At the beginning of February came a trip out of town, our apparently now-annual trip to Rome, where, sadly, and unusually, it wasn't so much warmer than Zürich. But that's ok, 'cause we made up for it with a few new-to-us sights and soooo much good food.
And, and. Mike found us a gorgeous little hotel one minute away from the Pantheon, with this view out our window. (For this location, this place was shockingly quiet.)
Since we'd arrived mid-afternoon, we had time to go see the branch of the National Museum of Rome that is set in the ruins of the Baths of Diocletian (completed in 306, with hardly any left standing nowadays, as one might expect). The museum features a buuuuuunch of marble altars, sculptures, and sarcophagi situated around this stunning courtyard; a museum of epigraphy (wooo! inscriptions! wooo!); a gorgeous collection of artifacts from the 12th through 7th centuries BC, found in and around the city; and a handful of other exhibitions both temporary and permanent.
Here, the so-called "Michelangelo cloister," built between 1565 and the end of the 17th century, and named for a drawing after which it was designed. It's quite large, and is lined with just about everything one could conceive of that might have been made of marble in antiquity.
For example, this amazing sarcophagus, which dates to the 2nd or 3rd century AD.
And this exquisitely- and delicately-carved column, which had no label. Sigh.
And these massive theatrical masks over each doorway in the cloisters.
And this huge, wacky-looking rhino thing. (He was part of a set with a wacky-looking elephant thing.)
Gratuitous shot of the cloisters/courtyard after dark.
Next, we headed indoors to the epigraphy museum for some good old written stuff. Here we found an utterly fascinating (and, in our experience, totally unique) collection of matryoshka-style concentric lead containers...
...the smallest of each set containing a wee lead figure, and each container inscribed with spells and curses. Everything in this intriguing little room was discovered in 1999 when workers building an underground parking structure discovered an ancient fountain positively stuffed with luck, fertility, and votive offerings, and with an abundance of magical items including a witch's cauldron (not kidding); lamps used for casting spells; various curse inscriptions; and these containers. AMAZING.
Thin lead tablet inscribed with a curse against a judge. (This stuff was so fascinating. I could have spent hours in that room.)
Next, we found the funerary artifacts. This particular inscription contains a few early cursive letters.
If you haven't noticed by now, I'm a sucker for anything involving gladiators. Here's a 3rd-century carving celebrating the victories of an unnamed gladiator against opponents using the trident and net. You can see the end of a trident above the horizontal divider, on the right side. (I almost can't deal with this. It's just too mind-blowing that this stuff was real, and here's actual proof.)
One of the temporary exhibits was a small collection works of art rescued from the devastating earthquakes in central Italy (particularly the towns of Accumoli and Amatrice) in 2016. From photos of the rubble, it's remarkable that anything survived at all; among the 3,000-plus items saved were these 15th-century limestone figures from the central portal of the church of San Francesco in Amatrice.
Another set of weird, (personally) unprecedented things that caught my eye were these little funerary hut-urns from an early-Iron-Age (9th/8th-century BC) cemetery in Rome. These were most likely modeled after the wattle-and-daub houses of the locals, and were filled with cremated remains and buried with funerary goods. I couldn't take my eyes off of them.
Back outdoors, a second, and much smaller, cloister/courtyard contains a handful of citrus trees, a marble well, some miscellaneous marble busts and statues...
...and a vast collection of inscriptions created by the Arval Brethren, a priesthood whose members primarily conducted sacrifices for crop fertility, but who also kept lengthy minutes of their religious services, festivals, and other proceedings. These records were later transcribed onto marble tablets, and voila: astoundingly detailed records of ancient Rome. This one deals with Nero (!!) in the year 59 AD. In Campania, he'd finally succeeded in killing his mother, whom he'd (falsely) accused of trying to kill him, and the Senate ordered up prayers and sacrifices to celebrate his safe return to Rome! (Un-freaking-believable. Inscriptions about Nero, written concurrent with Nero, right there in front of us. We also saw mentions of the emperors Augustus, Claudius, Caracalla, Commodus, and even Caligula, among others.)
Last stop, the main ruins of the baths themselves. Um...that place was big. (It was the largest ever built in antiquity, even larger than the baths of Caracalla [the ruins of which are not unimpressive]; could accommodate 3,000 people; and covered 13 hectares [130,000 square meters].) The Aula X hall contains three free-standing tombs, relocated here from various ancient necropolises for preservation. In the photo above, you can see two of them (the left is the stuccoed tomb and the right, the frescoed tomb), and one in the photo below, taken facing 180 degrees in the other direction.
