Arrivederci Roma!

Two quick posts before heading home tomorrow - see below.  In three weeks I’ve done a lot of travelling, and seen some amazing places.  It’s been great to be independent enough to just jump on a train and go somewhere new – something that hasn’t been easy when studying here.  Plus, the weather has been absolutely fantastic!

Here's a taste of today.

Arch of Constantine, Roman Forum

 

Tiber from the Ponte Sisto bridge

EUR

Very few tourists go to EUR, Mussolini’s Esposizione Universale Roma although they all see it from the airport.  It’s impossible to miss the giant dome of the Basilica of Peter and Paul, and the Palazzo della Civiltà Romana , the “square colosseum” designed and built in the 1940’s to celebrate 20 years of fascist rule. 

 

Mussolini had a great admiration for ancient Rome (as much as he razed some of it to build his grand roads) and the architecture of the public buildings were built along the lines of such monuments as Trajan’s Markets and the Forum.  Materials like travertine, tufa and marble were used in a take-no-prisoners clean aesthetic, and the public buildings, arranged within a grid with central axis, stand out in stark relief.

There are no piazzas, no chaos and none of the crowding usually associated with Rome.  It’s largely a business district, with head offices for a lot of national and multi-national companies based here.

So why go there?  Because there are three museums at EUR, and they all house incredible treasures.  One, the Civiltà Romana, displays the scale model of ancient Rome, familiar to anyone who has seen a travel guide to Rome.  The Forma Urbis, or the Severan Marble Map of Rome from 200 AD is also held here.  Unfortunately the Civilta Romana remains closed due to lack of funds.

Another, the Prehistoric Ethnographic Museum houses artefacts and information on human settlements from the Iron Age, including tombs from the Bronze age uncovered close by at Tolfa, a little to the North.

The museum I visited yesterday, along with my italian conversation buddy, was the Museum of Early Middle Ages, which houses some beautiful finds from the settlements of the Lungobards in Italy.  Armour, jewellery and weaponry in precious metals and stone dazzles.  But the greatest surprise of all is housed here – an entire frescoed room in opus sectile, a style of marble mosaic, uncovered from Ostia Antica in 1960 and reassembled here at the museum.  The room, part of a seaside villa, dates from 385 AD. No-one knows why this room remained uncompleted (the stones were laid out in special formation, ready to be fixed to the walls and ceiling) although there are theories.  Was there an earthquake?  Was there a pagan revolt?  Miraculously the completed walls collapsed in on themselves, sealing the mosaics in several layers.  Within the reconstructed room you can see lions and tigers hunting prey and the figure of a man, with halo, believed alternately to be Christ, or a philosopher.  The mosaics are of the highest quality and marbles are lovely.

The mosaic room housed at the museum

One side of the mosaic, tigers hunting.  The "Christ"
figure is on the lower panel

Castel Gandolfo



Lake Albano, from Castel Gandolfo
 

On Monday  I took the regional train to Castel Gandolfo, a tiny town that stands high above a volcanic lake, about 25 kilometres from Rome. Due to its proximity, many Romans have villas or apartments on the shores of Lake Albano – in fact the Romans have been holidaying here since the days of the Republic.  The emperor Domitian had his imperial villa at Castel Gandolfo, and today you can explore the ruins of the villa, which lie underneath the grounds of the Pope’s summer residence.

The Pope, along with most of its residents avoiding hot and dusty Rome in August, leaves the city and spends his summer by the water at Castel Gandolfo, arriving by Papal helicopter.  The summer residence stands in the main piazza, and from the balcony the Angelus (blessing) is given every Sunday.  

On a Monday morning Castel Gandolfo is extremely quiet, just a few local people having a coffee and gossip, plus a handful of tourists.  It’s quite easy to walk the town’s narrow streets within an hour, fetching up every now and again to admire the stunning view from numerous vantage points.

The Papal summer palace

I had lunch high up, on a little terrace overlooking the lake and it was sublime.  Every now and then a sailing boat would flit across the mirror surface of the lake, but aside from this, there was very little noise.  Incredible to leave the chaos and Rome and chance on such a peaceful place.

