C’mon Down to the Sculpture Warehouse – Every Bust Must Go! – Sculpture in the Vatican

There is an overwhelming amount of sculpture in Rome. Just writing this will in no way convey to you, one of my ten readers, the true magnitude of this fact. It is everywhere. In museums, in parks, in every church, in the ruins…Some religious, some political, some breathtaking art for art’s sake.

After the first few thousand sculptures, I was struggling to retain my awe – my ability to truly appreciate each individual work of art for its unique form, function, and perspective. And then I toured the Vatican. No Words Need Apply. None of them will fit. Instead of attempting to choose just one for this post, I decided to share with you all how crazy my experience was. These photographs were taken in The Hallowed Room of Busts. Well, that’s the name I’ve given it. I just like an excuse to capitalize words. Behold…

                             One row…

                         Two rows…

                         Three rows…

                         Four rows…

                        Five rows…

Beauty Is In The Eye Of The Thirsty – My Favorite Fountain in Rome

Yes, Rome has a stunning array of beautiful fountains, with sculptures of gods, mythical beasts and rulers. Fountains to inspire awe and reverence; to remind the plebeian struggling his way through the gutters of life to look up toward the heavens, and remember that no matter what brutalities befell his corporeal being, true peace and happiness awaited all of the faithful at the end of this mortal coil.

Ha. I’m just screwing with you all. Romans didn’t have that belief system. Their conquerors, the Christians did. But my favorite fountains, for the most part, are not for admiring. Not in the traditional sense. They did engender a deep appreciation for accessible, clean, and delicious drinking water. Especially on hot days while speed walking thirteen miles over nine hours. Trust me – nothing is more beautiful than one of these.

The best fountain of all.

Decorative and functional!

The Galleria Borghese, A Sketch, and the Unknown Artist

“It is a measure of how accustomed we are to inattention that we would be thought unusual and perhaps dangerous if we stopped and stared at a place for as long as a sketcher would require to draw it.”
– John Ruskin, The Art of Travel

My sketch of a painting by “I don’t know who – I barely had time to snap a photo of it.”
I actually tried very hard to research who painted this. My sketch is from a closeup picture of the lower half of the painting at an angle to cut the glare. If anyone out there knows, by all means, enlighten me.

              The original painting

A Sketch on Observation

“No changing of place at a hundred miles an hour will make us one whit stronger, happier, or wiser. There was always more in the world than men could see, walked they ever so slowly; They will see it no better for going fast. The really precious things are thought and sight, not pace.”
– John Ruskin, The Art of Travel

         My Roman cobblestone sketch

Death, Ruins and Lucretius in Italy

Many of the ruins that I saw in Rome were packed to capacity with tourists. This made contemplation of my surroundings, and connecting them to my studies, difficult. Ostia Antica was a blissful exception. It is outside of the city, and doesn’t attract the crowds that Rome does.

The site is stunningly beautiful, and the peaceful setting made it easier for the magnitude of what I was seeing to sink in.

I wondered who had lived and died there. What their lives were like. The unrecorded lives, without statues or monuments left to history. I wondered if and how they envisioned a distant future, and whether they had any idea that they, not as individuals, but as a culture, would live on in history for so great a period of time. Would it have meant anything to them? What did it mean to me? And why did I feel like the ghost, and not them?

I’m still working on the last two questions, but the poem Death by Lucretius came to mind, and I read it again upon returning to Rome. The end of this poem stood out as being particularly appropriate to what I had been thinking while exploring Ostia Antica:

We may be reassured that in our death
We have no cause for fear, we cannot be
Wretched in nonexistence. Death alone
Has immortality, and takes away
Our mortal life. It does not matter a bit
If we once lived before.

So I Had a Literary Insight in London…

Actually, It was in Cambridge. I am a Virginia Woolf fan, and it would have been difficult to avoid thinking about  A Room of One’s Own while I was there for the day. It is an intelligent, funny, scathing and sad bit of feminist literature, and it came to my mind while I was in the Trinity College Library in Cambridge. Another blessed location of near complete silence and no photography. But I Googled an image of the library interior!

                              Shhhhhhh….

