and out of the space, staring at the painting before me. It was beautiful, all of the soft transitions, the complex folds in the clothing, and the feeling of an unearthly reality enveloped the scene.
I walked through the picture gallery for a while, coming upon a cartoon by a famous Renaissance artist, I forget who, which serves as a study for the larger work in oil. The name “cartoon” is somewhat misleading, the cartoon was a last in a series of studies that would anticipate the final work in oil done by the artist, and duplicated the actual size of the finished painting. The artist would trace over the cartoon to transfer the image onto the canvas to paint with, and the drawing was usually much damaged or destroyed in the process. Luckiy, this one survived, and I got to see it and a copy of the finished work side by side. Elsewhere in this section was an unfinished work by Da Vinci, which I thought was interesting to see because I could observe every stage in the painting’s life—the drawing underneath, large blocked in areas of color, and the beginnings of detail…
And in one of the final rooms, a Caravaggio jumped out of the darkness; a painting of The Entombement of Christ, his body in all of its dead weight being struggled into the ground by his followers. I was impressed by the way the painting glowed, as all of Caravaggios do, lit by a single light source that threw the muscles of the men into shadow. The detail of the figures was amazing, down to the folds in the skin on the feet and the veins in the dragging hand of Christ that escapes the grasp of his carriers.
And on and on, I went out of that wing and into a small wing devoted to early Christian art, the most interesting part of which showed the elevation and plans of the original St Peters, constructed by Constantine, I think, over the site where St Peter was supposedly martyred—a five aisled space with a peaked roof. Of course, none of the building today exists, eclipsed by the plan of the basilica of Michelangelo, with later additions by other artists. By this time, however, it was late in the afternoon, and I was completely exhausted and overwhelmed by all that I had seen. I ran into Jess Dwyer on the way out, and we decided to walk back to the metro together, but she actually just ended up convincing me to go to St Peters. There was no other time that we could go, she said. And it was one of the greatest architectural wonders of the city.
I walked over to the great arms of the piazza and arranged myself right where the collonade bells out into a great circle, waited in a short line, and then approached the church itself, even more impressive up close than it had been from afar during the Easter mass. Not paying much attention, I allowed myself to be shunted into one of the barricades that directed tourists around the entrance and to various places in the church, bypassing the front door and moving over to the side, where realizing my mistake, I was given the choice to descend down into the tombs of the popes or up to the cupola. I chose the cupola, and to hike the 500+ stairs all of the way up to the top.
So I did, winding around the central area where the elevator had been installed, emerging on the inside of the church where the dome of St Peters comes to rest on its four great peiers on the inside. I was standing just above the magnificent gold lettering that ran the whole length of the dome, and could look down from my perch over the tiny people moving on the multicolored marble flooring below, the four great wings of the church stretching in all of their splendor below me. I finally got a sense for the huge space of the place, this was a home for angels, and the sumptuousness of the gold and the sculpture convinced me that my feelings were right.
I stood on a small ledge flanked by roundels with cherubims and cornucopias of fruit, and above me the gold and blue edged dome rose up even higher, pierced at intervals by windows and the great panels of images framed in gold, finally opening up to a smaller tower in the very center, with larger windows to allow light to filter down. It was amazing to view the church from such a height, and I walked all of the way to the other side of the dome to survey the church from everywhere I could, the plan of it becoming more discernable as I moved.
But I saw a sign headed toward the cupola, so I took another flight up the stairs, wondering where I would end up this time. I emerged on the roof of St Peters itself, on the terrace where the massive statues of Christ and all of the Apostles stand surveying the piazza below, and I turned around to see the huge dome of the church, the one that I had been standing inside of, rising up before me, beckoning. And then I moved on, to an even smaller spiraling stair that moved between the inner and outer shells of the dome, the walls around me beginning to tilt with the dome’s curvature, forcing me to bend my head as I wound my way up and up and up. The stairs got smaller, until only one person could go up at a time, clutching the rope that acted as the balustrade because the spiral was so close set, and emerged onto a small balcony, on the cupola itself.
Moving out of the collonade and into the open air, I could see the whole of Rome stretched out below me, red tiled roofs terracing up and down the hills, the Tiber running a dark streak through it all, the piazza stretching its arms below, beyond it the massive walls of the Castel St Angelo and the cacophony of streets, here and there a dash of green where the urbanity gave way to a park. I walked around the whole circumference of the cupola, coming to the back where I could see the peaked roofs of the Vatican museums stretch away in a maze to my left, and coming to the back of the church, the sculpted, rolling green of the Vatican gardens, mazes and hedges clearly outlined in the slanting light of the late afternoon. I stood for a while, moving around and seeing Rome from all of the vantage points that the great church had to offer, before descending the perilously steep stairs all of the way back down, letting me out in the inside of the church itself.
Where I was quickly overawed again, the massive cross-in-square plan with its huge central piers and 4 arms stretching away into tall apses, modified later to transform the building into a more western church, extending one of the arms to meet the piazza created around it. The elaborate patterns in all colors of marble rose in pattern up overhead to greet the mosaics, so detailed to look just like a painting, and all of the niches filled with statuary of saints, swirled up in their marble fabric.
I walked around the whole building, running into Scott, Jess, Chris, Anne and Sam while looking up at the magnificence that rose high over head. I was making my way toward the apse of the church when I was stopped by a church official, who asked me to wait as a series of priests in long white robes quietly crossed my path and walked toward the altar, from which a burst of choir music erupted, soaring into the recesses of the hallowed space. I moved to see it, and the music moved me, and I stood watching the services contucted before me, IN SAINT PETERS, before heading back out into the early evening and heading home.
We all were invited to a restaurant in Trastevere that night, courtesy of Jess Dwyer, who has some family connections in Italy. Chris, Anne and I almost missed it because the metro started malfunctioning and we had to walk to some of the stops, getting lost on the way and making it back to the hotel completely tired and with just enough time to lay in bed and contemplate for a few minutes what we had done that day before venturing out again, taking first the metro, and then the train across the river to the restaurant district.
The dinner was fabulous, multiple courses in Bruschetta, pasta and beef, where the wine flowed freely and the talk lasted late into the night. We had a true Italian meal, and we didn’t get done until midnight, walking out of the restaurant nearly bursting at the seams. That was the only full meal I had in Italy, and it was definitely worth it. If my stomach could handle that kind of fullness all of the time, I would eat like an Italian every day. As it was, I would have to settle for special occasions.
Still energized from our meal and the wine, a few of us made it over to the Drunken Ship, an American-frequented bar sort-of on the way back from the church, which ended up being completely deserted. We ended up making a Davidson night of it, taking over the place and goofing around to the outdated American pop music they played, and playing a few games of Beirut before finally grabbing taxis home and hitting the sack. It was probably one of my best days in Rome so far.
However, today was just as good, if not better, because not only did I get to play Frisbee in the Circus Maximus, I also got really into my Caravaggio book and actually ended up seeking him out, finding him in a small church in the Piazza del Popolo, running into a lot of surprise finds along the way. The morning started out with an hour’s later rest, which we all needed after the previous night’s exuberance, and a trip back to the Trestevere area, arriving at the Pyramid of Cestius.
The Pyramid of Cestius was built in the reign of Augustus to commemorate the death of a wealthy citizen of Rome, who had been inspired by images of Egypt to build a much smaller and steeper pyramid in his own honor. The white faced monument now sat embedded in a later wall, apparently it had been taken up as a kind of symbol for the city of Rome itself, and was believed to ward off evil in some way, although later Romans mistakenly thought Remus was buried there, and called the place “the cone of Remus.” Only further explorations revealed its more common origins. Nevertheless, the tomb site was quite impressive, and inside of the medieval walls was a 19th century cemetery reserved for the non-Catholics who were required to be buried there.
It was an idyllic cemetery, well shaded with tall trees and walled by the ancient walls of brick, monuments of all shapes and sizes sat in terraces up a shallow slope; here and there a cat wound its way among the trees. At the far corner of the cemetery, looking on the huge white pyramid, stood a grave emblazoned:
“This grave contains all that was mortal, of a YOUNG ENGLISH POET, who, on his death bed, in the bitterness of his heart, at the malicious power of his enemies, desired to be engraven upon his tomb stone ‘Here lies One Whose name was writ in Water.’”
It turns out, this poet’s name was John Keats, and he and another romantic poet, Shelley, were buried here amid the ruins and the encroaching plants. This place had a wonderful atmosphere all its own, cool and quiet in contrast to the roaring street on the other side of the walls, and we wandered for a bit among the stones, reading inscriptions in English, German, and French, as we wound our way among the shadows.
But we could not stay, and all trundled back to the subway, emerging by the Circus Maximus, but bypassing it for the moment to walk even further, past a track and a park to reach the remains of the Baths of Carcalla, erected at the edge of the ancient city in 211-216 AD as part of a massive public works project by the emperor to provide something for the residential districts that dotted the area. The baths rise today, huge cliffs of brick soaring up into the sky, half completed arches left over from an era of bygone majesty. They were originally faced with marble, but like many of the monuments in this city, the stone-desperate medieval builders took much of it away so that today less than half of the baths remain. The place now looked like a leveled green park, with a huge set of artificial towers rising out of the grass, eroded like the snaggled teeth of a huge giant.
Baths of this type, the so-called imperial type, were symmetrical along a major axis running through the building, where the rooms on one side would mirror those along the other, and passive head conduction, aided by the heat of the sun and massive furnaces along the south side of the building would room the caldarium. Romans traditionally started their bath experience at the potedarium, or changing room, and from there would work their way to the frigidarium, a cold bath with pools for a quick plunge, and so-called swimming pools, in actuality reserved more for wading than anything else, from there to the tepidarium, which was heated indirectly by the last room, the caldarium.
However, bath complexed such as these had many more functions than getting the Romans clean. Each symmetrical side of the bath had a palaestra for athletic pursuits, and numerous other small halls for lectures or public debates or other types of casual congregation. We walked in and among the ruins, stopping in places where the mosaics on the floor were still preserved, sea creatures and mermen parading in the black and white tiles across the floor, in other areas patterns of fish scales, all that still remained of the lavish decoration that once covered the building. We walked into vast spaces, walled by the immensity of the brick but now left open to the sky, increasing their height and the sense of loss and neglect that characterizes the shells of such impressive structures. The sun was warming the brick, and we were getting impatient to move on, to the Circus Maximus, where we knew we could be released to play some Frisbee.
And eventually we did, walking back toward the metro station to the big open field that is all that remains of the Circus Maximus, a set of stands for chariot racing that once could have held as many as 250,000 spectators. Almost all of it is buried or lost in the dregs of time, but the shape is preserved in the long strip of grass where people lounged and read or ran in circles along the old track. The place was huge—540 m long, and almost half again as wide. On one side of the Circus, a set of projecting arches of brick wove their way up the side of a hill; it was the back of the palace on the Capitoline hill, strategically placed so that from the high perch the emperor and his notables could watch the chariots whirl around the spina in the center that defined the turning points on the track, and from which the emperor could watch, high above the masses below him. We sat on the steep grassy sides where the stands used to be, and listened to the lecture, impatient to get out on the field ourselves and play Frisbee.
Eventually we were released, and a few of us ran down to the flat area below, bounded on one side by the slope of the hill and on the other by a gravel path for running. Myself, Jess Bradshaw, Anna Marie, Scott, Chris Vincoli, Chris Beeston and Sam all went to throw around, the boys removing their shirts and being laughed at because with all of the walking around in the sun we had been doing, removing their shirts only made them all look like they had a white one underneath, so big was the contrast between their heads and arms and the rest of them. We threw for a while, and then tried to play a 3 on 3 frisbee game, made difficult by our out of shape selves and the fact that hardly any of us had thrown a Frisbee in a few months. We tired easily, and after a while most of the group left, leaving Scott, Vincoli and myself. We kept throwing back and forth, expanding the range of our passes, practicing different types of throws and aping around for well into the afternoon. I was so happy—the sun was shining, I was running around and playing Frisbee, on the Circus Maximus, no less, and we had most of the afternoon to ourselves.
We stayed for a few hours out there, enjoying the sun and the Frisbee and each other’s company, before I realized that there was more of Rome that I wanted to see and we all gathered up our things and went our separate ways; Scott and I back to the hotel to shower, and the others to go look for a Roma shirt in one of the stores close to the Colosseum. I came back to the hotel, formulating in my head the plan for the evening—a quest for Caravaggio—the book I had been reading was discussing some of the works housed in churches in and around Rome, and I wanted to find some of them for myself. I was anxious to get away from the group for a while and see what I wanted to see, a Rome outside of the museum and outside of the constant lectures and tours we had been getting.
I quickly showered and dressed and worked my way to where Dr Toumazou had mentioned I could find two very good Caravaggios, in the Piazza del Popolo, one stop past Spagna on the metro. I emerged from the depths of the train in a new part of Rome, and was temporarily disoriented before I went through a narrow passage and emerged in the Piazza itself, a massive circle flanked by two identical looking churches at the far end that led to one of the main arteries in Rome, the Via del Corso, and in the center of the square was a massive Egyptian obelisk still full of its hieroglyphic lettering, a holdover from the spina of the Circus Maximus, transported by one of the emperors in antiquity from Egypt.
On my right I saw a rather plain looking church, but a sign next to the basement looked like it was showing a local exhibition of contemporary art. Intrigued, I stepped down the short flight to enter the small exhibit—works by two artists from Moldova, Igor Vieru and Svetlana Ostapovici. I had heard of neither of them, but the works themselves were interesting—Vieru worked in paint, big patches of softly blended color that kind of reminded me of Cezanne with impressionistic glimpses of common objects and people—a washerwoman, vases of flowers, sketches of everyday life. One in particular caught my eye, a big orange field of color with a woman picked out in the light, moving through the fields of color with ease, as she washed the clothing in her arms. The softly blended patches of color maintained their own integrity while contributing to the appearance of th whole.
The other artist had interesting stuff too—glittering mosaics laid out in three dimensional form—people would emerge from the flat walls and push forward, outlined in the crystalline glass, their cou ntours picked out in varying shades of one bright color or another, picked out against a plain backdrop. I looked here for a while, before exiting the church. I was about to move on, I was looking for Caravaggio, after all, and then I noticed a sign by the church entrance that told me more about the building itself, and thinking that maybe this might have been the one to which Toumazou was referring, I took a closer look. It turned out that this church, the church of Santa Maria del Popolo, did indeed contain the two Caravaggios in question in addition to some sculptures by Bernini and works by other unfamiliar Italian artists.