The Claudian Aqueducts

I took the train back to Rome mid afternoon, passing the park of aqueducts close to the Appian Way. These aqueducts were completed under the Emperor Claudius in 52 AD; amazingly, as close to the city as they are, they remain in large open parklands.  From the train, they’re an arresting sight.

San Gimignano

After a couple of days in Florence last week battling not only huge crowds, but also the filming of the new Dan Brown movie (coyly entitled "Headache" during production-under-wraps, which proved prophetic for anyone on foot), I went down a nostalgic path and visited a place I haven’t seen for 26 years – the medieval town of San Gimignano.  Situated a few kilometres from Siena, San Gimignano appears a modern city from a distance, complete with multi-storey towers:

As you get closer you realise these towers are of weathered grey stone and at least 800 years old.

 

In the middle-ages, when fortifications were necessary for survival in the endless fighting between the Guelfs (pro-Pope) and Ghibellines (pro-Emperor), up to 70 towers stood in San Gimignano.  Today, a dozen towers remain, along with two very beautiful piazzas, narrow streets, and medieval and renaissance artworks in both the Palace of the Podesta and the Church of the Collegiata.

Frescoes in the Palace of the Podesta.  The lower right
plaque commemorates Dante's visit in 1300.

Of particular beauty is this fresco of the Annunciation by Domenico Ghirlandaio:

And in the Collegiata, fresco cycles line both sides of the church and the nave with stories from the Old and New Testaments.  The vaulted ceilings are painted lapis lazuli blue, with glittering gold stars.   It’s unbelievably lovely, and easy to spend several hours trying to decipher the stories of the Creation and The Life of Christ.

Taking pictures inside the Collegiata and the Palace is impossible.  The guardians are incredibly strict about this and will hunt you down and harangue you at length.  I’m not certain of their reasoning, and it’s particularly strange after being able to freely photograph in the Uffizi gallery in Florence!  These below are from the internet.

Creation of Adam, Bartolo di Fredi

 

Jesus Enters Jerusalem, Lippo Memmi

With entry to the Palace anyone can climb the highest tower remaining in San Gimignano today, the Torre Grossa.  It's 177 feet up, and a lot of steps!  The last part is via a ladder, with little head-space.  But the views over Tuscany are superb:

From the top of the Torre Grossa, pretending heights don't bother me

At dusk I headed out for dinner and a glass of the wonderful Brunello red, which cost almost as much as my steak.  By now the town was quiet – there are a lot of day visitors here from Florence and Siena.  But at 9pm, the piazzas were almost deserted.

Florence

I’ve been off touring for a few days, and it feels like I’ve been away for ages. 

Last Tuesday I took the frecciarossa, the very fast train, to Florence - a trip that takes only one and a half hours on the super-rapido.   By 1.30pm I was at the Santa Maria Novella station and in my lovely room at the Rinascimento Palace by 2.00 (a hotel, despite the name – although any multi-storey apartment building in Italy is a palazzo.)

My hotel was just across the Ponte Vecchio on the Oltrano side.  From my window I could literally throw a stone into the Arno River.

 

Outside my hotel, towards the Ponte Vecchio

 Florence was humming.  On the Ponte Vecchio, the medieval bridge, the crowd was often so thick it was impossible to walk.  But the views of the Arno, on an almost-perfect blue day were perfect.

The Arno at dusk

I took a walk up to Santa Maria in Novella at dusk, the façade lined with Florence’s customary green, white and rose marble.   The basilica looks out onto one of the biggest piazzas in the city, at the moment hosting events for students enrolling in the Erasmus Program, giving them an opportunity to partake some of their studies in Florence. ( And students are everywhere in Florence – milling about the pubs, riding their bikes at breakneck speed, or gathering on the bridges to practice their Italian and chat up the locals.) 

Brunelleschi, who later designed the great dome of Florence for the Santa Maria Del Fiore designed the pulpit here at S.M. in Novella – purportedly where Galileo was first attacked by the clergy, after which he was indicted for his anti-geocentric views.  

The interior of medieval churches can be somewhat gloomy, however  to enter the courtyard of Santa Maria is lovely, with its frescoes fading away to gentle sepia colours.  In the centre the little garden was full of wild daisies and grasses.  Leading off the courtyard are the Passages of the Dead (I suspect kids would love this!) where tombstones, fragments of statuary and other mementoes are affixed in one long, and curiously uplifting passage.

