Rome Part I

I feel like I've been sprinting through a museum, both because my feet hurt like hell and because I've been seeing Rome, the cradle of Western civilization, at a very high rate of speed. We got here late Sunday afternoon and found our way to the home of our friends Jennifer and David, and their children Lee and Isaac. They've spent the past year here and are returning to New York soon.

We spent Monday morning in ancient Rome and the afternoon in the Renaissance. MFAH, Jennifer, Lee, and I went to the Forum and wandered around. I was struck by how close together everything was; much like Chicago's own Milennium Park, where the sculptures are crowded together, forcing people to interact with each other, these monuments were crowded around a public space where everyday people from all over the Empire jostled together. (Yes, I just compared ancient Rome with the finest city in the Midwest.) Again, it was great to have such wonderful tour guides: both MFAH and Jennifer knew quite a bit about what we were seeing, and they were able to fill in the gaps in my knowledge of ancient Rome that Rome, I, Claudius, and Ben-Hur didn't fill. The highlight of the forum area was the house of Augustus, where you can still see original frescoes, or at least the fragments of them that haven't disintigrated yet. Both Jennifer and MFAH had horror stories about the disintigration of ancient artifacts: at Pompeii, there's a sort of crisis underway, as lots of the details that have been left exposed to the elements and to tourists' hands are gone, including some that MFAH's colleague wrote about only two years ago. The park employees were too pushy here: they gave you a set amount of time in each room and then started to usher you to the next. I understand they want to let as many people see it as possible, but a few minutes isn't long enough for more than a cursory look.

Lee and Jennifer left us after this, and MFAH and I went to see the Arch of Constantine and the Colosseum. The Colosseum is a lot more impressive from the outside than from the inside; you can't go down into the basement, which is exposed, and although there is a wooden deck built at what would have been the floor level, you can't go out on it. Add to that the fact that the one bunch of seats that are "restored" are in fact completely wrong (there's apparently a lot of bad restoration around, most of it perpetrated under Mussolini and serving Fascist ends), and it's just not all that great. But the Arch of Constantine is amazing. When we were finished with the ancient stuff, we learned a valuable lesson about Rome: never eat lunch at a place that's within view of any ruins. We ate at a place outside the Colosseum, and we paid 15 euros (approximately $21) for what was basically a frozen TV dinner. Easily the worst meal we've ever had while traveling, and for MFAH, who has done significantly more traveling, that's really saying something.

After lunch was St. Peter's basilica, which a good friend called the greatest work of art ever created by man. I can't agree. It's impressive, certainly, but it's just too much. It's overdecorated, overstatued, overbronzed, overpillared, overpilastered, and overcooked. There are individual works of art that are phenomenal, but they're set against a Baroque riot of color and shape; the end result is incomprehensible and tiring. My favorite parts were the ceiling—which was, in fact, designed by Michelangelo instead of the overmannered Bernini—and the Bernini statues set into alcoves in the pilasters lining the nave. These Berninis were great because they were set against a plain background; since you could take them in as individual works, they didn't disappear into the exploding circus of the rest of the building. And of course, Michelangelo's Pieta, set off from visitors' grasping hands by plexiglass, was beautiful, but even more beautiful to me was an unlabeled and unidentified medieval bronze crucifix set along the wal of the Pieta's plastic prison.

Then we headed back to J&D's before heading out en masse to dinner, which was the best dinner so far on this trip: real Neapolitan pizza at an outdoor cafe. I need to rest a moment—I feel lightheaded just thinking about it. We went on a walking tour of the city center, where David, an architect; MFAH, a Renaissance art historian; and Jennifer, who studied art history, provided me with an incredibly detailed and passionate explaination of all the wonderful architecture we were walking by.

Of course not everything can be so wonderful: we may have fried our camera beyond repair; if it's beyond repair, all of the photographs we took of the Forum and St. Peter's are lost forever. It's supposed to function on either 110 or 220 volts, and it's charged without damage before on this trip, but when we plugged it in to recharge this time, there was a spark, and now it won't turn on. We bought a new camera today, and maybe we can get the old one repaired.

Tuesday morning we went to the Borgese museum, which specializes in ancient art but has a pretty nice collection of Renaissance and later periods. There was a special exhibition of Corregio, a minor Italian Renaissance painter. I don't like him: I don't like his fuzzy, insubstantial backgrounds, and I don't like the fact that none of his faces look "right," for lack of a better word. Most of them were rather unconvincing religious paintings, but there were two mythological subjects that both I and MFAH liked. We tend to mostly agree on art, except where we don't. But the highlight here was surprisingly Bernini, whom I didn't like at St. Peter's. Here they had a bunch of incredibly kinetic sculptures of Biblical and mythological scenes, and they really looked like the figures were about to burst out of their marble prisons and run across the room. And because they weren't surrounded by a surfeit of decoration, I could appreciate them as individual works of art. They might have been my favorite things in Rome, but the museum had one more surprise in store: a room full of Corregio's drawings, which were so phenomenal I'm going to buy a coffee table book of them when I get home. If he couldn't paint a face to save his life, he drew some so achingly beautiful that I could have spent the afternoon looking at them.

This afternoon we're shifting gears and going to Dario Argento's World of Horror, a combination shop and museum dedicated to the work of the king of Italian horror films. His films are celebrations of style over substance, of scenes of individual brilliance surrounded by halfhearted plots and burdened by substandard acting, so I think Bernini would approve of our visit, even if Michelangelo might not.

More later—we just got back from walking several hundred miles, and I'm tired.