The church itself has a rather austere façade, the familiar volutes rising up to a point in the center, but the face of the building itself free of much ornamentation besides raking cornices over each of the three doorways and a little bit of window tracery. Inside, however, was a different story. The church was completely painted and frescoed, just about everywhere except the ceilings over the two side aisles. The white columns parades down the space, breaking up the massive fields of color and design that covered most of the surfaces of the interior of the church.
At the far end was an altar with a huge painting that reached from the floor to the ceiling, and along the side aisles were little chapels, each with their own character, decorated with statues in the niches and different colored marble. It was really interesting to walk along all of the side aisles, looking at how each of the different chapels differentiated itself from the next. The chapel to the left hand side of the altar contained a crowd of people, and moving up to it, I saw the two paintings I had come to see, The Conversion of Saul, and The Crucifixion of Peter, which hung on either side of the Cerasi chapel. The center of the chapel was dominated by a much larger painting, by Caracci, called Assumption of the Virgin, a much more idealized painting in soft light that showed Mary being carried up in to heaven, flanked by swirled brightly colored drapery and lit in a golden light from above.
The two Caravaggios were in marked contrast; the painter himself, considered to be the first of the Baroque artists, was known for depicting scenes with a high degree of versimilitude and little idealization. The light is to me by far the most captivating part of his works, everything is lit in a strong slanting light source, resulting in an effect called tenebrism (heightened chiaroscuro), where the contrast of light and the play of shadows upon the figures adds a sense of drama to the already highly realistic scene. In contrast to many of the painters of his time, Caravaggio worked directly from live models, without the intermediary of cartoons, and this lended an immediacy to his works that I could readily see in these two. Both of them depicted moments of drama in the lives of the saints, Saint Peter at a slanting angle, being bound up to the cross, and Paul startled by a fall from his horse, sprawled across the bottom edge of the painting, severely foreshortened and looking in surprise at the horse handler above him. Despite the small crowd around the chapel, I stood for a while to trace the path of the light across the figures in the scene.
And then I took my time perusing the rest of the church—to the gilded and highly carved altar, complete with sculpture and a rather eastern looking Mary staring from behind a frame of heavy gold. And then down the opposite aisle, looking at various painted or carved chapels, one which heavily used a dark green stone for all of the columns, and another with a modern rendition of the late Pope John Paul II, standing in the dark corner of a finely veined stained glass window, and finally back out into the sun.
Continuing along the piazza, I spotted a sign entitled “The Genius of Leonardo Da Vinci.” Having all the time in the world, and curious about anther of the greats of Italy, I walked over, into what looked like the basement of another church, where I entered a small exhibition that reconstructed many of the machines that Leonardo sketched in his notebooks, which ranged from giant flying machines to motion machines, to great guns to bicycles. Scattered in and among the reconstructions were prints of sketches that he had made, ones to accompany the machines themselves, and others of the human anatomy, studies of faces and muscles and nerves. It was all really cool and I was stunned to see how much Da Vinci had managed to figure out about the world, just by observation. I want to learn more about it when I get the chance.
I left the museum in my own time and moved to the Piazza, walking over to examine the obelisk and go to the two identical churches on the opposite side, stopping to look at the plans and examine the inside briefly before moving off down the Corso. The Corso is crammed with a mixture of designer and lower end shops, interspersed here and there with churches that I stopped in briefly to look.
On the way down the corso, I stopped at another small art gallery, filled with works of local artists, found an English language bookstore called the Lion bookshop, where I bought a book about Brunelleschi’s Dome in preparation for Florence, and milled around for a bit before finally, at around 8 pm, heading home to a very quick dinner—a picnic with tuna and some carrots.
That night, I looked some at the architecture book I had been given, looking at all of the places I had seen in Rome and going online to find more information on some more Caravaggios to look for in Rome. One work of his that I had remembered from my art history class, called The Calling of St Matthew, hung in a small chapel in San Luigi dei Francesi, close to the Piazza Navona. I wanted to visit it the next day, if we had time. And then, completely exhausted but totally happy after having some of the best days in Rome, I slept.
Rome, Italy
Yesterday was a big big day for art history. We got to see the most famous museums in the world, those of the Vatican, and then I went on my own to see the basilica of St. Peter’s—that most iconic church in Rome with its huge dome and encircling arms. By the end of the day yesterday I was ready to collapse, but we had a big dinner at a place familiar to Jess Dwyer, one of the girls on the trip, who had agreed to take the whole party there. I am glad I stayed awake long enough to go—the whole evening ended up being tons of fun, and today was no less wonderful, a short visit to the Trastevere area of Rome, followed by some Frisbee in the Circus Maximus and then a quest to find some Caravaggio—a wandering around Rome that ended up turning up some lovely little art galleries and cute places near the Piazza Del Popolo, places I would have walked right by if I hadn’t been in a wanderlust mood. I am glad I was: the whole day was incredibly rewarding.
We woke up early as usual, and I needed my cappuccino that morning as we struggled to get the sleep out of our eyes and get to the Vatican. It turns out that we had a LOT of time to wake up. The line to buy tickets to the Vatican museums stretched around the block, all of the way back toward St. Peters, stretching around the massive enclosure walls of the small city-within-a-city. We ended up standing in line for about two hours, from 10 until noon, as the sun rose and beat down upon us. Luckily we could talk for a while to keep each other occupied, but after such a long time with so little movement and as the heat levels rose, the talk petered out and we all just stood as still as possible, trying to stay cool and away from the touch of the crowd of others in the line, waiting until we could finally get inside the walls to the museum itself.
Ambrice and I in our desperation unfolded umbrellas, as the line slowly inched toward the entrance. Then, at noon, we were finally allowed in the building, an entrance with as high security as an air port, full of metal detectors screens and throngs of people chattering excitedly. We all got through the security and met on the other side, by a long line of ticket booths, and once we had gotten our tickets were were released into the echoing halls of the Vatican.
Beyond the wonderful classical sculpture we found, placed almost casually in the niches of the spacious porticoes, there was a treasure trove of Renaisssance and Baroque painting. We wandered through the classical halls first, surrounded by wave after wave of chattering tourists. Walking down a grand hall, we came to an open air courtyard, with two of the most famous sculptures in the whole museum… the Laocoon, the famous Hellenistic sculptural group that depicts the great seer who warned against bringing the Trojan horse into the city, but was punished by his words at the clutches of a great snake. In the sculpture, Laocoon rages against the encircling sinew of the snake, violently twisting his torso and agonizing at the sky. On each side of him, his two sons try desperately to escape the snake’s clutches, but are unsuccessful. Despite the press of the people and the confustion of the museum, I was happy to be there, and fought to stay in front of the sculpture in admiration for a good few minutes, before moving on to the other treasures at the great museum.
IN the same courtyard as the one that held the Laocoon was the Apollo Belvedere, another wonderful sculpture of the rather effeminate looking god standing in a classical pose, one arm outstretched, head inclined gently in the same direction. His cloak swept over his shoulder and cascaded down his arm in the eloquent sweep of fabric as he looked above all of our adoring heads. And then, in a small niche off of another grand corridor, the Apoxeomenos jumped out at us. This sculpture, a rather good roman copy of the Greek original by the sculptor Lysippos stood, the new epitome of classical beauty with a leaner body and a smaller head, the whisperings of Hellenistic pathos around his eyes, performing the duties of an athlete. He stands in the contrapposto typical of his time, but one of his arms is stretched directly before him at the viewer, the other crossing over his chest, equipped with a strigil to scrape off the oil and sweat from his athletic activity. I was overawed again, standing there in a hallway with some of the most famous pieces of classical art, the streams of tourists flowing by.
But we had only a day to see the huge museum, so we moved on, to a wide gallery now closed, but with brillant white statuary glowing in the dim light and proliferated with animals—fighting, walking, and resting on their pedestal bases. And we went on, past a huge circular room full of larger than life statues of gods and emperors—this was very roman, and the massive figures of muscle bound Hercules’ with the faces of various Roman notables impressed upon us their power and their majesty. And we were on, to a room with huge dark red marble sarcophagi, an elaborate mosaic on the floor and huge paintings on the walls, and on to the Egyptian wing…
By now we were deep into the belly of the museum, and were quickly becoming oversaturated with images—the walls and floors and ceilings of this place were positively packed with images, marble, and gilded and floraled everywhere it could be. We entered a hall with ancient maps of Rome and Italy, and another hall of paintings, and another, we lost track of time in all of the madness. We entered the taller but more dimly lit halls of the Raphael wings of the museum, containing floor to ceiling frescoes by the Renaissance artist. And, just when I was beginning to wonder if the great work was actually there, we stumbled onto it—The School of Athens, one of Raphael’s most famous works that shows all of the world’s great philosophers and artists standing in the halls of a huge basilica, Plato famously pointing up at the ceiling while Aristotle looks down to the real world before him. Another wave of disbelief sahed over me as I stood in front of the fresco, its signs of age and the vitality of the painting bleeding through.
Then we moved down, into the basement of the museum, where, on the way to the Sistine Chapel I stopped to see a painting that looked like a Dali, during his religious period with a Christ shown hovering in the air on a dark ground with the characteristic barren landscape behind. And upon closer inspection I realized that it was a Dali, with another one sitting right beside it, and would have been completely overlooked in the quest to find Michelangelo… and another modern art piece that extrapolated from an image forever burned in my head from the Survey of Western Art class—the Isenheim Altarpiece by Grunewald, showing the crucifixion of Christ in all of its human suffering, the outstretched hands curling against the pain. The hand sat here, reproduced in a series of bright colors that completely contrasts the dark pain of the original painting, but striking nonetheless in its capture of that most emphatic gesture of the original painting.
But we moved on, coming to a series of warm rooms that opened up to the bustling noise of the Sistine Chapel. Although the ceiling was tall, the sheer amount of people in the space made it warm and humid, and we pressed ourselves into the crowd to contemplate the great Michelangelo painting. We stood and stared, the story of mankind unfolding with all of the fanfare of the Reniassance, the muscular figures twisting and moving in their panels on the long hall of the ceiling. It was amazing, but the crowd of people made viewing the work exhausting and I stood for a long time before becoming completely overwhelmed and retreating back down the elaborate hallways to the main entrance.
There, Jess Bradshaw and Scott and I all had some food and drink—I desperately needed something to revive me after wandering around in the maze of huge halls, and the long lines in the sun earlier that day had completely wiped me out. I had to sit for a long time, resorting to a Coke and some pizza to recover, talking about what we had seen and what we still wanted to see before exiting the Vatican that day. Jess was impatient to move on, so I continued to sit for a while before Jess Dwyer recommended that I visit the picture gallery on the top floor of the museum. She told me it was much less crowded than the rest of the place and contained a good number of wonderful paintings.
So I walked up the stairs and into the quiet hallways of this place, moving first among the rigid early Christian and Byzantine works, pictures of saints in their gilded frames, staring out at the space before them. As I worked my way into this section the early works gave way to the Renaissance, and I found myself looking at another work from my art history class, the Resurrection? Of Christ by Raphael. At the end of the hallway this huge painting stood, in all of its soft glory, Christ surrounded by a glowing cloud while those below him stand in astonishment. There were chairs near this part of the museum, so I sat for a while and watched people file in and out of the space, staring at the painting before me. It was beautiful, all of the soft transitions, the complex folds in the clothing, and the feeling of an unearthly reality enveloped the scene.
I walked through the picture gallery for a while, coming upon a cartoon by a famous Renaissance artist, I forget who, which serves as a study for the larger work in oil. The name “cartoon” is somewhat misleading, the cartoon was a last in a series of studies that would anticipate the final work in oil done by the artist, and duplicated the actual size of the finished painting. The artist would trace over the cartoon to transfer the image onto the canvas to paint with, and the drawing was usually much damaged or destroyed in the process. Luckiy, this one survived, and I got to see it and a copy of the finished work side by side. Elsewhere in this section was an unfinished work by Da Vinci, which I thought was interesting to see because I could observe every stage in the painting’s life—the drawing underneath, large blocked in areas of color, and the beginnings of detail…
And in one of the final rooms, a Caravaggio jumped out of the darkness; a painting of The Entombement of Christ, his body in all of its dead weight being struggled into the ground by his followers. I was impressed by the way the painting glowed, as all of Caravaggios do, lit by a single light source that threw the muscles of the men into shadow. The detail of the figures was amazing, down to the folds in the skin on the feet and the veins in the dragging hand of Christ that escapes the grasp of his carriers.
And on and on, I went out of that wing and into a small wing devoted to early Christian art, the most interesting part of which showed the elevation and plans of the original St Peters, constructed by Constantine, I think, over the site where St Peter was supposedly martyred—a five aisled space with a peaked roof. Of course, none of the building today exists, eclipsed by the plan of the basilica of Michelangelo, with later additions by other artists. By this time, however, it was late in the afternoon, and I was completely exhausted and overwhelmed by all that I had seen. I ran into Jess Dwyer on the way out, and we decided to walk back to the metro together, but she actually just ended up convincing me to go to St Peters. There was no other time that we could go, she said. And it was one of the greatest architectural wonders of the city.
I walked over to the great arms of the piazza and arranged myself right where the collonade bells out into a great circle, waited in a short line, and then approached the church itself, even more impressive up close than it had been from afar during the Easter mass. Not paying much attention, I allowed myself to be shunted into one of the barricades that directed tourists around the entrance and to various places in the church, bypassing the front door and moving over to the side, where realizing my mistake, I was given the choice to descend down into the tombs of the popes or up to the cupola. I chose the cupola, and to hike the 500+ stairs all of the way up to the top.
So I did, winding around the central area where the elevator had been installed, emerging on the inside of the church where the dome of St Peters comes to rest on its four great peiers on the inside. I was standing just above the magnificent gold lettering that ran the whole length of the dome, and could look down from my perch over the tiny people moving on the multicolored marble flooring below, the four great wings of the church stretching in all of their splendor below me. I finally got a sense for the huge space of the place, this was a home for angels, and the sumptuousness of the gold and the sculpture convinced me that my feelings were right.