I will admit that I don’t spend a great deal of time considering feminist issues in America. We want it better, but we’ve got it pretty damned good. I’m not going to be stoned and set on fire because I spurned the advances of my neighbor who then accused me of adultery. But I did ponder where I would be allowed to go and what I would be allowed to see had I been visiting Cambridge in Virginia’s time. Yes, by 1929 life for women had improved. Giving us a few modern conveniences and a little leisure time inevitably led to a full-blown revolt that didn’t begin to calm down until some point in the mid 1980’s. At least in a good chunk of Europe and America.

After freezing my heiny off in a punt ride down the canal, I was exceedingly glad that I could walk unaccompanied into a pub and order a lovely pint of hard cider, where my literary insight was swept away in a current of alcohol and cold medicine. I was also briefly very grateful that I was not required to wear a corset in public.

Much Ado About The Globe Theater in London

I am a Shakespeare fan, and have read all of his plays and seen many live or in films. There is a bit of a thrill in seeing it performed in London. From 1598 to 1644 ( burned down in 1613, rebuilt in 1614) The Globe was evidently scandalously popular. Puritans had it demolished in 1644. Killjoys.

Much Ado about Nothing is not one of my favorite plays, but it is enjoyable and witty, with love, deceit, bitterness, trickery, and a happy ending. The theater itself is quite rustic, with a circular interior of multiple floors hugging the walls very narrowly, so that all playgoers have a clear view, and a numb rear end before the play is finished.

Seeing a Shakespeare play in this famous setting on the banks of the Thames felt like being in a historical reenactment. If only this feeling had flowed over into the train ride back to our lodgings…

The British Library – London

`It is a good thing that I took notes, because the tour guide and guards in the room housing very rare and ancient texts in the British Museum will not allow you to take photographs. All of our personal belongings were stowed in a locker before entering this magical room. I thought of my father the entire time, and finally got to see many priceless literary works that he had schooled me on as a child. And of course this made me want to cry. I’m beginning to think I should get a map of the world and put little teardrop pushpins in all the places in the world I have cried.

Is Present Day Italian Food in Italy Better Than Italian Food in America?

I’m supposed to write a blog post on a meal I ate in Rome, and the sensations of that food or setting. For setting alone, I definitely enjoyed the adorably goofy restaurant at Ostia Antica, and our toga wearing waiter that was from – I don’t remember – Hungary? Poland? Somewhere in Russia, maybe. Definitely not Italy. That was a good day. The food, not so much.

A couple of days ago I was discussing Italian food with my son. The conversation went something like this: I said, “Italian food was not at all what I was expecting.” My son replied, “Whaddaya mean?” “Well, it was all super-salty,” I said, “and just not that great. The quality of the ingredients, the combinations of flavors…I don’t know – it was as if Americans think it’s great because they’re in Italy, not because the food is actually superior. And then I wondered if I thought this simply because I am accustomed to American interpretations of Italian food, and it is a matter of palate familiarity, or if Americans actually make better Italian food than Italians?” To which my son replied, “And then you decided that you were right, Italian food in Italy was “meh” and Americans do it better?” “Wow, it’s like you can read my mind or something!” I exclaimed.

Four Seasons in Rome vs My Two Weeks in Rome – A Contemplation of Time

I went outside today for the first time since I returned from Rome. Not even my son could lure me out, let alone my adult daughter, my aunt, or my closest friend. They understood. They know me. I am an excessively shy, solitary, private person. I don’t think that a single one of my fellow study abroad travelers would say that they know me better now than they did before we embarked on our journey. Only in the most superficial sense. I find a calmness and safety in solitude, not in numbers. I have encountered many people that find this off-putting, which is not my intention. It is merely my nature.

That said, traveling at a nearly comically frenzied pace with a large group of people through foreign lands populated so thickly that I expected to be lifted off of the ground and carried along by the sheer numbers and momentum of the crowds was an interesting experience for me. I don’t have panic attacks or high anxiety in large crowds. I do find it quite unpleasant.

What does this, specifically, have to do with my experience in Rome on the whole? Time. Not more time, as in Anthony lived in Rome for a year and I breezed through for two whole weeks. It was the quality of my time, not the quantity. I needed more time in my time. I wanted to spend one whole day just sitting at my open second story window carefully considering the changes in the color and hue of the stucco building directly across the street, from a thin, pale orange at dawn to a deep rust color at dusk. I needed to spend