The brick cube is the reconstruction of what's left of the Tomb of Platorini, probably 1st century AD.
Interior of the stuccoed tomb, which dates to the 2nd century AD.
The details on that ceiling are remarkable. So fine and delicate!
Interior of the frescoed tomb, also from the 2nd century AD.
Detail of the peacock fresco in the left corner...
...and of the figures on the right wall.
Perpendicular to the end of the Aula X is another huge hall...
...this one containing a massive mosaic on the floor (and another on the wall at the far end of the room). While this floor is not original, in the baths' heyday, these floors and walls would have been covered with mosaic and marble and sculptures.
Walls rising from the natatio, or large pool, which was once enclosed here. (The thing had a surface area of 4,000 square meters, so, yeah. Large.) The white chunks embedded in the walls are remnants of the marble decoration that would have been everywhere here.
Another massive mosaic, with Mike standing in the natatio, for scale. (This photo shows just over half the walls' height in this particular spot.)
Dinner that evening was at the tiny, tourist-filled, but still somehow utterly magnificent Da Enzo al 29, where we shared a Jewish-style artichoke (double deep-fried!!); a portion of panzanella alla Enzo; plates of gricia and carbonara rigatoni (Mike's gricia was the hands-down winner); meatballs in tomato sauce (heaven!); and that evening's dessert specialty, a piece of frappe topped with honey.
Walked past this on the way back to the hotel. Oh, hey there.
Day two began with coffee and pastries at our beloved Giolitti, and then we made our way north to the Galleria Borghese, a museum Mike and I visited together our very first time in Rome. This time around, however, they'd decided to allow photos. (Well, more likely, they just couldn't fight aganist the tides of idiots taking "surreptitious" photos on their phones, and just gave up. Either way, I got to take pictures this time! Woo!)
Passed those marvelous Aurelian walls on our way to the museum...
...where, I had not remembered, they'd been storing a Botticelli (from ~1488) for me. Thanks for keeping this safe, guys.
As luck would have it, we arrived smack in the middle of a rather short special exhibit of the works of Gian Lorenzo Bernini, an extraordinary artist, and one of the two-to-four sculptors whose work I might be able to pick out of a lineup. This particular room was full of his commissioned paintings and busts; here, one of the Cardinal Richelieu. (Reportedly, Richelieu was not a fan.)
Always on display at the Borghese are several of Bernini's most famous and monumental sculptures (two of which, let's be honest, are rather rapey). This one's Pluto abducting the fleeing Proserpina, from 1621.
The way Bernini conveyed both motion and intense detail blows my mind.
The museum itself is nothing to sneeze at; it was purpose-built in the early 17th century as a "suburban" villa in which Cardinal Scipione Borghese could both host extravagant parties and display his personal collection of art. In particular, he was a fan of Bernini and Caravaggio, but also acquired (via both legitimate purchase and not-so-friendly methods) works by Titian, Raphael, Canova, Rubens, and Veronese, among others. It also happened to include plenty of works from antiquity, which nearly fade into the background in the presence of so much other art. It's a stunning, overwhelming place.
Antiquities like, say, this extraordinary sarcophagus depicting the labors of Hercules, from about 160 AD.
Also included in the special Bernini exhibit were works created by Gian Lorenzo's father, Pietro, and by the two sculptors together. This is Winter, by Pietro, from 1620.
One of the most memorable pieces of art I've ever seen: Bernini's Apollo and Daphne, 1622-25. (Variation on a theme: she's turning into a tree as she escapes his advances.)
Again, motion...
...and detail. Her toes are turning into roots.
And her fingers into leaves. Spectacular.
Canova's remarkable sculpture of Paolina Borghese Bonaparte as the Victorious Venus, 1805-8.*
After we left the gallery, we headed back inside the walls to visit the Roman houses underneath the Caelian hill.
The entrance to the houses is around the side of the church of Saints John and Paul, which has this amazing fancy medieval Latin inscription across the front (from about 1150, as best I could gather).
These arches buttress the side of the church (left) against the remains of Imperial-era shops and houses across the street (right), and were rebuilt in the 13th century.
Look. I knew there were frescoes in these houses, but I had no idea. This is the Room of the Genii, with frescoes from the 3rd century AD. (From what I could tell, most of these were from the 3rd, or possibly early 4th, century. Also, at this point, we were probably one story deep, but the excavations here [not open to the public] go down at least another two stories. It's an incredible site, but I guess that's just Rome for you. Infinitely full of history.)