I stood on a small ledge flanked by roundels with cherubims and cornucopias of fruit, and above me the gold and blue edged dome rose up even higher, pierced at intervals by windows and the great panels of images framed in gold, finally opening up to a smaller tower in the very center, with larger windows to allow light to filter down. It was amazing to view the church from such a height, and I walked all of the way to the other side of the dome to survey the church from everywhere I could, the plan of it becoming more discernable as I moved.
But I saw a sign headed toward the cupola, so I took another flight up the stairs, wondering where I would end up this time. I emerged on the roof of St Peters itself, on the terrace where the massive statues of Christ and all of the Apostles stand surveying the piazza below, and I turned around to see the huge dome of the church, the one that I had been standing inside of, rising up before me, beckoning. And then I moved on, to an even smaller spiraling stair that moved between the inner and outer shells of the dome, the walls around me beginning to tilt with the dome’s curvature, forcing me to bend my head as I wound my way up and up and up. The stairs got smaller, until only one person could go up at a time, clutching the rope that acted as the balustrade because the spiral was so close set, and emerged onto a small balcony, on the cupola itself.
Moving out of the collonade and into the open air, I could see the whole of Rome stretched out below me, red tiled roofs terracing up and down the hills, the Tiber running a dark streak through it all, the piazza stretching its arms below, beyond it the massive walls of the Castel St Angelo and the cacophony of streets, here and there a dash of green where the urbanity gave way to a park. I walked around the whole circumference of the cupola, coming to the back where I could see the peaked roofs of the Vatican museums stretch away in a maze to my left, and coming to the back of the church, the sculpted, rolling green of the Vatican gardens, mazes and hedges clearly outlined in the slanting light of the late afternoon. I stood for a while, moving around and seeing Rome from all of the vantage points that the great church had to offer, before descending the perilously steep stairs all of the way back down, letting me out in the inside of the church itself.
Where I was quickly overawed again, the massive cross-in-square plan with its huge central piers and 4 arms stretching away into tall apses, modified later to transform the building into a more western church, extending one of the arms to meet the piazza created around it. The elaborate patterns in all colors of marble rose in pattern up overhead to greet the mosaics, so detailed to look just like a painting, and all of the niches filled with statuary of saints, swirled up in their marble fabric.
I walked around the whole building, running into Scott, Jess, Chris, Anne and Sam while looking up at the magnificence that rose high over head. I was making my way toward the apse of the church when I was stopped by a church official, who asked me to wait as a series of priests in long white robes quietly crossed my path and walked toward the altar, from which a burst of choir music erupted, soaring into the recesses of the hallowed space. I moved to see it, and the music moved me, and I stood watching the services contucted before me, IN SAINT PETERS, before heading back out into the early evening and heading home.
We all were invited to a restaurant in Trastevere that night, courtesy of Jess Dwyer, who has some family connections in Italy. Chris, Anne and I almost missed it because the metro started malfunctioning and we had to walk to some of the stops, getting lost on the way and making it back to the hotel completely tired and with just enough time to lay in bed and contemplate for a few minutes what we had done that day before venturing out again, taking first the metro, and then the train across the river to the restaurant district.
The dinner was fabulous, multiple courses in Bruschetta, pasta and beef, where the wine flowed freely and the talk lasted late into the night. We had a true Italian meal, and we didn’t get done until midnight, walking out of the restaurant nearly bursting at the seams. That was the only full meal I had in Italy, and it was definitely worth it. If my stomach could handle that kind of fullness all of the time, I would eat like an Italian every day. As it was, I would have to settle for special occasions.
Still energized from our meal and the wine, a few of us made it over to the Drunken Ship, an American-frequented bar sort-of on the way back from the church, which ended up being completely deserted. We ended up making a Davidson night of it, taking over the place and goofing around to the outdated American pop music they played, and playing a few games of Beirut before finally grabbing taxis home and hitting the sack. It was probably one of my best days in Rome so far.
However, today was just as good, if not better, because not only did I get to play Frisbee in the Circus Maximus, I also got really into my Caravaggio book and actually ended up seeking him out, finding him in a small church in the Piazza del Popolo, running into a lot of surprise finds along the way. The morning started out with an hour’s later rest, which we all needed after the previous night’s exuberance, and a trip back to the Trestevere area, arriving at the Pyramid of Cestius.
The Pyramid of Cestius was built in the reign of Augustus to commemorate the death of a wealthy citizen of Rome, who had been inspired by images of Egypt to build a much smaller and steeper pyramid in his own honor. The white faced monument now sat embedded in a later wall, apparently it had been taken up as a kind of symbol for the city of Rome itself, and was believed to ward off evil in some way, although later Romans mistakenly thought Remus was buried there, and called the place “the cone of Remus.” Only further explorations revealed its more common origins. Nevertheless, the tomb site was quite impressive, and inside of the medieval walls was a 19th century cemetery reserved for the non-Catholics who were required to be buried there.
It was an idyllic cemetery, well shaded with tall trees and walled by the ancient walls of brick, monuments of all shapes and sizes sat in terraces up a shallow slope; here and there a cat wound its way among the trees. At the far corner of the cemetery, looking on the huge white pyramid, stood a grave emblazoned:
“This grave contains all that was mortal, of a YOUNG ENGLISH POET, who, on his death bed, in the bitterness of his heart, at the malicious power of his enemies, desired to be engraven upon his tomb stone ‘Here lies One Whose name was writ in Water.’”
It turns out, this poet’s name was John Keats, and he and another romantic poet, Shelley, were buried here amid the ruins and the encroaching plants. This place had a wonderful atmosphere all its own, cool and quiet in contrast to the roaring street on the other side of the walls, and we wandered for a bit among the stones, reading inscriptions in English, German, and French, as we wound our way among the shadows.
But we could not stay, and all trundled back to the subway, emerging by the Circus Maximus, but bypassing it for the moment to walk even further, past a track and a park to reach the remains of the Baths of Carcalla, erected at the edge of the ancient city in 211-216 AD as part of a massive public works project by the emperor to provide something for the residential districts that dotted the area. The baths rise today, huge cliffs of brick soaring up into the sky, half completed arches left over from an era of bygone majesty. They were originally faced with marble, but like many of the monuments in this city, the stone-desperate medieval builders took much of it away so that today less than half of the baths remain. The place now looked like a leveled green park, with a huge set of artificial towers rising out of the grass, eroded like the snaggled teeth of a huge giant.
Baths of this type, the so-called imperial type, were symmetrical along a major axis running through the building, where the rooms on one side would mirror those along the other, and passive head conduction, aided by the heat of the sun and massive furnaces along the south side of the building would room the caldarium. Romans traditionally started their bath experience at the potedarium, or changing room, and from there would work their way to the frigidarium, a cold bath with pools for a quick plunge, and so-called swimming pools, in actuality reserved more for wading than anything else, from there to the tepidarium, which was heated indirectly by the last room, the caldarium.
However, bath complexed such as these had many more functions than getting the Romans clean. Each symmetrical side of the bath had a palaestra for athletic pursuits, and numerous other small halls for lectures or public debates or other types of casual congregation. We walked in and among the ruins, stopping in places where the mosaics on the floor were still preserved, sea creatures and mermen parading in the black and white tiles across the floor, in other areas patterns of fish scales, all that still remained of the lavish decoration that once covered the building. We walked into vast spaces, walled by the immensity of the brick but now left open to the sky, increasing their height and the sense of loss and neglect that characterizes the shells of such impressive structures. The sun was warming the brick, and we were getting impatient to move on, to the Circus Maximus, where we knew we could be released to play some Frisbee.
And eventually we did, walking back toward the metro station to the big open field that is all that remains of the Circus Maximus, a set of stands for chariot racing that once could have held as many as 250,000 spectators. Almost all of it is buried or lost in the dregs of time, but the shape is preserved in the long strip of grass where people lounged and read or ran in circles along the old track. The place was huge—540 m long, and almost half again as wide. On one side of the Circus, a set of projecting arches of brick wove their way up the side of a hill; it was the back of the palace on the Capitoline hill, strategically placed so that from the high perch the emperor and his notables could watch the chariots whirl around the spina in the center that defined the turning points on the track, and from which the emperor could watch, high above the masses below him. We sat on the steep grassy sides where the stands used to be, and listened to the lecture, impatient to get out on the field ourselves and play Frisbee.
Eventually we were released, and a few of us ran down to the flat area below, bounded on one side by the slope of the hill and on the other by a gravel path for running. Myself, Jess Bradshaw, Anna Marie, Scott, Chris Vincoli, Chris Beeston and Sam all went to throw around, the boys removing their shirts and being laughed at because with all of the walking around in the sun we had been doing, removing their shirts only made them all look like they had a white one underneath, so big was the contrast between their heads and arms and the rest of them. We threw for a while, and then tried to play a 3 on 3 frisbee game, made difficult by our out of shape selves and the fact that hardly any of us had thrown a Frisbee in a few months. We tired easily, and after a while most of the group left, leaving Scott, Vincoli and myself. We kept throwing back and forth, expanding the range of our passes, practicing different types of throws and aping around for well into the afternoon. I was so happy—the sun was shining, I was running around and playing Frisbee, on the Circus Maximus, no less, and we had most of the afternoon to ourselves.
We stayed for a few hours out there, enjoying the sun and the Frisbee and each other’s company, before I realized that there was more of Rome that I wanted to see and we all gathered up our things and went our separate ways; Scott and I back to the hotel to shower, and the others to go look for a Roma shirt in one of the stores close to the Colosseum. I came back to the hotel, formulating in my head the plan for the evening—a quest for Caravaggio—the book I had been reading was discussing some of the works housed in churches in and around Rome, and I wanted to find some of them for myself. I was anxious to get away from the group for a while and see what I wanted to see, a Rome outside of the museum and outside of the constant lectures and tours we had been getting.
I quickly showered and dressed and worked my way to where Dr Toumazou had mentioned I could find two very good Caravaggios, in the Piazza del Popolo, one stop past Spagna on the metro. I emerged from the depths of the train in a new part of Rome, and was temporarily disoriented before I went through a narrow passage and emerged in the Piazza itself, a massive circle flanked by two identical looking churches at the far end that led to one of the main arteries in Rome, the Via del Corso, and in the center of the square was a massive Egyptian obelisk still full of its hieroglyphic lettering, a holdover from the spina of the Circus Maximus, transported by one of the emperors in antiquity from Egypt.
On my right I saw a rather plain looking church, but a sign next to the basement looked like it was showing a local exhibition of contemporary art. Intrigued, I stepped down the short flight to enter the small exhibit—works by two artists from Moldova, Igor Vieru and Svetlana Ostapovici. I had heard of neither of them, but the works themselves were interesting—Vieru worked in paint, big patches of softly blended color that kind of reminded me of Cezanne with impressionistic glimpses of common objects and people—a washerwoman, vases of flowers, sketches of everyday life. One in particular caught my eye, a big orange field of color with a woman picked out in the light, moving through the fields of color with ease, as she washed the clothing in her arms. The softly blended patches of color maintained their own integrity while contributing to the appearance of th whole.
The other artist had interesting stuff too—glittering mosaics laid out in three dimensional form—people would emerge from the flat walls and push forward, outlined in the crystalline glass, their cou ntours picked out in varying shades of one bright color or another, picked out against a plain backdrop. I looked here for a while, before exiting the church. I was about to move on, I was looking for Caravaggio, after all, and then I noticed a sign by the church entrance that told me more about the building itself, and thinking that maybe this might have been the one to which Toumazou was referring, I took a closer look. It turned out that this church, the church of Santa Maria del Popolo, did indeed contain the two Caravaggios in question in addition to some sculptures by Bernini and works by other unfamiliar Italian artists.
The church itself has a rather austere façade, the familiar volutes rising up to a point in the center, but the face of the building itself free of much ornamentation besides raking cornices over each of the three doorways and a little bit of window tracery. Inside, however, was a different story. The church was completely painted and frescoed, just about everywhere except the ceilings over the two side aisles. The white columns parades down the space, breaking up the massive fields of color and design that covered most of the surfaces of the interior of the church.
At the far end was an altar with a huge painting that reached from the floor to the ceiling, and along the side aisles were little chapels, each with their own character, decorated with statues in the niches and different colored marble. It was really interesting to walk along all of the side aisles, looking at how each of the different chapels differentiated itself from the next. The chapel to the left hand side of the altar contained a crowd of people, and moving up to it, I saw the two paintings I had come to see, The Conversion of Saul, and The Crucifixion of Peter, which hung on either side of the Cerasi chapel. The center of the chapel was dominated by a much larger painting, by Caracci, called Assumption of the Virgin, a much more idealized painting in soft light that showed Mary being carried up in to heaven, flanked by swirled brightly colored drapery and lit in a golden light from above.
The two Caravaggios were in marked contrast; the painter himself, considered to be the first of the Baroque artists, was known for depicting scenes with a high degree of versimilitude and little idealization. The light is to me by far the most captivating part of his works, everything is lit in a strong slanting light source, resulting in an effect called tenebrism (heightened chiaroscuro), where the contrast of light and the play of shadows upon the figures adds a sense of drama to the already highly realistic scene. In contrast to many of the painters of his time, Caravaggio worked directly from live models, without the intermediary of cartoons, and this lended an immediacy to his works that I could readily see in these two. Both of them depicted moments of drama in the lives of the saints, Saint Peter at a slanting angle, being bound up to the cross, and Paul startled by a fall from his horse, sprawled across the bottom edge of the painting, severely foreshortened and looking in surprise at the horse handler above him. Despite the small crowd around the chapel, I stood for a while to trace the path of the light across the figures in the scene.
And then I took my time perusing the rest of the church—to the gilded and highly carved altar, complete with sculpture and a rather eastern looking Mary staring from behind a frame of heavy gold. And then down the opposite aisle, looking at various painted or carved chapels, one which heavily used a dark green stone for all of the columns, and another with a modern rendition of the late Pope John Paul II, standing in the dark corner of a finely veined stained glass window, and finally back out into the sun.
Continuing along the piazza, I spotted a sign entitled “The Genius of Leonardo Da Vinci.” Having all the time in the world, and curious about anther of the greats of Italy, I walked over, into what looked like the basement of another church, where I entered a small exhibition that reconstructed many of the machines that Leonardo sketched in his notebooks, which ranged from giant flying machines to motion machines, to great guns to bicycles. Scattered in and among the reconstructions were prints of sketches that he had made, ones to accompany the machines themselves, and others of the human anatomy, studies of faces and muscles and nerves. It was all really cool and I was stunned to see how much Da Vinci had managed to figure out about the world, just by observation. I want to learn more about it when I get the chance.
