What I saw in Rome

The list

Roman Forum
Palantine Hill
Pantheon
Coliseum
Museo e Galleria Borghese**
Spanish Steps/Piazza di Spagna
Chiesa di Santa Maria Maggiore
Castel Sant’Angel
Piazza di San Pietro
Tiber River
Appian Way
Colonna di Marcus Aurelius
Santa Maria della Concezione (the crypt only)**
Quattro fontane
Fontana di Tritone
Fontana delle Api**
Fontana di Trevi
Fontana dei Quattro fiumi
Bocca della verita
Circus Maximus

My favorites are marked with **. They were all in my “neighborhood”

I also tried to shop – this was hard because of August in general, and Ferragusto in particular. But I did buy a nice lambskin leather jacket.


My favorites

The Borghese gardens/gallery/museum was just fantastic. This was really my first cultural activity in Rome. A cardinal in the 17th century become obsessed with collecting art, and so built this galleria and absolutely stuffed it with commissioned and other art of the time. Included in the building are elaborate wall and ceiling painting and baroque decoration. There is just so much to see in this building. The Borghese is most famous for it’s Bernini sculpture. I loved the Apollo and Daphne piece in which Apollo is nabbing Daphne while shes turns into a laurel tree to escape his clutches. Hard to see how Bernini could sculpt these fine, upturned laurel leaves and little branches sprouting from her body out of marble.

The Cappuchin monks from Santa Maria della Concezione built in crypt in the lower level of the church. There, they used the bones from mummified and exhumed monks from previous generations of monks at this church to construct elaborate and baroque art forms on the walls and ceiling of a series of rooms. The art itself is interesting, but it’s also crazy to think of how many dead monks were used in the construction of these art pieces. Thousands. Some of the art consists of simple stacks of hundreds of bones. The motif is to take a particular bone (say, a shoulder blade), and use dozens or hundreds of them to create geometric patterns, often radial or curvilinear. No photographs, please.

In the last room, several mummified months preside over this latin phrase (approximately translated): “What you are, we once were. What we are, you will become.” I found the whole thing transfixing.

And, while there are many great water fountains around, I like best the little one just 50 meters from the Daphne, “Fontana delle Api”. It’s easy to miss, especially since the impressive Fontana di Tritone (Triton Fountain) occupies the center of the piazza. But this fountain is cute – little bees in a scallop shell. Very different than all the classical subject fountains I’ve seen throughout Rome – but it’s also a Bernini, like the big famous ones.