The Room of the Worshipper, complete with mer-goats in the corner!
Wall of the 3rd-century courtyard/nymphaeum, partially destroyed during construction of the church above.
In that same room, a mosaic floor fragment from the 2nd century.
Attached to the houses is a small, but very high-quality, museum filled with all sorts of interesting things found nearby. Like these tremendously narrow amphorae imported from Africa in the 4th or 5th century.
And these stamped bricks, about which I'd read elsewhere, but never actually seen before. The stamps functioned essentially as trademarks for particular factories and came in several standardized forms; this one is known as a "circular stamp with orbicular" and is the newest of the forms, in use between the 2nd-ish and 3rd centuries.
This, the rectangular stamp, is usually the oldest (although it was in use for centuries outside of urban Rome); this one in particular survives from between the years 60 and 93 AD.
I guess it's not a trip to Rome if you don't walk past this on your way back to your hotel. It never gets old.
We took a little stroll past Trajan's forum, too. (It was freezing cold and a little rainy that day, but at least we got a nice sunset in the deal.)
Dinner was at Enoteca Ferrara, which I've wanted to revisit for a good while (it was one of the last stops on a food tour we took several years ago). And in all honesty, I totally panicked and blew my order--my food was just fine, but NOT what I really should have ordered at this restaurant, and not really what I wanted, but my angry stomach compels me to search out vegetables more often than not, and so sometimes I have to deprive myself of the best of what certain restaurants have to offer, blehhhhhh, stupid stomach--but Mike's food was amazing: ravioli filled with brasato, served on grilled radicchio, for his starter, and brasato with a side of crispy, roasted, bacon-rosemary potatoes. At least I was a success on the dessert, though: I had lemon semifreddo on this thick, crumbly crust, topped with wild strawberries and a sour sauce made from lemon zest. (My kingdom for this kind of tart lemon dessert, people. It was perfection.)
Plus, look at this wine list. HAH!
On day 3, we wandered past the Trevi Fountain...
...all cleaned up and sparkly and PACKED with people...
...on our way to a guided tour of the Domus Aurea, Nero's immense party palace now located sorta inside the Oppian hill. (The livin' palace was over on the Quirinal hill, duh.) And does this place have a story. When it was finished, this palace--gilded, grottoed, marbled, mosaic-ed, frescoed, colonnaded, gardened--covered somewhere between 100 and 300 acres of land across the better part of both the Palatine and Esquiline hills, and included a giant manmade lake on the future site of the Colosseum. (And to answer your inevitable question, no, the Domus Aurea was not where Nero fiddled as Rome burned. He built the palace after the fire, on the somewhat-conveniently newly-cleared land. What...a coincidence.) As it turned out, Nero was a bit of a murderer, a tyrant, a vicious persecutor of Christians, and a mis-handler of both currency and empire. After Nero committed suicide in 68 AD, the Senate issued a damnatio memoriae--that is, an obliteration of his memory via the destruction of his visible legacy in the city. The lake was drained and the Colosseum built by Vespasian in 70 AD, and Trajan filled in the Domus Aurea with rubble so he could build his own bath complex on top in 104 AD.
And then, get this! The site was lost to memory until the 15th century, when a guy fell through a hole in the hill and into the room now called the Golden Vault, where the ancient frescoes and stuccoed designs (preserved, ironically, thanks to Trajan's rubble) were surprisingly intact. Word of the discovery spread, and the designs in the Vault eventually directly influenced the course of Renaissance art: artists including Raphael and Ghirlandaio, for sure, and possibly even Michelangelo, visited the Vault by torchlight and adopted the designs into their own works. (Did not know this before, but the artistic concept of "grotesques" came from the designs these guys lifted by torchlight inside their so-called cave...or grotto, as in grotto-esque. NEAT.)
Because of the presence of Trajan's walls and all sorts of other architectural bits that have intruded on the Domus Aurea over the years, it's difficult to get a feel for how the place might have looked originally. So I'll just skip over the architectural photos in general and go straight to the amazing details that remain.
Far, far above our heads, over the site of what was apparently a large and glorious nymphaeum, is a mosaic of Hercules confronting the cyclops. Such tiny pieces, so far over our heads! (We're estimating 30 feet over.)
Very delicate fresco in a random room somewhere. (These, said our guide, were the everyday, ho-hum frescoes one might paint in areas that were unimportant, like, say, hallways.)