I left the museum in my own time and moved to the Piazza, walking over to examine the obelisk and go to the two identical churches on the opposite side, stopping to look at the plans and examine the inside briefly before moving off down the Corso. The Corso is crammed with a mixture of designer and lower end shops, interspersed here and there with churches that I stopped in briefly to look.
On the way down the corso, I stopped at another small art gallery, filled with works of local artists, found an English language bookstore called the Lion bookshop, where I bought a book about Brunelleschi’s Dome in preparation for Florence, and milled around for a bit before finally, at around 8 pm, heading home to a very quick dinner—a picnic with tuna and some carrots.
That night, I looked some at the architecture book I had been given, looking at all of the places I had seen in Rome and going online to find more information on some more Caravaggios to look for in Rome. One work of his that I had remembered from my art history class, called The Calling of St Matthew, hung in a small chapel in San Luigi dei Francesi, close to the Piazza Navona. I wanted to visit it the next day, if we had time. And then, completely exhausted but totally happy after having some of the best days in Rome, I slept.
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
Imperial Forum and Ostia
April 22, 2007
Rome, Italy
Yesterday was another longish day for us, and I think that everyone is starting to get burned out with all of the traveling, the crowds and the heat. I could not focus at all wherever we went and only recovered in time to go to the mass last night at the Pantheon, which was fortunate because I would have sincerely regretted only being half awake at that experience.
During the day we went to the Imperial Forum, which was a series of public spaces added under Caesar and later emperors to expand public space in the center of the city. Unfortunately, most of it is now covered by the modern road plowed through by Mussolini, looking for a way to link the Colosseum at the end of a big road to the other great monuments of the city, and obliterated everything in his way. As a result, the forums might have columns or walls here and there on either side of the huge road, but not much else.
On the opposite end of the forum was the other famous column of the Roman period, the Column of Trajan, upon which the column of Marcus Aurelius is modeled, with smaller and lower bands of relief showing his two greatest campaigns against the barbarians. The column was originally topped with a statue of Trajan himself, but in the later periods this was replaced with a bronze of some saint or another, which still exists today. Some of the bottom was encased in scaffolding, but the building itself was quite impressive—a massive width and a huge white shaft standing high above all of the other buildings in the remains of the forum. We walked around this column, down into the one part of the forum that was still preserved: a honeycomb of arches and vaults all done in brick.
This part of the forum was actually called Trajan’s Markets, and although it abutted the forum, in antiquity it did not actually connect. However, the walls separating the more commercial parts of the forum from the rest of the place have since fallen in, revealing a massive hemicycle of brick facing. The Markets look like an inverted Colosseum—several stories of arched colonnades looking outward from a concave curve—over 150 shops carved out of the side of the hill on the back of the forum. This structure was huge and very impressive—we got to walk inside the tall arched vaulting and admire the uniform rows of brick work as it swung around in a massive arc. It was cool on the inside, and the shops, now long empty, stood barren and shadowed in the early afternoon light.
It was around 2:00, and I was so tired I could barely keep one foot in front of the other. After the presentation had finished on the markets, I walked over on the other side of the forum to inspect an exhibition that I had considered visiting, one on Marc Chagall, a 20th century artist. However, the cost of the museum was incredibly high, and I was so tired that I knew I would be unable to appreciate the artwork, however fine it was. So, I decided to walk back toward the Colosseum to take the metro home.
I arrived back at the hotel just in time to watch an episode of Desperate Housewives and catch up a little bit on my blog (as you can see by the lateness of this entry, I am still way behind), and tried to take a nap. Just as I was about to nod off, Jess Eisenberg excitedly burst into the room, panting from the effort to get there in time, and asked if everyone had left to go to the mass in the Pantehon. Since I was planning on going, I replied that no, everyone had not, and after struggling to rise to my feet, I put back on my shoes, grabbed a scarf to cover my shoulders, and walked into the hall, where Vincoli and Scott were waiting. We took the number 84 bus as close as we could get to the Pantheon, and walked the rest of the way there, racing the clock to arrive on time.
But arrive we did, coming into the plaza just in time to stop and appreciate the weathered façade of the great building, the portico with its immortal insciption of Marcus Agrippa across the top, and the massive widely spaced columns leading into a huge door that opened onto the even bigger space of the dome, lavishly enriched with the marble that the outside completely lacked—all fancy stone had been stripped sometime in the middle ages, leaving the rough brick on the rotunda, and a series of holes—puncture wounds, on the pediment of the porch where the statues used to be.
We walked through the slanting afternoon light and the bustling noise of the street before coming into the relative calm of the Pantheon, still swarming with tourists. We took our seats in the folding chairs past the ropes, and settled in to wait until the mass began. The mass itself was long but very beautiful, conducted completely in Italian and Latin, so none of us understood much, but the magic of the moment and of the place struck us all. I looked around at the beautiful statuary and the magnificent dome, unsurpassed in its scope and majesty, and when the priest began to sing series after series of arpeggioed hallelujahs I could not help but feel moved.
We all emerged from the mass feeling incredibly elated, and stepped out from that sanctuary back into the real world. I wanted to let the feeling stay with me, so I didn’t talk much for the first few minutes, holding the memories of the echoing hymns close to the chest until the real world intruded too far and I was forced to return to the practicality of what to do next. So we decided to get gelato, of course, moving up the street on the side of the Pantheon to a famous gelateria that had over 100 flavors. Already having maxed out my gelato quota for the day, I opted for some gummis instead, but Scott, Chris and Jess all got some, and let me try a bit as we meandered our way over to the Trevi Fountain.
The Trevi fountain looked even more lovely in the fading light of the afternoon, the water bubbling out of the niches, supervised closely by the imposing figure of Triton, striding over the rocks on the backs of fierce dolphins. It was not nearly as mobbed as it was the day that Lily and I visited, and we had less of a problem getting down to the water this time. I threw in another coin, a fervent wish to return to Rome again, and we stood gazing at the burbling water before we finally walked back to the nearet metro, and returned to the hotel, just in time to share our experiences with the group. Some folks had gone to the Opera that night, and told us their stories about how it was. We hung out for a while, talking and comparing notes before turning in.
The next day was a long travel day; we had to take the metro all of the way out of Rome to Ostia, which was the ancient Roman harbor. The shoreline has silted up since then, and Ostia Antica is a good few kilometers inland from the beach now, but we spotted lots of Europeans in their bathing attire, headed out to the beach. We all listened to our iPods or read as the train sped out of the city and into the rolling hills, before dropping us off in a wooded park complete with fragmented walls and scattered marble.
Ostia was a huge town in antiquity—virtually every good that went to Rome went through the port first, and two emperors carved harbors directly out of the earth—Claudius digging a shallow one that turned out to be very dangerous for the ships, and Trajan digging a regular hexagonal harbor that was much deeper and more sheltered, protecting the ships from the wind and waves that turned the other harbor into a graveyard.
The town contained a large number of public baths, including the Baths of Neptune, a large complex with some wonderful black and white mosaics with the god leading a quartet of horses, mermaids and dolphins arcing in the white tesserae. We walked around the fragments of walls that surrounded the mosaics, climbing up to view them from the top, and coming around and down to walk amongst the walls.
Then we were off, to the next place—the barracks of the firemen. It was growing hot, and the red bricks rose up to our necks and surrounded us. Jarrett gave us an assignment, to figure out what the function of the building was, so we spread out, walking in and out of ancient rooms, peering over walls and through windows, some of us deciphering inscriptions set into ancient blocks of marble. I entered a curious room with high brick walls and a floor completely surrounded on four sides by a deeply cut channel about a foot wide, the rest of the floor rising up in an island around it. Underneath was a tunnel, presumably to lead the water from wherever it was to here, and walking back along the narrow paths to the wide open space where we started the trip, we noticed tall cisterns for water and a set of steps decorated with marble and littered with what looked like statue bases.
Jarrett told us that this was, indeed, a barracks that surrounded a central courtyard, and the curious appearance of all of the water was so that the community firemen could practice putting out fires. The set of steps and marble decoration facing onto the courtyard was a small shrine to the emperor, and there were in addition two sets of toilets, one public and one private. Evidently the firemen were kind of a big deal in antiquity.
And as the day wore on, we saw many of the areas of the ancient town. We saw what amounted to an ancient shopping mall—the so-called Piazzali de la Corporazoni, an open square lined with stalls for everything from ropemakers to fruit sellers. Each of the shop types was indicated by the image inlaid in mosaic in the floor. At the back of this square was a theater, a small one dedicated by Caracalla and so inscribed in a huge plaque on the sides of the seating area. We stopped there for lunch, and when we were finished, the bravest of us ventured down to the stage to enact something for the benefit of everyone there. Katie went down and read a selection of The Wasteland, by TS Eliot, and Sam graced us with a song, sung with much reluctance but sung well.
After the break, we took a brief stop by the Mithraeum, the site of a mystery cult in the Roman empire, one centering on this eastern sun god, who was worshipped in a cave like setting by the sharing of a ritual meal among his followers. The walls of this strange temple were bounded by low seating, and the far end contained a carved medallion with the god himself, cloak flying behind him, surrounded on one side by a great bull.
Finally, we visited an ancient taverna and the Roman version of a tenement building—evidence for city housing, buildings several stories high surrounding a communal courtyard and garden, before, tired and more than a little sunburned, we took a long walk back to the metro station and endured a rather unpleasant hot and sweaty ride back to Rome. Stewart and I and Scott all got off at the Spanish Steps—I had lost my pair of sandals a while back and my feet were screaming for air, so we found a Northface store and I bought a pair of turqoise flip flops and Scott a pair of heavier sandals with several straps. He was so happy about his purchase that I think he sung the whole way home.
We still got home when it was light outside, so I decided to combat the worst of my fatigue by going for a run, venturing out of the hotel and to a nearby park and villa, complete with an art museum (which I did not visit in my sweaty state, but would have liked to), a crumbling romantic temple-like structure, an obelisk, and sweeping hills of vegetation. I ran around this park for a while, weaving up and down the paths and in and out of groups of people lounging in the late afternoon cool. I greeted other runners on the paths, happy to finally see exercising Europeans, a rarity over here. It felt great to be doing something athletic again, and my run was further extended when I got a little bit lost on the way home and ended jogging over to the next stop on the metro before realizing that I was heading the wrong direction and turning around, getting back to the hotel much later than I said I would picnic.
Still, I managed to have a great little salad for dinner, and Ambrice and Chris and Jess Bradshaw and Jess Eisenberg and I chatted for a long time about the trip and how close it was to being over, surprised that all our travels would come to an end soon, but happy that the madness would end as well. Being in such a small group with such an eccentric professor for so long is never easy. And then I had a much needed, but wonderful shower, before reading more of my new Caravaggio book and heading off to bed.
I had meant to go to bed early to get a bunch of sleep before the Vatican the next day, but Jess Bradshaw ended up coming in and talking to me for a long time, and when she left I was almost settled into sleep, but Katie, who I was rooming with, came in and we ended up having a long heart to heart until my answers faded to grunts and then to whispers and silence.
Rome, Italy
Yesterday was another longish day for us, and I think that everyone is starting to get burned out with all of the traveling, the crowds and the heat. I could not focus at all wherever we went and only recovered in time to go to the mass last night at the Pantheon, which was fortunate because I would have sincerely regretted only being half awake at that experience.
During the day we went to the Imperial Forum, which was a series of public spaces added under Caesar and later emperors to expand public space in the center of the city. Unfortunately, most of it is now covered by the modern road plowed through by Mussolini, looking for a way to link the Colosseum at the end of a big road to the other great monuments of the city, and obliterated everything in his way. As a result, the forums might have columns or walls here and there on either side of the huge road, but not much else.
On the opposite end of the forum was the other famous column of the Roman period, the Column of Trajan, upon which the column of Marcus Aurelius is modeled, with smaller and lower bands of relief showing his two greatest campaigns against the barbarians. The column was originally topped with a statue of Trajan himself, but in the later periods this was replaced with a bronze of some saint or another, which still exists today. Some of the bottom was encased in scaffolding, but the building itself was quite impressive—a massive width and a huge white shaft standing high above all of the other buildings in the remains of the forum. We walked around this column, down into the one part of the forum that was still preserved: a honeycomb of arches and vaults all done in brick.
This part of the forum was actually called Trajan’s Markets, and although it abutted the forum, in antiquity it did not actually connect. However, the walls separating the more commercial parts of the forum from the rest of the place have since fallen in, revealing a massive hemicycle of brick facing. The Markets look like an inverted Colosseum—several stories of arched colonnades looking outward from a concave curve—over 150 shops carved out of the side of the hill on the back of the forum. This structure was huge and very impressive—we got to walk inside the tall arched vaulting and admire the uniform rows of brick work as it swung around in a massive arc. It was cool on the inside, and the shops, now long empty, stood barren and shadowed in the early afternoon light.
It was around 2:00, and I was so tired I could barely keep one foot in front of the other. After the presentation had finished on the markets, I walked over on the other side of the forum to inspect an exhibition that I had considered visiting, one on Marc Chagall, a 20th century artist. However, the cost of the museum was incredibly high, and I was so tired that I knew I would be unable to appreciate the artwork, however fine it was. So, I decided to walk back toward the Colosseum to take the metro home.
I arrived back at the hotel just in time to watch an episode of Desperate Housewives and catch up a little bit on my blog (as you can see by the lateness of this entry, I am still way behind), and tried to take a nap. Just as I was about to nod off, Jess Eisenberg excitedly burst into the room, panting from the effort to get there in time, and asked if everyone had left to go to the mass in the Pantehon. Since I was planning on going, I replied that no, everyone had not, and after struggling to rise to my feet, I put back on my shoes, grabbed a scarf to cover my shoulders, and walked into the hall, where Vincoli and Scott were waiting. We took the number 84 bus as close as we could get to the Pantheon, and walked the rest of the way there, racing the clock to arrive on time.
But arrive we did, coming into the plaza just in time to stop and appreciate the weathered façade of the great building, the portico with its immortal insciption of Marcus Agrippa across the top, and the massive widely spaced columns leading into a huge door that opened onto the even bigger space of the dome, lavishly enriched with the marble that the outside completely lacked—all fancy stone had been stripped sometime in the middle ages, leaving the rough brick on the rotunda, and a series of holes—puncture wounds, on the pediment of the porch where the statues used to be.
