EUROPE DIARY - Rome
TUESDAY 18 AUGUST
Up latish and off to an all-day stint at
The Colosseum
One big motherfucker.
Anne posed for a photo with a few handy centurions, and also with Roman
advert for LOSEC – didn’t know big Julie had reflux…
& the Palatine and the Forum
Lots of unexplained brickwork.
It was like landing on the moon – I couldn’t see any connection between
then and now. (AM)
WEDNESDAY 19 AUGUST
Up more or less betimes and off to the Vatican Museum, all sorts lovely
Roman ten-ton porphry baths (some with drainholes, some where you presumably
had to siphon) and the Laocoon and the Apollo Belvedere and the Sistine
Chapel, where Chris thought the Michelangelos looked remarkably poorly
designed: all these little different boxes of pictures. Wheelchair
advantage – remove headrest and lean head on top of back to survey ceilings
in comfort, unlike everyone else.
Then round to
St. Peters
One big motherfucker.
Front invisible under scaffolding. The wheelchair entrance involves
going under a side archway past the Swiss Guards, heading up a ramp and
emerging into the nave under the skeletal foot of Death in the middle of
a pope’s tomb by Bernini,
Say this for Bernini, if you gave him a church wall the size of an
Imax screen he knew what to do with it. Unlike Michelangelo.
Anne thinks Bernini is a greater sculptor than Michelangelo, but then
the only Michelangelo sculpture she’s seen is the Pieta, which is his all-time
worst. Home to squabble till bed.
THURSDAY 20 AUGUST
Bernini day. Off to Villa Borghese to see Bernini exhibition.
Villa Borghese
Anne humming
“Berninis
In bikinis
Are coming down the stairs…”
Anne is going up in the narrowest lift in the world: her wheelchair
will not fit, she has to be transferred to a cane chair for the trip up
and in to another wheelchair at the top.
Full of magnificent pieces and utter crap. (AM)
Berninis and Botticellis and Titians and a nice Honhurst of Susanna and
the Elders, a subject that comes up a remarkably large number of times
for what is after all a clerical environment. Also putti on every
flat surface, or, to put it another way, the kind of thing that got the
Christian Brothers into such trouble.
Then a stroll through Rome missing the St. Theresa (closed for
August, as were all the shops) but catching several Bernini pallazos, churches,
etc. along the way. Also Bernini’s elephant with a too-long trunk
and an obelisk on his back, very Discworld. And
The Pantheon
One big motherfucker.
And a coffee-granita-and-cream at La Tazza d’Oro, mecca of coffeelovers
the world over.
Bernini was a prince among popes – he was responsible for half Rome.
Poor Bernini – in his time they didn’t have illuminated fountains with
coloured water. (AM) (Oh yes, they did! CB)
Home, too pooped to pop, to find Clinton has bombed Afghanistan.
NB Check ruins for DNA.