The Passages of the Dead

The courtyard of Santa Maria in Novella

 

A lovely first day in Florence.  Uffizi tour tomorrow.

Domus Aurea

When the Emperor Nero built his Domus Aurea, or Golden House in 64 AD, Rome had recently undergone a great blaze that wiped out villas and houses on the Caelian Hill.  Rumour had it that the fire had been deliberately started (hence “Nero ..fiddled while Rome burned”) although today this is disputed by historians.   Whatever did enable Nero to reclaim large tracts of land in the centre of Rome – the Domus Aurea covered some 100 acres – he built a lavish colonnaded structure, with mosaic ceilings inlaid with precious stones, rooms faced with marble and wonderful frescoes.  There was, according to scholars of the day, an ingenious dining room open to the sky, with a revolving fretwork ceiling that rained rose petals and perfumes down on the guests.  Formal gardens and parks spread as far as the Palatine Hill. A huge bronze statue of Nero, over 100 feet high, stood at the entrance to the Domus Aurea, representing the emperor as a sun god.

The entrance to the Domus Aurea today

Nero committed suicide just four years later in 68 AD, after the Senate declared him a public enemy.  He was 30 years old.  What followed was the Damnatio memoriae, a complete eradication of Nero’s works.  The Domus Aurea was stripped of its treasures,  it was filled with earth and the public baths, the Baths of Titus, were built over the villa.  The pleasure lake of the Domus became the site of the Colosseum.

The Domus Aurea remained buried until the 15^th century, when a young Roman fell through the earth into an underground grotto filled with wonderful frescoes.   Soon the renaissance artists were letting themselves down on ropes into these underground caves to study the paintings and later, copy the techniques.  This style of painting had never been seen before and was reproduced in palaces and churches such as Rome’s Villa Farnesina and the Vatican by famous artists of the day, including Raphael. 

18th Century work using the technique. French Academy, Rome

The damp earth continued to seep into the Domus Aurea, limiting access.  Within the last 20 years, it has been mostly closed due to subsidence and flooding.  In 2010, a huge chunk of the ceiling in the complex collapsed.  The Roman authorities began to work on the site, fearing further and irretrievable damage.

It has therefore been nigh-on impossible to visit Nero’s Golden House.  Year after year on visits to Rome it has remained closed.  Earlier this year it was open for a very short period.  However, amazingly, here it May it is again open for weekend visits, restricted to small numbers, and only on application.  There are two tours in English per week.

I'm still pinching myself that I was lucky enough to get the last ticket for a tour yesterday afternoon.  At 3pm I queued along with my fellow visitors, hardhats in hand (the site is still undergoing extensive restoration) waiting for our guide, one of the archeologists at the Domus Aurea to lead us through the complex.

Beginning our tour

We began in one wing of the palace, and our guide explained that we would need to discern the original structure of Nero’s house from later additions under the Emperor Trajan.  At first, as we headed down the scaffolded corridors we saw little of the Golden House but as we walked further towards the centre we began to see frescoed rooms, some soaring upwards of 30 feet, and traces of mosaics on the ceilings.  At one point we stopped to admire a mosaic floor, uncovered only two weeks previously.

Mosaic floor, newly discovered

 

The frescoed ceiling.  The holes were made by the artists in the
15th century to gain access from above.

The long curved gallery, once open to the pleasure gardens

One of the better preserved rooms, frescoes still colourful

 

We reached the famous octagonal dining room with its giant oculus letting in light from above (today's ground level).  This was the location of the dining room and the revolving ceiling.  Beyond one of the eight entrances to the room lies a ramped structure, believed to be an artificial waterfall.  It must have been incredible to sit and dine in this space, with the sound of water tricking down, looking out towards the Palatine Hill.

The octagonal dining room

But everywhere the damp is oozing in.  It was hot yesterday – too hot for long sleeves – but in the Domus it was cold.  The water dripped steadily down from the ceilings, and the frescoes, faded but still discernable, were covered in bright green mould.  There was a real sense of the park above us, the Colle Oppio, breaking into the structure with its trees sending down their roots, and the damp earth above bearing down on the shell of the Domus.  The structure is incredibly strong, with beautifully constructed arches and colonnades, but it’s fighting with the elements above it.