We walked through the slanting afternoon light and the bustling noise of the street before coming into the relative calm of the Pantheon, still swarming with tourists. We took our seats in the folding chairs past the ropes, and settled in to wait until the mass began. The mass itself was long but very beautiful, conducted completely in Italian and Latin, so none of us understood much, but the magic of the moment and of the place struck us all. I looked around at the beautiful statuary and the magnificent dome, unsurpassed in its scope and majesty, and when the priest began to sing series after series of arpeggioed hallelujahs I could not help but feel moved.
We all emerged from the mass feeling incredibly elated, and stepped out from that sanctuary back into the real world. I wanted to let the feeling stay with me, so I didn’t talk much for the first few minutes, holding the memories of the echoing hymns close to the chest until the real world intruded too far and I was forced to return to the practicality of what to do next. So we decided to get gelato, of course, moving up the street on the side of the Pantheon to a famous gelateria that had over 100 flavors. Already having maxed out my gelato quota for the day, I opted for some gummis instead, but Scott, Chris and Jess all got some, and let me try a bit as we meandered our way over to the Trevi Fountain.
The Trevi fountain looked even more lovely in the fading light of the afternoon, the water bubbling out of the niches, supervised closely by the imposing figure of Triton, striding over the rocks on the backs of fierce dolphins. It was not nearly as mobbed as it was the day that Lily and I visited, and we had less of a problem getting down to the water this time. I threw in another coin, a fervent wish to return to Rome again, and we stood gazing at the burbling water before we finally walked back to the nearet metro, and returned to the hotel, just in time to share our experiences with the group. Some folks had gone to the Opera that night, and told us their stories about how it was. We hung out for a while, talking and comparing notes before turning in.
The next day was a long travel day; we had to take the metro all of the way out of Rome to Ostia, which was the ancient Roman harbor. The shoreline has silted up since then, and Ostia Antica is a good few kilometers inland from the beach now, but we spotted lots of Europeans in their bathing attire, headed out to the beach. We all listened to our iPods or read as the train sped out of the city and into the rolling hills, before dropping us off in a wooded park complete with fragmented walls and scattered marble.
Ostia was a huge town in antiquity—virtually every good that went to Rome went through the port first, and two emperors carved harbors directly out of the earth—Claudius digging a shallow one that turned out to be very dangerous for the ships, and Trajan digging a regular hexagonal harbor that was much deeper and more sheltered, protecting the ships from the wind and waves that turned the other harbor into a graveyard.
The town contained a large number of public baths, including the Baths of Neptune, a large complex with some wonderful black and white mosaics with the god leading a quartet of horses, mermaids and dolphins arcing in the white tesserae. We walked around the fragments of walls that surrounded the mosaics, climbing up to view them from the top, and coming around and down to walk amongst the walls.
Then we were off, to the next place—the barracks of the firemen. It was growing hot, and the red bricks rose up to our necks and surrounded us. Jarrett gave us an assignment, to figure out what the function of the building was, so we spread out, walking in and out of ancient rooms, peering over walls and through windows, some of us deciphering inscriptions set into ancient blocks of marble. I entered a curious room with high brick walls and a floor completely surrounded on four sides by a deeply cut channel about a foot wide, the rest of the floor rising up in an island around it. Underneath was a tunnel, presumably to lead the water from wherever it was to here, and walking back along the narrow paths to the wide open space where we started the trip, we noticed tall cisterns for water and a set of steps decorated with marble and littered with what looked like statue bases.
Jarrett told us that this was, indeed, a barracks that surrounded a central courtyard, and the curious appearance of all of the water was so that the community firemen could practice putting out fires. The set of steps and marble decoration facing onto the courtyard was a small shrine to the emperor, and there were in addition two sets of toilets, one public and one private. Evidently the firemen were kind of a big deal in antiquity.
And as the day wore on, we saw many of the areas of the ancient town. We saw what amounted to an ancient shopping mall—the so-called Piazzali de la Corporazoni, an open square lined with stalls for everything from ropemakers to fruit sellers. Each of the shop types was indicated by the image inlaid in mosaic in the floor. At the back of this square was a theater, a small one dedicated by Caracalla and so inscribed in a huge plaque on the sides of the seating area. We stopped there for lunch, and when we were finished, the bravest of us ventured down to the stage to enact something for the benefit of everyone there. Katie went down and read a selection of The Wasteland, by TS Eliot, and Sam graced us with a song, sung with much reluctance but sung well.
After the break, we took a brief stop by the Mithraeum, the site of a mystery cult in the Roman empire, one centering on this eastern sun god, who was worshipped in a cave like setting by the sharing of a ritual meal among his followers. The walls of this strange temple were bounded by low seating, and the far end contained a carved medallion with the god himself, cloak flying behind him, surrounded on one side by a great bull.
Finally, we visited an ancient taverna and the Roman version of a tenement building—evidence for city housing, buildings several stories high surrounding a communal courtyard and garden, before, tired and more than a little sunburned, we took a long walk back to the metro station and endured a rather unpleasant hot and sweaty ride back to Rome. Stewart and I and Scott all got off at the Spanish Steps—I had lost my pair of sandals a while back and my feet were screaming for air, so we found a Northface store and I bought a pair of turqoise flip flops and Scott a pair of heavier sandals with several straps. He was so happy about his purchase that I think he sung the whole way home.
We still got home when it was light outside, so I decided to combat the worst of my fatigue by going for a run, venturing out of the hotel and to a nearby park and villa, complete with an art museum (which I did not visit in my sweaty state, but would have liked to), a crumbling romantic temple-like structure, an obelisk, and sweeping hills of vegetation. I ran around this park for a while, weaving up and down the paths and in and out of groups of people lounging in the late afternoon cool. I greeted other runners on the paths, happy to finally see exercising Europeans, a rarity over here. It felt great to be doing something athletic again, and my run was further extended when I got a little bit lost on the way home and ended jogging over to the next stop on the metro before realizing that I was heading the wrong direction and turning around, getting back to the hotel much later than I said I would picnic.
Still, I managed to have a great little salad for dinner, and Ambrice and Chris and Jess Bradshaw and Jess Eisenberg and I chatted for a long time about the trip and how close it was to being over, surprised that all our travels would come to an end soon, but happy that the madness would end as well. Being in such a small group with such an eccentric professor for so long is never easy. And then I had a much needed, but wonderful shower, before reading more of my new Caravaggio book and heading off to bed.
I had meant to go to bed early to get a bunch of sleep before the Vatican the next day, but Jess Bradshaw ended up coming in and talking to me for a long time, and when she left I was almost settled into sleep, but Katie, who I was rooming with, came in and we ended up having a long heart to heart until my answers faded to grunts and then to whispers and silence.
Sunday, April 22, 2007
The Forum, the Pantheon, the Colosseum
April 20, 2007
Rome, Italy
The past few days have been totally exhilarating but completely exhausting at the same time. We have been to the Forum, the Colosseum, and the Pantheon, and done tons and tons of walking around the city, seeing a lot of the sights and doing tons and tons of exploring. This is why I have been pretty lax in updating the blog, I have been so busy seeing everything that I fall asleep on my reading before midnight. Its been tough to keep up with everything in Rome, the more I see the more I want to see it all, and we are only here a week. This is definitely a city I would love to come back to, but in the meantime I am going to spend as much time as possible seeing what I can see with the limited time I have.
Two days ago was Day 2 of the Forum, where we got to see the later monuments, ones that were still in fairly good condition. It was a long, busy busy day and it was super hot by the late afternoon. We sat in the sun and baked, getting funny backpack strap tan lines as we wandered around through the tumbled bricks and bits of columns in the center of the old city. We started out at the arch of Trajan, which arches over the Via Sacra, the triumphal procession for most of the religious festivals in the city. It is only a single arch, somewhat less elaborate than the more famous Arch of Constantine but no less impressive in its decoration. The most famous part of this arch is a frieze on the interior, where the spoils from the sack of Jerusalem, including a huge menorah held above the soldiers as they turn to head toward the interior of the arch itself.
Then it was up that ceremonial road and to the Forum itself. We walked through the brick ruins of arches and columns until we reached the far side, which backed right up to the Capitoline Hill, from which I had seen the hail storm the previous day. Backing onto the hill were three temples, the remains of which varied from a full set of colonnades on the porch to at the very least a tufa (a type of volcanic stone that the Romans were fond of using for the cores of their buildings) and concrete mound indicating a temple platform. The farthest of these, and the least well preserved was the temple of Concordia Augusta, “imperial harmony,” erected under the reign of Trajan in the early 1st centuries AD, and consisted of an oddly shaped cella, wider than it was long, fronted by a narrower porch that projected out from the hill into the forum proper. This temple also doubled as a speakers platform, and was colonnaded, but all of it has been lost to medieval and renaissance stone scavengers. To the side of this was another temple, the temple to Vespasian, erected after the emperor’s death by Caracalla, some 200 years later and wedged in between the temple of Concordia and the much older temple of Saturn on the other side.
This temple was better preserved, but not by much: three lonely columns, the corners of the porch in white marble, the details picked out with the dark stain of time, standing on a much humbler platform. The entablature above the columns still contains some degree of decoration—objects of sacrifice, ram’s skulls, knives, jars, etc….
The temple that is best preserved on that side is the temple of Saturn, a much older one than the other two and completely constructed of this stuff called spolia—bits and pieces of other monuments appropriated and incorporated in to this one. Mostly the stuff stolen is the huge monolithic column capitals, made up of a reddish type of marble and mushed together from fallen parts. Some of them have clear lines where two broken pieces of column have been stitched together to form anew. However, the re-use seems to have been largely successful, the porch stands completely intact, a collonade that embraces the empty sky instead of the cella of the temple which should have existed behind it. According to legend, the cult of Saturn was a very old and very strange one in the empire, one associated with crop farming and fertility, in which an old statue of the god would remain with his feet tied with wool every part of the year except for during the Saturnalia festival, when his feet would finally come untied. Jarrett seemed to indicate that bizarre stuff like this was about par for the course for the Romans, who liked to do strange inexplicable things for their religion.
In any event, we moved on to look at the arch of Septimius Severus, which was constructed in the 3rd C AD and from which Constantine closely modeled his arch by the Colosseum. This is a more elaborate triple arch, and is elaborately sculptured. Unlike the Greeks, who liked to show more mythological scenes of battles, the Romans wanted to show their own victories and their conquests, here the many scenes show the emperor himself going out to fight the barbarian hordes. The Romans, ever successful, mowed down the barbarians and commemorated their victories by memorializing the defeat of their enemies, placing them under the feet of the conquering monarch, thoroughly subdued.
Then we moved on, out of that small part of the forum and into the larger area, a place where a single column stood proudly against the sky. This was the column of Phocas, erected by one of his supporters in honor of Phocas’ supposed greatness, when in actuality Phocas himself was somewhat of a barbarian, a military commander who took power that was not quite his and who was disposed of rather quickly.
Then we kept going, to the sides of the forum where stood a great Basilica of Julia, pressed into another one of the hills surrounding the forum, a series of squat brick arches sat in a row, surrounding a courtyard with a huge peristyle. Basilicas in the Roman period were not churches as we now think of them, although they generally retain the three aisled shape that the Christians would later appropriate and add an apse at the end of. The basilica in the Roman period was used for law courts and meeting places, this particular basilica was primarily used as a law court dealing with inheritance and wills. The brick arches and apses we saw now are the results of years and years of stone pillaging. The basilica was originally huge, and while the remains are quite impressive now, I can only imagine what it would have been like in its heyday.
On the opposite side from the Julian basilica was another basilica, of which much less remains, only the scattered pieces of a few marble columns. However, next to it is a building almost fully constructed of a rough brick core. This was called the Curia, the place where the senate would meet and vote. We could not go inside, but Jarrett told us that inside could be found a ring of seats for each of the senators, and voting would take place by moving to one or another side of the big room. The outside was rather plain, originally stuccoed and colonnaded on the exterior, leading up to a massive set of iron clad doors, and three windows above brought light and air into the space.
But we had more to see, so we moved on to the center of the forum itself, where a temple and an altar to Julius Caesar once stood, and where after his assassination in 44 BC, the funeral procession carrying his body rioted and burned him on the spot in the middle of the forum. Nothing really remains except for the greyed remains of a tufa and concrete platform and three columns, standing alone on the tops of the platform. Just in front was the semicircular remains of the altar, which was erected over the spot where Caesar was burned. The sun by now was blazing and we were getting warm and impatient to move on. We kept walking, coming to the nearby temple of Castor and Pollux, a cult imported from the Greeks, which was imported to Rome after the mysterious images of the twins were seen simultaneously at a battle field and in the forum itself. So, the temple was erected, the same type we have seen all over the place—with a steep staircase, a high platform, and a deep porch with embedded walls around the outside of the cella.
We kept going, past the temple remains and into the best preserved part of the forum, the sanctuary of the vestal virgins, which stood—a few curved walls and columns on top of that typical platform that we have become so familiar with. The vestal virgins were a special class of women in Rome, chosen at a young age to keep the sacred flame of Vesta permanently lit. These virgins had special privelages, they could get front seats at the gladiator games, and could ride carriages throughout the city, where no one else could. In return, they lived in this special precinct just off of the forum and were kept segregated from the rest of society… all that now remains are the few walls and the columns at the very end of the forum.
And again, away from the open space of the forum, to the Temple of Antoninus Pius and Faustina, a church that was converted from an earlier temple—brick faced with marble columns on the porch, elaborately carved and inscribed with the names of the emperor and his wife. And then on and on, to another temple, this one different from the rest—a circular central hall with a series of doors framed by purple marble columns, the marble exterior missing but the door frame elaborately wrought with egg and dart moulding, and the spolia of the columns fitted to the doorframe with the help of a little marble padding. This was one of my favorite temples, because it was different from all of the others—a circle instead of the tall squares that filled up the rest of the forum. This temple was called the Temple of Romulus, not the one of Roman antiquity, but the temple of the deified son of the emperor Maxentius, constructed in the 4th C AD, although all of the marble parts date from some time earlier.