The Golden Vault, complete with holes in the ceiling from explorers dropping in. In this room, we all sat down on these little cubes for a "3D virtual reality experience" showing us what the site probably looked like when it was new. Naturally, I was violently skeptical, but we put on our headsets, and friends, I almost cried. It was so pretty and grand and weirdly moving to be seeing ancient Rome--a place I've studied and researched and visited and treasured for over half of my life--as something other than a ruin. It was strangely powerful for me.
Detail of the stuccoes in the Golden Vault.
The massive criptoportico (which basically just means arched passageway, in ancient Roman construction terms), impressively covered in frescoes. (And 6 meters high!)
Mosaic floor and some wall color.
Ceiling in the Hall of Achilles.
The massive octagonal hall (14.7 m/50 ft, across!), sadly missing all of its decor, but spectacular in size nonetheless.
Patterns left in the adhesive used to create intricate marble designs on the palace's floors.
On our way to find some coffee after the tour (the only way to visit the Domus Aurea, by the way), we passed these ruins that we've seen many times. I looked finally looked these up: they're the remains of a gladiatorial training gymnasium in use during the 1st and 2nd centuries AD.
Next (accidental, 'cause the place I wanted to visit was closed) stop, the utterly massive Santa Maria Maggiore. (Apparently, Bernini is buried here, but we didn't know that and so missed his tomb. DANG IT.)
The interior is mostly 18th-century, but these amazing mosaics are from 1296...
...and some of these, along the nave...
...and these, on the triumphal arch behind the baldachin, are (mostly) from the 5th century!
Also old: the basilica's Cosmatesque floor, originally laid in the 12th century. (I love learning new art history/architecture words!)
Naturally, a floor this old has been occasionally altered and restored over the centuries, but it's pretty spectacular nonetheless.
In the basilica's museum, we found a piece of sheet music hand-written by Domenico Scarlatti, whose tunes I played long, long ago in my former life as a fair-to-middlin' pianist.
The museum also has a nativity scene from around 1240.
The impressive exterior.
Next stop, quite an adventure to get to, and absolutely flooded with super-enthused English fans: the Stadio Olimpico to watch Italy play England in the Six Nations tournament.
Line-out for England.
Crazy-eyes Owen Ferrell goes for a kick! (It seems to me that most professional rugby kickers get some variation of this look on their faces when it's kickin' time, kinda like many big-time tennis players have their weird little tics before serving. Entertaining.)
Panorama of the stadium, the beautiful weather, and my very serious rugby-watchin' husband.
Somewhat predictably, England kinda ran away with this one, so we left a little early to walk back into the city and to get dinner at La Matriciana, a very old-school Roman trattoria recommended by a friend. And it was brilliant, as we could tell upon entry: immediately, we were confronted with waiters in vests and bowties; a massive buffet of antipasti; and a gorgeous Berkel meat slicer, all of which portend good things. Mike, not so into the marinated fish-and-veg as I, got starters of prosciutto, mozzarella, and a fried artichoke, and I was absolutely compelled to go for a single trip through the buffet. Awwwww, yeah. I went with lemony anchovies and octopus; some startlingly good salmon; some incredible roasted red peppers; grilled zucchini and eggplant; and perfectly-cooked romanesco, although there were plenty of other items to be sampled. (A girl's gotta leave room for some pasta, too.) Next came amatriciana pasta for Mike and cacio e pepe for me, and they were both exactly what we in the mood for, and truly fantastic. (Like, show-stoppingly good.)
Since we were just way too full for dessert, we staggered towards our hotel, and on the way found ourselves in a little shop positively packed with bottles of antique alcohol of all imaginable types. We ended up standing at the counter, drinking the house red wine, chatting with the proprietor about a weird old bottle of gin with a prominent illustration of a ham on the label (!), and talking with three guys in town for the rugby match--two Germans, and one Italian, one of whom had started the first rugby team in Erbil, and one who plays for a team like Mike's in Budapest. Talk about some interesting people, and super friendly, as well--the guy from Budapest paid for our glasses of wine! What a magical way to end a tremendous weekend in one of my favorite places. Rome never ceases to amaze me; never runs out of new things for me us discover; and never, ever disappoints.
Up next: we leave tomorrow for a trip to NYC, but it'll be a while before you hear about that, 'cause you know how slow I am. Plus, we haven't even left yet, so there's that.
*Yes, she was a relation of that Bonaparte. In fact, she was Napoleon's sister. When the Borghese family fell on hard times in 1807, Camillo Borghese--Paolina's husband--was forced to sell hundreds of pieces from the collection to the emperor himself, which is how a good number of important works from the Borghese villa came to be in the aptly-named Borghese Collection at the Louvre.
