2 Search Results for "bernini"

• Night Scene in Piazza Navona

  • From: jaylemae
  • Description:

    On our last trip to Rome, we found ourselves exploring and strolling the Piazza Navona, Rome's finest squares.  It contains the masterpieces of Bernini (the Fountain of the Four Rivers and the Fountain of the Moor), Calderari (the Fountain of Neptune) and Borromini (the Church of Sant'Agnese in Agone).  The square is lined with many artists, painters, restaurants and live entertainment.  Especially at night, the piazza becomes more vibrant and alive as locals and tourists hang out and enjoy dinner with friends.  

  • 4 months ago
  • Views: 215

• Rome for a birthday, Nov. 2007

  • From: Sean
  • Description:

    As our train from Florence pulls into Rome's neo-Fascist Termini station, I think about a passage from the bestselling book La Bella Figura: A Field Guide to the Italian Mind.

    "Nothing rattles along like an accelerato, which, as we know and you don't, is the slowest kind of train in Italy, despite its name."

    Hmm...we accidentally jumped on an accelerato which has turned out to be the slow train to Rome. We arrive two hours behind the published scheduled, to boot.

    We violate all the guidebook rules and accept an offer from an unlicensed cab. I have visions of us being hijacked and taken out to the suburbs of Rome where we'll be robbed. But the only aggression on display by the driver is, well, his driving. The cab slaloms down the Via Nazionale like we're on a quest for Olympic gold.

    After jettisoning our luggage at our hotel, Boy and I hoof it over to one of our favorite pizzeria's in Rome: Da Baffetto's.

    Signore Da Baffetto, looking like a caricature of himself in his oversize plastic rimmed Coke-bottle-bottom eyeglasses, brusquely seats us at a table with two young Italian guys. Boy and I order Roman style pizzas, which are thin-crusted and peppery. Mine comes with fried zucchini flowers on top; his has prosciutto. (For hours and info, see the Reids Guides write-up, here.)

    Afterward, we do quick recon of our favorite spot: The Pantheon. It's closed at this hour (after 7), but when it's open, its interior roof looks like this:

    

     

    We start our first full day in Rome with a cappuccino standing at the bar of one of the Tazza d'Oro (cup of gold) coffeeshops. We're within a stone's throw of the Pantheon. And we're having cappuccino while we can; as La Bella Figura points out, it's "immoral" in Italian culture to have a cappuccino after 10am.

    We then race over for a 9 a.m. six-person guided tour of the Palatine Hill by Context Tours. Our guide helps us imagine what the structures once looked like in full. We learn how the inner courtyards circulated air through the palace, for instance, and how drinking water was brought up to various rooms.

    We visit our first church after lunch, first visiting Santa Maria Maggiore (exterior shot, here.) A mass is being held in a side chapel. Many local parishioners stop in to light candles and say prayers in-between running errands. It was nice to see a magnificent, imposing church being used as a place for locals to worship, as its builders intended.

    We admire the church's baldichino, which in this case is a marble canopy held aloft by statues of four angels. From a distance, it appears that the canopy is hanging in mid-air. (Long-distance shot, here.)

    Foolishly, we pay 6 euros each because we think we're paying for a tour that will include an inspection of the loggia above, with its famous frescoes described in a guidebook. Alas, we're suckered into an exhibit of theological trivia. Turns out the tour is by reservation only and held at an odd hour. Oh well.

    We go church-hopping--It's a regular Madonna-rama. We look next for Santa Prassede, which has a surprsingly modest exterior. Its gold-colored ceiling and the mosaics above its altar impressed me so much on my first viewing of them in 2003. They still wow.

    Next up: Santa Prudenzia, which features the oldest of the extant mosaics from early Christian times. We step down to the lower, "ground level" that it's on. It turns out that all of Rome was once much closer to sea level than it is today, and this church is an example, as is the Largo Argentina--featuring the site of where Brutus committed his famous murder.

    Palazzo dell'ex Collegio Massimo, which houses one of the main national museums of ancient Roman art, is dubbed by us the non tocare muesum because the guards keep hissing at us not to touch anything. I half-expect a guard to interfere when I mockingly mimic the pose of a Greek discus player in front of a statue of the same--hamming it up for Boy and his camera.

    A highlight is the statue of a wounded boxer , a Roman copy of a Greek original. Different metals were used by the sculptor(s). The boxer's lips and wounds are redder than the rest of his dark bronze body. And the skin under his right eye appears to sag--a marvelous sculptural trick. A rare, English-language sign at the museum explains that ancient Greek boxers worked their punches at each other's faces, not their torsos. Yikes!

    The boxer looks dejected, yet his bandaged hands broadcast nobility in its finest sense.

    It's astonishing to see the museum's re-assemblage of mosaics on its top floors. Some artists inserted minute, colored stones in pontillist-like patterns in gorgeous pastels. Entire garden scenes that once decorated the walls of villas. They're sexually graphic, too, inspiring some tittering.

    I'm stunned by the frescoes we see on another floor of the museum. They are so naturalistic, three-dimensional, and lively, they're modern looking. I'm struck by how the Dark Ages truly were Dark--they obliterated the knowledge of perspectivism that the Romans had. Particularly marvelous is a piece of what--to my unschooled eye, seems like a fabulous work of abstract expressionism--the sign labels it il cubiculo con parte della volta decorato a stucco.

    Mocking fellow "Americani" tourists is how we pass the time while enjoying our appertivo. We laughingly remember how, back in Florence, we had overheard a young woman force a waiter to send a pizza back to the kitchen because it hadn't been pre-sliced for her. C'mon now, folks. You're not in the U.S., you're in another country. Let's try to relax a bit and see how nationalities live.

    Frustration with facetious tour guides is another topic that animates us, with greater degrees of passion the more Campari sodas we knock back. We remember how, during our few days in Florence, we had popped into the Palazzo Pitti. The level of tour-guide explication was very basic, pitched at a high-school level: What's the difference between a fresco and a mosaic? Did you know that much of the art of the Renaissance is very representational of religious and mythological stories because many of the people of the time were illiterate? ( Basta! Enough! Did I really pay $20 for that level of info?) I was especially frustrated that, at the Palazzo Pitti, I wasn't pointed toward the work of the amazing female painter Artemisia Gentileschi, who triumphed in what was then considered an exclusively male artform. Okay, I realize I'm sounding like a snob here. But Europe's expensive! I've only got one shot to enjoy these museums!

    I had my birthday in Rome on the American holiday of Thanksgiving Day. I wake up cranky. Chris cheers me up with a stand-up cappuccino at Sant'Eustachio il caffe, my favorite coffee shop in the world. We visit the baby elephant statue with an obelisk on its back--sculpted by Bernini and next to the Pantheon. The cuteness of the statue and the caffeine in my bloodstream cheer me up. I have a feeling that if I lived in Rome, as frustrating as the city's bureaucracy might be, I could always have my spirits lifted by the city's prevalent history and beauty. The Romans have been partying under the same stone columns for several millennia now. They know how to live.

  • Blog post
  • 1 year ago
  • Views: 610