The last stop of the day was at the so-called New Basilica, begun by Maxentius and finished by Constantine himself. It was huge, a vaulted space with arches 35 meters high, lit from above by a clerestory of windows and arched collonade around the exterior of the building. Although nothing now remains of the marble veneering that originally covered the interior in its multitude of colors, the brick still left with some of the coffered patterns in the ceiling, incised hexagons that retreat back into the huge arches over head. Although only one side of this originally huge building remains, it was so impressive to see, I could not believe how much went into the construction of such a buiding. And to think that Constantine constructed it just in time to move the capital to Byzantium is even more astounding, it would have stood as a functional law court for only a few years before being abandoned for the new capital.
And we were done, ready to go but eager to explore more of Rome itself. Jess Dwyer and I decided to go to the Villa Borgese, another of Rome’s fine art museums, one that contains a number of Renaissance works including paintings by Raphael, Caravaggio, and tons and tons of sculptures, Apollo and Daphne, a lounging lady, a faun… all of it was set in a magnificent park and garden area which led to a white neoclassical building, the inside of which was marbled and gilded and every ceiling was covered with a fabulous painting of mythology. We could only stay for about an hour, but we made the most of the time, wandering through the magnificent halls and staring in wonder at everything before us. It was one of the best museum experiences I have had yet, and if it didn’t cost so much to enter the museum I would definitely go back. Perhaps the next time (hopefully) I am in Rome I can come and appreciate the wonders of the Villa. Even the grounds were beautiful, well landscaped with winding paths through the trees and fountains sending up shoots of water into the bright sky.
But we eventually had to head back, it was Jess Eisenberg’s birthday so we all went out to dinner, taking the metro to the Spanish Steps and having a very nice, but very expensive dinner there. We all enjoyed ourselves, talking a whole bunch and relaxing, before heading back to the hotel before I headed to Vincoli and Scott’s room to watch Gladiator, again, stopping where the scenes flew over a construction of the city and pausing to try to identify the buildings…. Such a dorky/classics kid move! And we got sucked into watching the whole thing, talking about Roman history and books and such until it got way too late and we went to bed.
I also in that time converted a pair of jeans I had ripped into a skirt, which I was really excited about wearing, and I got to showcase the next day, which I greatly enjoyed.
The next day was another one of the WOW days, the very first thing we saw was one of the most famous pieces of ancient art in Rome, the Ara Pacis. This building is most famous for its intricate reliefs, and was constructed by Augstus in commemoration of a triumphal return into the city, after winning another huge battle campaign. We took the metro to the Piazza de Spagna and walked past all of the designer shops to get there, until we came upon the back side of the altar, framed by a modern white and widely windowed modernist building. Through the huge panes of glass we could see the tendrils of stone curving around the walls of the altar, and above the processional collonade of the emperor and his attendants, lit in bars by the shades high overhead. It was a beautiful building to house another beautiful building, and we stepped inside the light glass structure to contemplate the brilliant white marble carved altar.
The Ara Pacis is an altar dedicated to peace, and the altar part itself is enclosed in a delicate curtain wall of marble, decorated on the bottom register by an elaborate floral decoration, vines and florals in elaborate spirals, flanked by flying swans and enlivened with all kinds of insects and lizards, peeking out of the foliage. The upper portion, however, is the most famous. On the short sides it has one of the first depictions of Roma, an amazon warrior queen who sits majestically on top of the spoils of war, and on another side Pax, the incarnation of peace who lounged back in regal style, holding two children and flanked by the elements of nature. These scenes are done in excellent shallow relief; the drapery swirls about these lovely women in their Olympian calm, very reminiscent of the Parthenonian sculpture, and they watch as the worshipper passes through the marble palisade to sacrifice upon the altar itself. Another short side contains figures of heroic men—Aeneas, the mythological founder of Rome, together with Ulus, the founder of the Julian line, and a fourth panel with the mythological figure of Mars, both of the male figures impressive in their strength and their majesty. However, on the long sides of the curtain wall are a series of figures in procession, including the emperor himself and his right hand man Agrippa, interspersed with high priests and women, children looking on as the procession for the dedication of the altar wound itself permanently in stone around the altar.
We finally finished our tour of the outside, and entered the middle, where a mock palisade erected itself in stone, topped with garlands of vines and objects of sacrifice. The altar itself was rather plain, but the top contained a very small delicate frieze of sacrificial processions and at the very top scrolled volutes flanked by heraldic lions. It was a wonderful thing to see, lit by the bright morning sky streaming in through the tall windows, and set up on a marble platform so that we could move all around and through it, appreciating the altar from every angle.
The basement contained a small art gallery with photographs, and the view out of the modern building looked out to a square with 16th and 17th century churches, brick and marble and scrolled, while this white spare and glassed museum sat holding one of the finest pieces of some of Rome’s earliest history. The juxtaposition of it all was impressive, and the museum itself was very well designed, the architect’s name is Richard Meyer, and I intend to find out more about him. He seems to have done a lot of museums, well versed in guiding people through and around a visual space, which is an idea that intrigues me. My thoughts about the Ara Pacis were definitely enhanced by the spare, clean, and well lit space that he provided for it…
On the other side of the gleaming white museum, was an old moss and brick cylinder, sunk several meters into the ground and completely covered in shrubs and trees, the grizzled counterpart to the marble and steel and glass austerity of the Ara Pacis and its museum. This was the mausoleum of Augustus, constructed around the same time as his shining altar but looking completely different. Because much of the upper sections have disappeared and been overgrown, it is difficult to reconstruct, but contained the burials of many members of Augustus’ family, and may have been modeled on the huge tholos tombs that Macedonians like the much-admired Alexander the Great might have used.
In the pavement in front, faint etchings in the stone show plans for another huge monument in antiquity, the Pantheon. Apparently Roman architects and engineers used whatever open pavement space was available to scratch their flooplans, leaving a much more durable set of blueprints than would have been found. We found them—small shadows in triangles and rectangles in the sidewalk, outlining the plans for the pediment of that grand building that we would see later that day.
And we were off, to the next monuments, moving to an area of Rome called the Campus Martias—a flat low lying field where the army would drill, but was later used to hold public assemblies and a number of important monuments.
Moving through the bustling modern city, we would stumble upon glimpses back in time—an obelisk in the middle of a piazza, containing the hieroglyphs from when it was stolen from Egypt, topped by a bronze globe from where it was converted by Augustus into a huge sundial and calendar, laid out in bronze and travertine in a huge public square. However, the obelisk was set on insufficient foundations, and in the swampy area of the campus it began to tilt, so much so that Domitian repaved and rebuilt the foundations, where it remained until its collapse in the medieval period. Roman engineering like this impresses me—they could predict seasons, the day, and the time by the lines in bronze cast by the old needle of stone.
And we were off, to the next part of the ancient city, to the column of Marcus Aurelius, set into one of the biggest commercial streets of Rome, backed by a huge mall on one side and a number of shops on the other. This column has also been set on new foundations, to make up for the rise in ground level since the area has been continuously inhabited for hundreds and hundreds of years. The Column of Marcus Aurelius is carved in a spiral pattern to the top where the figures become intelligible and dissolve into blobs of light and shadow at the neck craning height of 29 meters, which is close to 100 feet. The reliefs themselves show the emperor’s campaigns against the barbarian hordes, fighting and surrendering, up the length of the whole block of stone. Interestingly enough, the interior of the column is not of solid stone, but has a staircase pierced here and there with windows at intervals until it reaches an observatory deck so many feet into the air. We could no longer go inside because the column drums have shifted place, but it seems like a pretty neat idea.
And then another tour de force—THE PANTHEON! We stopped in front of here for our lunch, and ate our peanut butter and jelly sandwiches watching the crowds swarm like ants over the base of the building. The building itself consists of two parts—a huge domed rotunda in the back, spanning the largest volume until it was surpassed sometime in the 18th century (I thought Hagia Sophia might have surpassed it, but I was wrong, this building is much much bigger inside), with a porch that looks very much like the front of a temple stuck onto it.
Apparently the porch was supposed to be much taller than it is now, but the columns for its construction could not make the long transit from Aswan, Egypt, and the Pantheon now contains not one set, but two sets of raking cornices, stacked atop one another like open books. Nonetheless, the play of geometry inside and outside the building is enough to leave our jaws hanging out of our mouths. Walking in the huge columns, which even at their short lengths towered high overhead, and entering the massive domed space was a religious experience in itself. The dome rises in a patterned series of coffers up to the oculus—a hole at the apex of the dome that let in light and sun. The Pantheon is so big that a little bit of rainfall in the 30 ft diameter hole does not make much of a difference; a few drains lead from the marble floor to get rid of any wetness on the floor, but the space is so big that it makes very little difference.
The inside is one huge play on geometry: niches of squares and circles alternate, separated by pairs of richly colored columns, above that a decorative motif and above another set of niches, all originally set with antique statuary, but now replaced with Renaissance era stuff as the building to all the gods was converted into a house of Christ. The ceiling is almost too perfect to be believed, a series of rectangles that rise up and up to the circle in the roof, from which a beam of light projected out onto the walls high above our heads. I just stood in awe, turning around and around, looking at this fabulous building, standing, an example of the genius of Roman engineering--- it has not been supported by anything in all of its long years of existence, where the Parthenon, Hagia Sophia, and so many temples we have seen have been buttressed by ugly imposing scaffolding. The inside looks pristine, blocks of marble in different shapes, the front apse gilded and erected with an altar, where masses are still held.
Rahael is buried here, and Vittorio Emmanuel, one of the princes of Italy, and the building has captured the imaginations of so many for years and years. Its easy to see why.
Everything else that day seemed to fade in comparison. We kept walking through the city, stopping at the baths of Agrippa, the first set of public baths erected, with very little remaining besides the curved arches of brick projecting from modern office buildings, and on to what was once the Stadium of Domitian, erected by the huge hellenophile in his attempt to bring a 5th festival to the Panhellenic cycle, that of the Capitoline Games. Unfortunately for him, the Romans were too prudish about the notion of athletic nudity to embrace the games, and the stadium was probably just left until a use could be found for the big space. It still remains preserved in the city fabric, however much the actual building is missing, because it forms the outer edges of the Piazza Navona, one of the more famous piazzas in Italy, ringed by beautiful sandy colored buildings and punctuated by a fabulous fountain in the center.
The other things we saw the rest of the day were much the same—a curve in the road where the Theater of Pompey used to be—the place where Caesar was stabbed in 44 BC, now just another glitch in Rome’s ever so curvy road system. The Odeion of Domitian was the same, a rapid turn in the building and a single standing column and we were at the site of another of his great building projects.
And we were finally finished! Hungry and tired, but still wanting to see the city, Katie and I broke up from the rapidly disappearing group and set out ourselves to find some English language bookshops I had identified in the area. The first, by the Piazza Navona, was stacked at random with tons and tons of volumes that we had a great time sorting through, and then we walked along the Piazza of St Augustine and ran into a gem. The small bookshop was crammed with boxes and stacks of books, with space barely wide enough for one person to fit between, and realizing that there was no way to really browse, we asked the bookkeeper, a young woman with limited, accented English if there were any books in our language. When she said no, Katie asked if there were any in Latin and was rewarded to come upon a number of leather bound volumes, stamped with the SPQR that denoted “the Senate and the Roman people” with the classics in Latin and Italian. Best of all these books were old, so much that the title pages looked like woodblocks picked out in red and black, and some of the pages had to be cut with scissors to be read. Katie and I were enthralled—she started hopping up and down in the limited space that we had, her big eyes completely aglow. After much deliberation, she settled on Cicero, I think, and we left the store with huge smiles on our faces.
Across the street we happened on a small gallery exhibiting early German woodcuts, and some more obscure works by Klimt, and we both perused the gallery, still hopped up on our fabulous book finds, and impressed by what we had seen. Then we continued on, finding a huge English language bookstore called, appropriately enough, the Anglo American Bookshop, where we browsed until they almost closed the shop on us and bought a book—I bought one called The Lost Painting, which deals in the quest for a missing Caravaggio masterpiece, although I was tempted by many others.
That night, Katie and I had a very nice picnic—tuna-apple-carrot-salad, before talking about how wonderful our book hunt had been, and went to bed. These days are so full I was definitely asleep before the clock struck midnight.
But today was no less exciting! We got to see the Colosseum today, and many other cool monuments, this time on the Palatine Hill, which stands overlooking the Circus Maximus and in the imperial period contained some of the biggest and most elaborate palaces in all of Rome. Unfortunately, there is not much to see anymore, besides scattered concrete and tufa temple podiums, broken, decayed walls, and tantalizing remnants of what might have been. Some of the stuff that WAS still there had been closed for the day, leaving us to peer at the gates that blocked our entrance and grind our teeth in frustration.
We did, however, see the most important complex on the Palatine, the Palace of Domitian. This sprawling space was separated by a series of oblong fountained and forested courtyards, each one more private than the next, marked out by patches of green grass and low walls of brick. In places we could see where the walls reached all of the way up to the next level, making the huge audience halls, but elsewhere the Palace completely faded into the grass and it was up to our imaginations to reconstruct what must have been quite impressive. On the far side of one of the courtyards, the so-called “hippodrome” due to its similarity in shape contained a deep set apse, radical shadows picked out by the late morning sun, with walls extending at least three levels down into a vast open space. Moving to the last courtyard we could see two levels of apartments that all looked onto a long rather oblong space, complicated by a fountain in the center. From the far side of this courtyard, in the blazing heat, we could look out to the actual hippodrome, the Circus Maximus, spreading out below us. Like the Stadium of Domitian, not much remains except the outline in the fabric of the city, in this case preserved in the form of a long narrow grassy park.
And then we were off of the Palatine Hill, through the cool fountained air and the shade where the palaces have been coopted by the Papal families and turned into a garden, romantic with the nostalgia for a Rome in the overgrown columns of ancient grandeur. But neither the cool nor the shade were to last, it was out into the blazing sun and dust of the Piazza del Coloseo, and the Arch of Constantine.
This arch is the one that makes it into all of the history books, both because of its size and complexity in decoration, and because almost none of the complexity is concurrent with its financier. Constantine pillaged, (or if you prefer a less negative point of view, recycled) bits and pieces of other monuments, probably a number of friezes from a bygone Arch of Marcus Aurelius, and others from a monument to Hadrian. The mismash of styles and scenes all have the pervading theme of warfare, and glory to the emperor—all emperor’s heads later modified to resemble Constantine, of course. It is a triple arch, each side enhanced by borrowed columns topped with the figures of bound captives, and the entire thing is sculpted in and out with figures of all periods.