Water runs off a frescoed arch

 

Heading along the ramps, shiny from the damp

The archeologists have hatched a plan to slowly replace the soil on the Colle Oppio with lighter materials, including crushed clay pebbles, and to remove some of the heavier trees and vegetation to enable the Domus Aurea to breathe again.  It seems a massive undertaking.  But they plan to restore the rooms to their original glory and bring some of the frescoes to life again. 

Vino Roma

My temporary home in Rome is in the Rione (suburb or region) of Monti, one of the most ancient quarters in Rome, with a succession of building styles that cover over 2,500 years of history - roman, medieval, renaissance, baroque and modern.  The name derives from the fact that it comprised four of Rome's seven hills, and I can attest very much to the topography, as I am constantly climbing up or walking down steep streets that remain pretty well as they were laid out in the middle ages.  One of these streets, bordered by medieval buildings, a large and gloomy church and an adjoining convent, is the Via In Selci.  Late on a Spring afternoon, the sun turns its buildings to burnt umbers and rose golds.

Via In Selci

 

A little way down the Via In Selci is Vino Roma.  Vino Roma has been on my "must visit" list for about three years now, ever since I read about Hande Leimer, its founder, on one of Rome's best food blogs, Katie Parla's "Parla Food". 

 

Hande has done it tough as a female sommelier, especially in the machismo-dominated wine world that is Rome.  But she has turned her venture into a real success - the week I looked at potential wine tastings I noticed there were events scheduled every day except Monday.  So, liking the sound of Hande's Wine & Cheese Dinner, I reserved my place and made my way down the Via In Selci last Thursday night.  At 6pm  the sun was still high in the sky (at the moment, it gets dark a little after 8 at night).

 

Vino Roma occupies a wine studio space with a very long tasting table, and it soon filled up with eight wine lovers from Wales, Israel, America and Australia.  Hande explained we would taste five wines, two of them on an empty stomach, to give us the opportunity to compare our wines with, and without food. 

 

Whilst in Rome I've tried to stick to local wines from the Lazio region (of which Rome is part) but I have to say, the Frascatis, Trebbianos and the Est! Est! Est! have been drinkable, but not amazing.  So it was interesting to try a wonderful dry white wine from Lombardy in the far north of Italy, and a stunning and gutsy red, the Nero d'Avola, from Sicily in the far south.

Hande explains the concept of 'Orange' wine

 

After learning to look, smell and taste our wine we progressed from a sparkling prosecco and a flinty fiano to an "orange" wine, a new/old method of winemaking that involves using white grapes with a red wine technique, which puts some tannins into the wine.  And it really does have an orange hue!  Food began to accompany our wine including suppli,  risotto balls particular to the Lazio region and made with cacio cheese and pepper, fresh ricotta (once it's refrigerated it's ruined, according to Hande.  Ours was hours old.), salame, prosciutto, mozzarella, rocket, those wonderful Italian tomatoes, fava beans, pecorino, country bread, artisan cheeses.  With a sweet Garganega wine from the Veneto we tried a delicacy from Sardinia - cave-aged cheese helped along via a second fermentation by worms.  Worms?  Yes, really.  It was incredibly strong but paired well with the desert wine.

 

I learned a lot and had a great evening - not only from enjoying the company and the wine but also from trying some new and delicious food. In relation to the wine, there were a couple of things Hande told us that stayed in my memory: 

1. Look at the colour of red wine, make a 'lake' in your glass by tipping it to one side.  Is the "shore" rusty or pink?  If it's rusty it's aged, but aged not necessary in years, rather it has more oxidation (although it could be both).
2. No Italian vineyards by law can be irrigated once they're established.  The roots of our vines in Australia, and in the US, go down about three feet.  In Italy, the vines have roots to 17 feet.

We wound up about 9.30 with some people actually having to get on planes the next day.  I had an easy walk home accompanied by the rosy glow only good company, food and wine can bring.  And slept brilliantly!