There is not much sleep to be had sloshing around on the lower bunk of a rattling train that makes occasional, mysterious extended stops at various waystations.
At 8 am, our porter brought us trays with rolls, butter, and jelly.
Though we expected to arrive in Rome at 9:22, it was closer to 10:22 when we got to the Roma Termini.
The station was hot and crowded. That would be a recurring theme for the day. Our hotel was within walking distance from the train station, so we walked there as soon as we arrived. Though the dingy carpet at the entrance did not make a good impression, the woman working the front desk was friendly, our room for five was large, clean and quiet, and the WiFi signal was strong. The room was hot when we got there, but when we turned the AC on full blast, it cooled down.
The woman at the front desk called a taxi for five, but that meant the front seat was a bench seat, so Nina rode beside me--her first time to ride in the front of a vehicle.
Unidentified, red-banner-waving political demonstrations blocked some streets (maybe they were railway workers?), so our driver stopped frequently to confer with gabby traffic cops, which felt quintessentially Italian.
When we got to the Vatican, Emilio felt queasy, but the "fresh" air and the water I put on his head helped.
We had to navigate an 800-meter obstacle course of aggressive, insistent touts who wanted us to join their tours which would, they said, allow us to skip lines. When we finally assumed our spots at the end of a long line in the shade beside one of the walls on the north side of the Vatican, we ended up waiting 45 mostly painless minutes before we got in. The kids took 15-minute turns playing games on Mari's phone.
When we got the tickets, we also invested in audio guides for the kids, who also got treasure hunt maps.
I insisted that we start with Raphael's rooms and the Sistine Chapel, I but utterly failed to get us to either one quickly. The museum signs and maps were little help. In fact, they seemed designed to take us by the longest route possible to get where we wanted to go. We seemed to walk through dozens of rooms filled with busts, sculptures, and tapestries, and every room between us and the Sistine Chapel seemed crowded.
The Vatican is also the hottest museum I've been in--there was no AC at all in many places. Climate control seems to be a high priority in most museums I've been to, but I guess the truth is that most works of art in those museums were created and stored in times before AC even existed.
When we finally got to the room where Raphael's School of Athens was featured, Mari and the kids were carried straight on through like driftwood on the human current, and I was just able to pull them back in time.
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| The photo above is the Internet's. If the School of Athens were as crowded as the School of Athens room was on the day we visited it, I don't think the quality of the discussion would have been so lofty, and Diogenes of Sinope would not have been able to adopt his comfortable lounging position on the floor. |
In 1508, when he was 25, Raphael moved to Rome, and Pope Leo X asked him to decorate his library at the Vatican. When Raphael finished the room, including his most famous work, “The School of Athens,” the Pope was so pleased he kicked out the painters he had asked to paint other rooms and asked Raphael to take over.
Raphael and his team of painters continued painting the pope’s rooms until Raphael’s sudden and unexpected death in 1520. He was 37 years old at the time.
The four rooms Pope Leo X asked Raphael to paint for him are now commonly known as “Raphael’s Rooms.”
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| This photo of the ceiling in the School of Athens Room is not mine, either.. |
I came to see the School of Athens, a group portrait in motion that favorably compares with the group portraits by Rembrandt that we saw in Amsterdam. I was struck, though, by the brightness of the golden ceiling art in the room.The circular frescos clustered around the hexagon in the middle are allegorical figures that relate to the paintings on the walls below them. Read as a clockface, that's: Theology at 12, sitting between two cherubs (putti) holding up signs that read "Divinar Rer Notitia" ("Knowledge of Divine Things"); Justice at 3, holding a balance and wielding a sword; Philosophy at 6, holding two books ("Morals" and "Nature) between two genii (no wings) whose cards read "Causarum Cognitio" ("Know the Causes"--attributed to Cicero)--this one's above "The School of Athens"; and Poetry at 9, wearing a laurel wreath and holding a lyre.
The rectangular figures between the circles, starting with the the upper right quadrant and continuing clockwise, are Adam and Eve ("want an apple?"), the Judgement of Solomon ("let's cut this baby in half"), Urania, a.k.a. Uranus (the astronomers' muse), and "Apollo and Marsysas." Marsyas apparently challenged Apollo to a musical battle, lost, and was flayed alive. My friends on the internet think it wasn't Raphael who painted this one.
After we left the Raphael rooms, we walked through a captivating 2013 art installation called "In the beginning (and the end)" by Studio Azzuro that invited visitors to touch the smooth black walls of the room. Doing so had the effect of summoning spectral images in modern dress to the surface, where they told stories in Italian and in sign language. Take your hand away and the images fade as well.
This art installation was part of the Vatican's first pavilion to be included in the Venice Biennale (which I'd love to see some day), and it became a part of the itinerary at the Vatican museum in 2016.