Then it was on to the last, and the best event—the Colosseum. The Colosseum was originally flanked by a whole gladiatorial complex that included a smaller arena for training, barracks, and a big fountain. The arena itself takes its name from another surrounding monument, that of the Colossus of Nero, a statue that depicts the sun god with the emperor’s face and stood somewhere in the neighborhood of 120 Roman feet tall. The actual arena itself was called the Flavian Amphitheater, but it was colossal in its own right, with a seating capacity not to be surpassed in the ancient world, topping out at about 80,000 spectators at the greatest. It contains 4 tiers of arched colonnades, and entrace into the arena was regulated by four axial entrances, 2 reserved for entering and exiting gladiators, and the others for spectators. Elsewhere, at each of the 76 others, numbers and a type of token would regulate who sat where and how they got in. According to Jarrett, in the case of emergency the building could be cleared in as little as three minutes, a tribute to Roman efficiency in movement of personnel.
The four sections were divided along lines of class and rank, with the emperor and the vestal virgins each occupying special platforms in the stands, with high ranking senators closest to the action, equites, or knights next, and the lower classes up in the nosebleed sections at the top. It is a remarkable construction of brick and tufa, arched vaults providing all of its internal structuring, with a maze of passages underneath the floor itself to allow for the sudden appearance of beasts or fighters, enhancing the spectacle on the floor. Now it stands with its ribs exposed; all of the seats are missing and most of the lower levels of ceiling, leaving the arch fragments open to the sun. We moved into the outer ring of tall vaults, from which we could either go up or farther in, which we did, moving to where we could overlay the whole guts of the building, the bowl removed of its travertine seats and naked. After surveying the lower level, we went outwards and moved back up, to the second level to see the bowl from a greater height, even more impressed at the engineering skills of these ancient people. I myself would like to get my hands on some good plans of the Colosseum, as best it can be constructed, so I can look at how the movement of personnel was accomplished.
We walked around for a while, stopping to admire the Arch of Constantine and the remnants of the palace structures from our privelaged perch. We were dismissed from “class” that day at around five, but Vincoli and myself and Jarrett went over to the side of the Colosseum to see what was called the Ludus Magnus, the training ground for gladiators, where we could see the semi circle of stands hidden under the foundations of the modern street, and nearby the barracks for the gladiators, where they lived and trained in the shadow of the Colosseum, where so many of them would meet their deaths. As a last interesting note, I should mention that the Colosseum has been discovered to have a few underground tunnels, one leading directly from this training ground to the arena floor, another for the protected entrance and exit of the emperor, and a third, perhaps for the Vestal Virgins. Not unlike the way modern competitors are ushered into arenas, through separate, enclosed passages…
And spent, we returned to the hotel where I got some much needed down time. But we had also heard rumors about a potential opera that night, so at around 7 Vincoli, Scott and I ventured out into the city again, to the Piazza della Republica, only to find out that the opera in question was completely sold out. We made the most of it, wandering around the night-lit city, going to Santa Maria Maggiore, and a park with what looked like the remains of an old bath complex, now dedicated to Vittorio Emmanuel. Santa Maria Maggiore was quite impressive, we saw the back apse of it and moved around to the front where we could see the stepped series of columns and the broken façade, coming forward to embrace us where we stood in the darkening night. Behind the columns was a glittering mosaic, the golds picked out by artificial lights, and a wonderful surprise for us after the disappointment of the opera.
We returned to the hotel to sleep, too tired to do anything else. Rome is an exhausting, exhilarating, enchanting city.
Rome, Italy
The past few days have been totally exhilarating but completely exhausting at the same time. We have been to the Forum, the Colosseum, and the Pantheon, and done tons and tons of walking around the city, seeing a lot of the sights and doing tons and tons of exploring. This is why I have been pretty lax in updating the blog, I have been so busy seeing everything that I fall asleep on my reading before midnight. Its been tough to keep up with everything in Rome, the more I see the more I want to see it all, and we are only here a week. This is definitely a city I would love to come back to, but in the meantime I am going to spend as much time as possible seeing what I can see with the limited time I have.
Two days ago was Day 2 of the Forum, where we got to see the later monuments, ones that were still in fairly good condition. It was a long, busy busy day and it was super hot by the late afternoon. We sat in the sun and baked, getting funny backpack strap tan lines as we wandered around through the tumbled bricks and bits of columns in the center of the old city. We started out at the arch of Trajan, which arches over the Via Sacra, the triumphal procession for most of the religious festivals in the city. It is only a single arch, somewhat less elaborate than the more famous Arch of Constantine but no less impressive in its decoration. The most famous part of this arch is a frieze on the interior, where the spoils from the sack of Jerusalem, including a huge menorah held above the soldiers as they turn to head toward the interior of the arch itself.
Then it was up that ceremonial road and to the Forum itself. We walked through the brick ruins of arches and columns until we reached the far side, which backed right up to the Capitoline Hill, from which I had seen the hail storm the previous day. Backing onto the hill were three temples, the remains of which varied from a full set of colonnades on the porch to at the very least a tufa (a type of volcanic stone that the Romans were fond of using for the cores of their buildings) and concrete mound indicating a temple platform. The farthest of these, and the least well preserved was the temple of Concordia Augusta, “imperial harmony,” erected under the reign of Trajan in the early 1st centuries AD, and consisted of an oddly shaped cella, wider than it was long, fronted by a narrower porch that projected out from the hill into the forum proper. This temple also doubled as a speakers platform, and was colonnaded, but all of it has been lost to medieval and renaissance stone scavengers. To the side of this was another temple, the temple to Vespasian, erected after the emperor’s death by Caracalla, some 200 years later and wedged in between the temple of Concordia and the much older temple of Saturn on the other side.
This temple was better preserved, but not by much: three lonely columns, the corners of the porch in white marble, the details picked out with the dark stain of time, standing on a much humbler platform. The entablature above the columns still contains some degree of decoration—objects of sacrifice, ram’s skulls, knives, jars, etc….
The temple that is best preserved on that side is the temple of Saturn, a much older one than the other two and completely constructed of this stuff called spolia—bits and pieces of other monuments appropriated and incorporated in to this one. Mostly the stuff stolen is the huge monolithic column capitals, made up of a reddish type of marble and mushed together from fallen parts. Some of them have clear lines where two broken pieces of column have been stitched together to form anew. However, the re-use seems to have been largely successful, the porch stands completely intact, a collonade that embraces the empty sky instead of the cella of the temple which should have existed behind it. According to legend, the cult of Saturn was a very old and very strange one in the empire, one associated with crop farming and fertility, in which an old statue of the god would remain with his feet tied with wool every part of the year except for during the Saturnalia festival, when his feet would finally come untied. Jarrett seemed to indicate that bizarre stuff like this was about par for the course for the Romans, who liked to do strange inexplicable things for their religion.
In any event, we moved on to look at the arch of Septimius Severus, which was constructed in the 3rd C AD and from which Constantine closely modeled his arch by the Colosseum. This is a more elaborate triple arch, and is elaborately sculptured. Unlike the Greeks, who liked to show more mythological scenes of battles, the Romans wanted to show their own victories and their conquests, here the many scenes show the emperor himself going out to fight the barbarian hordes. The Romans, ever successful, mowed down the barbarians and commemorated their victories by memorializing the defeat of their enemies, placing them under the feet of the conquering monarch, thoroughly subdued.
Then we moved on, out of that small part of the forum and into the larger area, a place where a single column stood proudly against the sky. This was the column of Phocas, erected by one of his supporters in honor of Phocas’ supposed greatness, when in actuality Phocas himself was somewhat of a barbarian, a military commander who took power that was not quite his and who was disposed of rather quickly.
Then we kept going, to the sides of the forum where stood a great Basilica of Julia, pressed into another one of the hills surrounding the forum, a series of squat brick arches sat in a row, surrounding a courtyard with a huge peristyle. Basilicas in the Roman period were not churches as we now think of them, although they generally retain the three aisled shape that the Christians would later appropriate and add an apse at the end of. The basilica in the Roman period was used for law courts and meeting places, this particular basilica was primarily used as a law court dealing with inheritance and wills. The brick arches and apses we saw now are the results of years and years of stone pillaging. The basilica was originally huge, and while the remains are quite impressive now, I can only imagine what it would have been like in its heyday.
On the opposite side from the Julian basilica was another basilica, of which much less remains, only the scattered pieces of a few marble columns. However, next to it is a building almost fully constructed of a rough brick core. This was called the Curia, the place where the senate would meet and vote. We could not go inside, but Jarrett told us that inside could be found a ring of seats for each of the senators, and voting would take place by moving to one or another side of the big room. The outside was rather plain, originally stuccoed and colonnaded on the exterior, leading up to a massive set of iron clad doors, and three windows above brought light and air into the space.
But we had more to see, so we moved on to the center of the forum itself, where a temple and an altar to Julius Caesar once stood, and where after his assassination in 44 BC, the funeral procession carrying his body rioted and burned him on the spot in the middle of the forum. Nothing really remains except for the greyed remains of a tufa and concrete platform and three columns, standing alone on the tops of the platform. Just in front was the semicircular remains of the altar, which was erected over the spot where Caesar was burned. The sun by now was blazing and we were getting warm and impatient to move on. We kept walking, coming to the nearby temple of Castor and Pollux, a cult imported from the Greeks, which was imported to Rome after the mysterious images of the twins were seen simultaneously at a battle field and in the forum itself. So, the temple was erected, the same type we have seen all over the place—with a steep staircase, a high platform, and a deep porch with embedded walls around the outside of the cella.
We kept going, past the temple remains and into the best preserved part of the forum, the sanctuary of the vestal virgins, which stood—a few curved walls and columns on top of that typical platform that we have become so familiar with. The vestal virgins were a special class of women in Rome, chosen at a young age to keep the sacred flame of Vesta permanently lit. These virgins had special privelages, they could get front seats at the gladiator games, and could ride carriages throughout the city, where no one else could. In return, they lived in this special precinct just off of the forum and were kept segregated from the rest of society… all that now remains are the few walls and the columns at the very end of the forum.
And again, away from the open space of the forum, to the Temple of Antoninus Pius and Faustina, a church that was converted from an earlier temple—brick faced with marble columns on the porch, elaborately carved and inscribed with the names of the emperor and his wife. And then on and on, to another temple, this one different from the rest—a circular central hall with a series of doors framed by purple marble columns, the marble exterior missing but the door frame elaborately wrought with egg and dart moulding, and the spolia of the columns fitted to the doorframe with the help of a little marble padding. This was one of my favorite temples, because it was different from all of the others—a circle instead of the tall squares that filled up the rest of the forum. This temple was called the Temple of Romulus, not the one of Roman antiquity, but the temple of the deified son of the emperor Maxentius, constructed in the 4th C AD, although all of the marble parts date from some time earlier.
The last stop of the day was at the so-called New Basilica, begun by Maxentius and finished by Constantine himself. It was huge, a vaulted space with arches 35 meters high, lit from above by a clerestory of windows and arched collonade around the exterior of the building. Although nothing now remains of the marble veneering that originally covered the interior in its multitude of colors, the brick still left with some of the coffered patterns in the ceiling, incised hexagons that retreat back into the huge arches over head. Although only one side of this originally huge building remains, it was so impressive to see, I could not believe how much went into the construction of such a buiding. And to think that Constantine constructed it just in time to move the capital to Byzantium is even more astounding, it would have stood as a functional law court for only a few years before being abandoned for the new capital.
And we were done, ready to go but eager to explore more of Rome itself. Jess Dwyer and I decided to go to the Villa Borgese, another of Rome’s fine art museums, one that contains a number of Renaissance works including paintings by Raphael, Caravaggio, and tons and tons of sculptures, Apollo and Daphne, a lounging lady, a faun… all of it was set in a magnificent park and garden area which led to a white neoclassical building, the inside of which was marbled and gilded and every ceiling was covered with a fabulous painting of mythology. We could only stay for about an hour, but we made the most of the time, wandering through the magnificent halls and staring in wonder at everything before us. It was one of the best museum experiences I have had yet, and if it didn’t cost so much to enter the museum I would definitely go back. Perhaps the next time (hopefully) I am in Rome I can come and appreciate the wonders of the Villa. Even the grounds were beautiful, well landscaped with winding paths through the trees and fountains sending up shoots of water into the bright sky.
But we eventually had to head back, it was Jess Eisenberg’s birthday so we all went out to dinner, taking the metro to the Spanish Steps and having a very nice, but very expensive dinner there. We all enjoyed ourselves, talking a whole bunch and relaxing, before heading back to the hotel before I headed to Vincoli and Scott’s room to watch Gladiator, again, stopping where the scenes flew over a construction of the city and pausing to try to identify the buildings…. Such a dorky/classics kid move! And we got sucked into watching the whole thing, talking about Roman history and books and such until it got way too late and we went to bed.
I also in that time converted a pair of jeans I had ripped into a skirt, which I was really excited about wearing, and I got to showcase the next day, which I greatly enjoyed.
The next day was another one of the WOW days, the very first thing we saw was one of the most famous pieces of ancient art in Rome, the Ara Pacis. This building is most famous for its intricate reliefs, and was constructed by Augstus in commemoration of a triumphal return into the city, after winning another huge battle campaign. We took the metro to the Piazza de Spagna and walked past all of the designer shops to get there, until we came upon the back side of the altar, framed by a modern white and widely windowed modernist building. Through the huge panes of glass we could see the tendrils of stone curving around the walls of the altar, and above the processional collonade of the emperor and his attendants, lit in bars by the shades high overhead. It was a beautiful building to house another beautiful building, and we stepped inside the light glass structure to contemplate the brilliant white marble carved altar.
The Ara Pacis is an altar dedicated to peace, and the altar part itself is enclosed in a delicate curtain wall of marble, decorated on the bottom register by an elaborate floral decoration, vines and florals in elaborate spirals, flanked by flying swans and enlivened with all kinds of insects and lizards, peeking out of the foliage. The upper portion, however, is the most famous. On the short sides it has one of the first depictions of Roma, an amazon warrior queen who sits majestically on top of the spoils of war, and on another side Pax, the incarnation of peace who lounged back in regal style, holding two children and flanked by the elements of nature. These scenes are done in excellent shallow relief; the drapery swirls about these lovely women in their Olympian calm, very reminiscent of the Parthenonian sculpture, and they watch as the worshipper passes through the marble palisade to sacrifice upon the altar itself. Another short side contains figures of heroic men—Aeneas, the mythological founder of Rome, together with Ulus, the founder of the Julian line, and a fourth panel with the mythological figure of Mars, both of the male figures impressive in their strength and their majesty. However, on the long sides of the curtain wall are a series of figures in procession, including the emperor himself and his right hand man Agrippa, interspersed with high priests and women, children looking on as the procession for the dedication of the altar wound itself permanently in stone around the altar.
