Palazzo Doria Pamphilj

Imagine this.

There you are, abandoned as a baby in an English orphanage awaiting adoption.  Along comes an Italian princess, childless, with an immense fortune including palaces, villas and a priceless art collection of Caravaggios, Brueghels and the like.  She adopts you and a younger baby girl and you go and live in an Italian palazzo in Rome. 

Today in Rome the traffic moves constantly from the Vittorio Emanuele monument at the bottom of the via del Corso to the Piazza del Popolo at the top.  A large and very grimy palazzo, spanning a couple of city blocks, fronts the Corso and as you walk along you can glimpse a very beautiful internal courtyard, one of four, in the 1,000-room palace.



Princess Orietta Pogson Doria Pamphilj died in 2000 leaving her two adopted children this palace along with other family treasures, and today you can visit the staterooms, chapel and art- and sculpture-galleries.  And as you walk through you can listen to the current Prince Jonathan Doria Pamphilj explain the history of this incredible place intertwined with stories of the family ancestors.  These include Pope Innocent X and his scheming sister-in-law, the evil Donna Olimpia, known as La Papessa, due to her constant and effective manipulation of the pope and the papal fortune.  Roman legend says the ghost of Donna Olimpia still clatters through the city in her devil carriage.  I'd believe it - just have a look at this marble bust of the woman:

And most sculptors presented idealised portraits of their subjects.

Lovelier things are to be seen in the gallery, including the salon of mirrors -

and this wonderful painting of the sinners in Paradise, by Jan Brueghel.  Note the pair of lions, and the porcupines in the right hand corner.  And in the left background, an elephant and two giraffes.  Brueghel supposedly hadn't seen many of these exotic animals and hence their positioning away from the main detail of the picture.

So the palazzo is very lovely, and probably very difficult to restore and maintain and it is therefore open to the public to help keep it in private hands.  These days the hands belong to the adopted boy and girl from the orphanage, except now they are 50 and 49 years old respectively.  Princess Gesine Margaret Orietta Mary Pogson Doria Pamphilj is a devout catholic, married to an Italian, with four daughters and is a staunch upholder of her religion.  Prince Jonathan Doria Pamphilj is an openly gay man, in a civil partnership with a Brazilian ex-restauranteur and has two children by surrogacy.

The right of these children to inherit the Doria Pamphilj estate after Jonathan's death was called into question by Princess Gesine Doria, on the basis that the children were born of surrogate mothers.  In 2010 a court in Rome declined to hear the case, so it's round one to Prince Jonathan.  But as you can imagine, there's huge family ructions over this one.

First days in Rome

Spring in Rome is lovely.  Everywhere you walk, vines cover buildings, trees are bursting into bloom, and wisteria is tumbling over walls.

 

In a garden near my apartment the scent of orange blossom is so heavy you can almost taste it.  The garden is steps away from the Colle Oppio park, which leads down to the Colosseum, and this park is a meeting place for the neighbourhood - kids, dogs, old people, students, family groups.  No matter what time of the day, there's always people sitting on the park benches, or lazing on the grass.  A little further on the great bulk of the Colosseum looms up, still half covered in scaffolding from a three-year restoration.  In fact, a lot of buildings in Rome are under repair at the moment, with screens shrouding their travertine facades. 

 

Yesterday I met my conversation exchange buddy for a trip down to the Roman houses and amphitheatre lying under the modern day buildings of the via Botteghe Oscure.  At one time, the Crypta Balbi lay within metres of Pompey's Theatre, with the colonnaded Cryptus - a huge covered arcade - annexed to the theatre that Cornelius Balbus built in 13BC.  Today you can descend into a Roman street, following the line of the old structure with the massive outer wall of the theatre still in place, and in fact providing very solid support for the jumble of successive buildings right up to today's modern museum sitting on top of it all.

 

Three years on, I am still meeting and talking with the same people I met and exchanged my basic Italian for their (considerably better) English.  It's incredibly satisfying to now have long and fairly easy conversations, the best reinforcement of how far my language has come.  Of course I am still making stupid mistakes, and often repeating the same basic errors, but on the whole I can now speak Italian :)

 

After a long day of exploring the structures of the amphitheatre, I walked back to my apartment in Monti, past the giant "typewriter" - the Vittorio Emanuele monument - passing the forums of both Caesar and Augustus, Trajan's Markets and the massive tufa wall of the Subura, which kept the rich safe from the constant threat of fires from the slums down below.  At 8pm the light was beginning to fade but Rome was busy, busy with people swarming along the via Foro Imperiale.  Almost a perfect day in the city.  Just need to get my aching feet used to the cobblestones again.