The experience of reaching out to the walls to summon life from them reminds me of the gesture Michelangelo placed at the center of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, except that in this case instead of God creating the human in his image, it is the humans who are producing digital images of themselves.
In the center of the floor of the Studio Azzuro room was a circle of projected light. We extended our hands into the light to create the image above: a Ruiz Benton floor to complement a Sistine ceiling.
No photos are allowed in the Capella Sistina.
When the Vatican traffic cops in the room weren't policing surreptitious cell phone usage, they were repeatedly demanding that the people in the crowded room turn down the volume on their voices. The dynamic was not unlike that of a cafeteria lunch room in an elementary school, except for the massive work of art on the ceiling above us.
The cops compelled the masses to congregate in the center of the room where I spent my time looking to vulture some of the seats by the wall--which I eventually nabbed for us.
The chapel was built for Pope Sixtus IV (hence the name) between 1473 and 1481. Michelangelo painted the ceiling between 1508 and 1512 and was called back 22 years later to paint The Last Judgement on the wall, which he finished in 1541.
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Not my photo, Sistine Cops. In the image above, Daniel looks like he's taking notes on the puzzling behavior of the chapel visitors. No lions here.
The boys over Daniel's shoulders seem to be touching their neighbors in unwelcome ways. And is that a Dementor peeking out from behind Danny's shoulder? |
Thoughtful, half-shaded Daniel (see above) stuck with me.
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| Not my photo. |
The boys were impressed by Bartholomew, who is holding his own skin in his hand during the Last Judgement. According to popular legend, Bartholomew was himself skinned alive. The boys' audio guides tell them that Michelangelo painted his own portrait on Bartholomew's discarded skin. Cheeky internet commentators say it may have been because Michelangelo would rather have been sculpting than painting the Sistine Chapel.
After we left the Chapel, we ate pizza, fries, and tiramisu in the cafeteria before heading to the museum's Pinacoteca (art gallery). Highlights included: a very large Raphael painting ("The Transfiguration"), which he was working on at the time of his death in 1520; an unfinished Da Vinci ("St. Jerome in the Wilderness"), whose sketched sections provided a fascinating look at the painting process; unfinished clay sculptures by Bernini that reveal the straw sinews beneath the model's surface.
Another highlight was Caravaggio's large "Deposition" (Entombment) at right, which was painted between 1600 and 1604.
Caravaggio's dramatic religious paintings emphasize the poverty of their subjects. I've done some reading about Caravaggio for my legendary, unpublished book
A History of the World for Nina, Pablo, and Emilio, so I know that Caravaggio himself hung out with people who were shunned by the Italian elite--sometimes for good reason. Beginning in 1603, Caravaggio was arrested on several occasions for disturbing the peace, and on May 28, 1606, he killed one of his critics in a duel, fled Rome and became a fugitive.
In 1608, Caravaggio shot a man in Malta and was locked in a cut-rock cell in the 1000-year-old Castel Sant Angelo Prison, which we walked by after we left the Vatican Museum.
Escape from the Castel Sant Angelo was considered impossible. But with the help of a friend, Caravaggio eluded the prison guards and lowered himself down a 200-foot cliff (the height of an 18-story building) into a waiting boat.
One year later, Caravaggio was attacked outside a rough tavern in Naples by four men who disfigured his face.
He died in the summer of 1610 at the age of 38 and was buried in an unmarked grave
After we left the Vatican, we took this picture with St. Peter's Basilica in the background.
This was one of the days when my phone figured out how to map the path we walked and saved the image, so I know that when we left the Vatican, we walked down the Via Crescenzio until we got to the Parco della Mole Adriana, which surrounds the Castel Sant Angelo, where Caravaggio was once imprisoned.
After circling the Parco we walked along the Tiber past the Pont di Sant Angelo.
The Ponte Sant'Angelo was built during the reign of Hadrian the I (117-138) and completed about 135 to connect the publicly owned areas south of the Tiber with Hadrian's mausoleum (later-the Castel Sant'Angelo) on the north side. Hadrian was from Spain, and his imperial portrait depicted him with a beard, though for the previous hundred years every emperor had been depicted with a clean-shaven face. After 117, every imperial head is bearded.
Ten statues of angels, designed by Bernini were mounted on the bridge in 1688.
Souvenir stands along the Tiber featured Pope Francis bobbleheads for 8 Euros.
The RB walks are fueled by mulit-flavored gelati cones. Mari was our quality control officer.
I took this photo of St. Peter's and the Ponte Sant' Angelo from the Ponte Umberto I, which we crossed to get to the Piazza Navona.