We finally finished our tour of the outside, and entered the middle, where a mock palisade erected itself in stone, topped with garlands of vines and objects of sacrifice. The altar itself was rather plain, but the top contained a very small delicate frieze of sacrificial processions and at the very top scrolled volutes flanked by heraldic lions. It was a wonderful thing to see, lit by the bright morning sky streaming in through the tall windows, and set up on a marble platform so that we could move all around and through it, appreciating the altar from every angle.
The basement contained a small art gallery with photographs, and the view out of the modern building looked out to a square with 16th and 17th century churches, brick and marble and scrolled, while this white spare and glassed museum sat holding one of the finest pieces of some of Rome’s earliest history. The juxtaposition of it all was impressive, and the museum itself was very well designed, the architect’s name is Richard Meyer, and I intend to find out more about him. He seems to have done a lot of museums, well versed in guiding people through and around a visual space, which is an idea that intrigues me. My thoughts about the Ara Pacis were definitely enhanced by the spare, clean, and well lit space that he provided for it…
On the other side of the gleaming white museum, was an old moss and brick cylinder, sunk several meters into the ground and completely covered in shrubs and trees, the grizzled counterpart to the marble and steel and glass austerity of the Ara Pacis and its museum. This was the mausoleum of Augustus, constructed around the same time as his shining altar but looking completely different. Because much of the upper sections have disappeared and been overgrown, it is difficult to reconstruct, but contained the burials of many members of Augustus’ family, and may have been modeled on the huge tholos tombs that Macedonians like the much-admired Alexander the Great might have used.
In the pavement in front, faint etchings in the stone show plans for another huge monument in antiquity, the Pantheon. Apparently Roman architects and engineers used whatever open pavement space was available to scratch their flooplans, leaving a much more durable set of blueprints than would have been found. We found them—small shadows in triangles and rectangles in the sidewalk, outlining the plans for the pediment of that grand building that we would see later that day.
And we were off, to the next monuments, moving to an area of Rome called the Campus Martias—a flat low lying field where the army would drill, but was later used to hold public assemblies and a number of important monuments.
Moving through the bustling modern city, we would stumble upon glimpses back in time—an obelisk in the middle of a piazza, containing the hieroglyphs from when it was stolen from Egypt, topped by a bronze globe from where it was converted by Augustus into a huge sundial and calendar, laid out in bronze and travertine in a huge public square. However, the obelisk was set on insufficient foundations, and in the swampy area of the campus it began to tilt, so much so that Domitian repaved and rebuilt the foundations, where it remained until its collapse in the medieval period. Roman engineering like this impresses me—they could predict seasons, the day, and the time by the lines in bronze cast by the old needle of stone.
And we were off, to the next part of the ancient city, to the column of Marcus Aurelius, set into one of the biggest commercial streets of Rome, backed by a huge mall on one side and a number of shops on the other. This column has also been set on new foundations, to make up for the rise in ground level since the area has been continuously inhabited for hundreds and hundreds of years. The Column of Marcus Aurelius is carved in a spiral pattern to the top where the figures become intelligible and dissolve into blobs of light and shadow at the neck craning height of 29 meters, which is close to 100 feet. The reliefs themselves show the emperor’s campaigns against the barbarian hordes, fighting and surrendering, up the length of the whole block of stone. Interestingly enough, the interior of the column is not of solid stone, but has a staircase pierced here and there with windows at intervals until it reaches an observatory deck so many feet into the air. We could no longer go inside because the column drums have shifted place, but it seems like a pretty neat idea.
And then another tour de force—THE PANTHEON! We stopped in front of here for our lunch, and ate our peanut butter and jelly sandwiches watching the crowds swarm like ants over the base of the building. The building itself consists of two parts—a huge domed rotunda in the back, spanning the largest volume until it was surpassed sometime in the 18th century (I thought Hagia Sophia might have surpassed it, but I was wrong, this building is much much bigger inside), with a porch that looks very much like the front of a temple stuck onto it.
Apparently the porch was supposed to be much taller than it is now, but the columns for its construction could not make the long transit from Aswan, Egypt, and the Pantheon now contains not one set, but two sets of raking cornices, stacked atop one another like open books. Nonetheless, the play of geometry inside and outside the building is enough to leave our jaws hanging out of our mouths. Walking in the huge columns, which even at their short lengths towered high overhead, and entering the massive domed space was a religious experience in itself. The dome rises in a patterned series of coffers up to the oculus—a hole at the apex of the dome that let in light and sun. The Pantheon is so big that a little bit of rainfall in the 30 ft diameter hole does not make much of a difference; a few drains lead from the marble floor to get rid of any wetness on the floor, but the space is so big that it makes very little difference.
The inside is one huge play on geometry: niches of squares and circles alternate, separated by pairs of richly colored columns, above that a decorative motif and above another set of niches, all originally set with antique statuary, but now replaced with Renaissance era stuff as the building to all the gods was converted into a house of Christ. The ceiling is almost too perfect to be believed, a series of rectangles that rise up and up to the circle in the roof, from which a beam of light projected out onto the walls high above our heads. I just stood in awe, turning around and around, looking at this fabulous building, standing, an example of the genius of Roman engineering--- it has not been supported by anything in all of its long years of existence, where the Parthenon, Hagia Sophia, and so many temples we have seen have been buttressed by ugly imposing scaffolding. The inside looks pristine, blocks of marble in different shapes, the front apse gilded and erected with an altar, where masses are still held.
Rahael is buried here, and Vittorio Emmanuel, one of the princes of Italy, and the building has captured the imaginations of so many for years and years. Its easy to see why.
Everything else that day seemed to fade in comparison. We kept walking through the city, stopping at the baths of Agrippa, the first set of public baths erected, with very little remaining besides the curved arches of brick projecting from modern office buildings, and on to what was once the Stadium of Domitian, erected by the huge hellenophile in his attempt to bring a 5th festival to the Panhellenic cycle, that of the Capitoline Games. Unfortunately for him, the Romans were too prudish about the notion of athletic nudity to embrace the games, and the stadium was probably just left until a use could be found for the big space. It still remains preserved in the city fabric, however much the actual building is missing, because it forms the outer edges of the Piazza Navona, one of the more famous piazzas in Italy, ringed by beautiful sandy colored buildings and punctuated by a fabulous fountain in the center.
The other things we saw the rest of the day were much the same—a curve in the road where the Theater of Pompey used to be—the place where Caesar was stabbed in 44 BC, now just another glitch in Rome’s ever so curvy road system. The Odeion of Domitian was the same, a rapid turn in the building and a single standing column and we were at the site of another of his great building projects.
And we were finally finished! Hungry and tired, but still wanting to see the city, Katie and I broke up from the rapidly disappearing group and set out ourselves to find some English language bookshops I had identified in the area. The first, by the Piazza Navona, was stacked at random with tons and tons of volumes that we had a great time sorting through, and then we walked along the Piazza of St Augustine and ran into a gem. The small bookshop was crammed with boxes and stacks of books, with space barely wide enough for one person to fit between, and realizing that there was no way to really browse, we asked the bookkeeper, a young woman with limited, accented English if there were any books in our language. When she said no, Katie asked if there were any in Latin and was rewarded to come upon a number of leather bound volumes, stamped with the SPQR that denoted “the Senate and the Roman people” with the classics in Latin and Italian. Best of all these books were old, so much that the title pages looked like woodblocks picked out in red and black, and some of the pages had to be cut with scissors to be read. Katie and I were enthralled—she started hopping up and down in the limited space that we had, her big eyes completely aglow. After much deliberation, she settled on Cicero, I think, and we left the store with huge smiles on our faces.
Across the street we happened on a small gallery exhibiting early German woodcuts, and some more obscure works by Klimt, and we both perused the gallery, still hopped up on our fabulous book finds, and impressed by what we had seen. Then we continued on, finding a huge English language bookstore called, appropriately enough, the Anglo American Bookshop, where we browsed until they almost closed the shop on us and bought a book—I bought one called The Lost Painting, which deals in the quest for a missing Caravaggio masterpiece, although I was tempted by many others.
That night, Katie and I had a very nice picnic—tuna-apple-carrot-salad, before talking about how wonderful our book hunt had been, and went to bed. These days are so full I was definitely asleep before the clock struck midnight.
But today was no less exciting! We got to see the Colosseum today, and many other cool monuments, this time on the Palatine Hill, which stands overlooking the Circus Maximus and in the imperial period contained some of the biggest and most elaborate palaces in all of Rome. Unfortunately, there is not much to see anymore, besides scattered concrete and tufa temple podiums, broken, decayed walls, and tantalizing remnants of what might have been. Some of the stuff that WAS still there had been closed for the day, leaving us to peer at the gates that blocked our entrance and grind our teeth in frustration.
We did, however, see the most important complex on the Palatine, the Palace of Domitian. This sprawling space was separated by a series of oblong fountained and forested courtyards, each one more private than the next, marked out by patches of green grass and low walls of brick. In places we could see where the walls reached all of the way up to the next level, making the huge audience halls, but elsewhere the Palace completely faded into the grass and it was up to our imaginations to reconstruct what must have been quite impressive. On the far side of one of the courtyards, the so-called “hippodrome” due to its similarity in shape contained a deep set apse, radical shadows picked out by the late morning sun, with walls extending at least three levels down into a vast open space. Moving to the last courtyard we could see two levels of apartments that all looked onto a long rather oblong space, complicated by a fountain in the center. From the far side of this courtyard, in the blazing heat, we could look out to the actual hippodrome, the Circus Maximus, spreading out below us. Like the Stadium of Domitian, not much remains except the outline in the fabric of the city, in this case preserved in the form of a long narrow grassy park.
And then we were off of the Palatine Hill, through the cool fountained air and the shade where the palaces have been coopted by the Papal families and turned into a garden, romantic with the nostalgia for a Rome in the overgrown columns of ancient grandeur. But neither the cool nor the shade were to last, it was out into the blazing sun and dust of the Piazza del Coloseo, and the Arch of Constantine.
This arch is the one that makes it into all of the history books, both because of its size and complexity in decoration, and because almost none of the complexity is concurrent with its financier. Constantine pillaged, (or if you prefer a less negative point of view, recycled) bits and pieces of other monuments, probably a number of friezes from a bygone Arch of Marcus Aurelius, and others from a monument to Hadrian. The mismash of styles and scenes all have the pervading theme of warfare, and glory to the emperor—all emperor’s heads later modified to resemble Constantine, of course. It is a triple arch, each side enhanced by borrowed columns topped with the figures of bound captives, and the entire thing is sculpted in and out with figures of all periods.
Then it was on to the last, and the best event—the Colosseum. The Colosseum was originally flanked by a whole gladiatorial complex that included a smaller arena for training, barracks, and a big fountain. The arena itself takes its name from another surrounding monument, that of the Colossus of Nero, a statue that depicts the sun god with the emperor’s face and stood somewhere in the neighborhood of 120 Roman feet tall. The actual arena itself was called the Flavian Amphitheater, but it was colossal in its own right, with a seating capacity not to be surpassed in the ancient world, topping out at about 80,000 spectators at the greatest. It contains 4 tiers of arched colonnades, and entrace into the arena was regulated by four axial entrances, 2 reserved for entering and exiting gladiators, and the others for spectators. Elsewhere, at each of the 76 others, numbers and a type of token would regulate who sat where and how they got in. According to Jarrett, in the case of emergency the building could be cleared in as little as three minutes, a tribute to Roman efficiency in movement of personnel.
The four sections were divided along lines of class and rank, with the emperor and the vestal virgins each occupying special platforms in the stands, with high ranking senators closest to the action, equites, or knights next, and the lower classes up in the nosebleed sections at the top. It is a remarkable construction of brick and tufa, arched vaults providing all of its internal structuring, with a maze of passages underneath the floor itself to allow for the sudden appearance of beasts or fighters, enhancing the spectacle on the floor. Now it stands with its ribs exposed; all of the seats are missing and most of the lower levels of ceiling, leaving the arch fragments open to the sun. We moved into the outer ring of tall vaults, from which we could either go up or farther in, which we did, moving to where we could overlay the whole guts of the building, the bowl removed of its travertine seats and naked. After surveying the lower level, we went outwards and moved back up, to the second level to see the bowl from a greater height, even more impressed at the engineering skills of these ancient people. I myself would like to get my hands on some good plans of the Colosseum, as best it can be constructed, so I can look at how the movement of personnel was accomplished.
We walked around for a while, stopping to admire the Arch of Constantine and the remnants of the palace structures from our privelaged perch. We were dismissed from “class” that day at around five, but Vincoli and myself and Jarrett went over to the side of the Colosseum to see what was called the Ludus Magnus, the training ground for gladiators, where we could see the semi circle of stands hidden under the foundations of the modern street, and nearby the barracks for the gladiators, where they lived and trained in the shadow of the Colosseum, where so many of them would meet their deaths. As a last interesting note, I should mention that the Colosseum has been discovered to have a few underground tunnels, one leading directly from this training ground to the arena floor, another for the protected entrance and exit of the emperor, and a third, perhaps for the Vestal Virgins. Not unlike the way modern competitors are ushered into arenas, through separate, enclosed passages…
And spent, we returned to the hotel where I got some much needed down time. But we had also heard rumors about a potential opera that night, so at around 7 Vincoli, Scott and I ventured out into the city again, to the Piazza della Republica, only to find out that the opera in question was completely sold out. We made the most of it, wandering around the night-lit city, going to Santa Maria Maggiore, and a park with what looked like the remains of an old bath complex, now dedicated to Vittorio Emmanuel. Santa Maria Maggiore was quite impressive, we saw the back apse of it and moved around to the front where we could see the stepped series of columns and the broken façade, coming forward to embrace us where we stood in the darkening night. Behind the columns was a glittering mosaic, the golds picked out by artificial lights, and a wonderful surprise for us after the disappointment of the opera.
We returned to the hotel to sleep, too tired to do anything else. Rome is an exhausting, exhilarating, enchanting city.
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