Built in the 15th century, Piazza Navona was the city's main market for almost 300 years. When Mari was 9-years-old and her grandfather was the Argentine ambassador to the Vatican, she spent a month living at the Argentine embassy. It was during the Christmas season (which is summer in Argentina), and the market was filled with stalls selling ornaments and sweets. It was one of her favorite places.
There are several fountains in the Piazza Navona. After this fountain was created in 1574, it was known as the "Blacksmiths Fountain,"because of all the blacksmith shops nearby. The statue of Neptune fighting an octopus was added in 1878.
Our next stop was the Pantheon, which was begun in 27 BCE and mostly finished during the reign of Emperor Hadrian between 118 and 128. Until modern times, the dome was the largest in the world.
After leaving the Pantheon, we stopped for dinner in a plaza in front of the San Ignazio di Loyola church at restaurant called the La Cave di San Ignazio, which is also called Da Sabatino. The Church dates to the 17th century; the restaurant to the early 1900s.
The photo above is my emotional memory of the place. Everything we were served--potato and rice croquettes, green salad, tortellini with cream, spaghetti alioli, and spaghetti carbonara was delicious--but I loved the bruschetta.
78€ was probably the most we spent on any meal on our trip, but we spent almost as much feeding the five of us at Two Frogs Grill in Ardmore, and I have fonder memories of this meal in Rome than I have of that one in Oklahoma.
After supper, we made our way to the Trevi Fountain, where we threw in coins that promised we would return. The fountain was built in 1762. The coins are now collected daily and given to charity.
On our walk home, we walked through the Emperor Trajan's Forum, which was illuminated at night. The Forum was built between 106 and 112. Trajan--Hadrian's predecessor--was the last of the clean-shaven emperors. He was also from Spain.
Our path home was not direct (my phone did not record our route) in part because some of the streets were blocked off for Rome's first "mezza maratona."
Our walk home took us past the Roman Colosseum, which was built between the years 70 and 80 during the reign of emperor Vespasian, in part to commemorate his victory over Jewish rebels (the booty from the war paid for it).
The Colosseum was also on the half-marathoners' route.
I made a couple of wrong turns on the way from the Colosseum to the hotel, and since some of us were quiet tired, we ended up taking a taxi ride for the last few blocks of our trek home.
We were happy to arrive in our cool room.
In March 1871, radical, working-class revolutionaries led a successful uprising in Montmartre that helped establish the Paris Commune. The Commune took control of the capital city after Napoleon III surrendered to Prussia in the French-Prussian War that began in 1870. The Communards greatly reduced the power of the Church and made numerous changes to benefit the lives of the workers. A prominent group of feminists advocated for radical changes in the way the state treated women as well. On the 22nd of May, the French army entered Paris, and a day later they re-took Montmartre. That same day, the Communards set fire to the Tuileries Royal Palace, which is near the Louvre. Six days later, after 72 days in power, the Commune--which Marx and Lenin would later describe as the first "dictatorship of the proletariat"-- was crushed by the French army.
Construction of the Sacré Cœur Basilica began in 1876 and was finished in 1919. It was built on Montmartre, in part, to atone for the "sins" of the Paris Commune. During the period when the Sacré Cœur was being built, many well-known artists lived in the area, including Pierre-August Renoir, whose "Bal du moulin de la Galette" (1876) depict a dance at Montmartre on a Sunday afternoon. When Vincent Van Gogh lived here with his brother Theo 1886 and 1888, he painted one of the windmills that was on the hill. The composer Erik Satie lived here between 1890 and 1898. Both Modigliani and Picasso moved to Montmarte in 1904. Picasso painted "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" (1907) while his studio was in Montmarte.
Not long before the photo above was taken, Gerardo offered to give Pablo a shoulder ride and in the process of squatting to pick him up, tore the seat of his pants. He handled this fashion emergency with humor (and a sweater tied around his waist), and it became without a doubt, one of the highlights of the trip for Pablo.
He's dribbling the ball in this one.
The Rue Chappe is one of several steep staircase streets that lead down to Pigalle district and the Moulin Rouge.
The Moulin Rouge cabaret opened in 1889. It is here that the can-can dance was popularized. The building burned down in 1915 and was rebuilt in 1921.
We got home around 8:30. Nina left her journal in Madrid. Maria Rosa mailed it to us, and Gerardo picked it up at the post office, so she had some catching up to do. The rest of us spent our last evening in Paris, packing, doing laundry, and chilling to a recording of Nina Simone singing, among other things, "Lilac Wine." Gerardo, Mari and Emi also played Carioca. Emi won.
Not long before the photo above was taken, Gerardo offered to give Pablo a shoulder ride and in the process of squatting to pick him up, tore the seat of his pants. He handled this fashion emergency with humor (and a sweater tied around his waist), and it became without a doubt, one of the highlights of the trip for Pablo.
