Saturday, August 11, 2007

No Place Like Rome - After the Touristy Spots - The Real Rome

The ANNOTICO Report

 

 

No Place Like Rome

NEWS.com.au - Australia
By Stanley Stewart 

August 10, 2007

YOU have waited in interminable queues to see the Sistine Chapel, you have braved the crowds on the Spanish Steps, you have had your picture taken with a fake gladiator in front of the Coliseum.

And you have felt, just a little, that Rome has escaped you. It is beautiful, it is fascinating, but it is elusive. You have the sense that the Eternal City is eternally slipping away down a cobbled side street, forever out of range.

I first went to Rome in the 1970s; I have since survived four olive harvests, three Italian girlfriends, two Vespas, and a Roma Lazio derby. I now spend almost half the year in Rome, in leafy Parioli.

Here is my collection of hot tips. They are unashamedly personal. My only criterion is to avoid the obvious, the main tourist sites that feature on everyone's first-time itinerary.

The best ceiling fresco may be the Sistine Chapel and the best square undoubtedly Piazza Navona. But I am assuming that you have already seen them. Or that you can find them yourself (just follow the crowds). This selection is about hidden gems; it is intended to nudge you off the tourist circuit, and into the city.


BEST RUIN< BR>Edward Gibbon claimed the great bathhouses were responsible for the decline and fall of Rome: all that moist nudity was weakening the Roman character. But in our age of spas and health clubs, they seem enviable institutions. The Terme di Caracalla was a cathedral of bathhouses. It accommodated 1600 bathers and included a gymnasium, a stadium, libraries, art galleries, shops and gardens. Even in ruin its scale astonishes. Surrounded by umbrella pines and swaths of cropped grass, the colossal vaults and the ghostly roofless halls evoke Rome's lost grandeur better than any ruin in the city. It survived until the 6th century when the invading Visigoths buggered up the plumbing.

Viale delle Terme di Caracalla, 10 minutes walk from the Circo Massimo Metro. 9am to 7.30pm, Tuesdays to Sundays; 9am to 2pm, Mondays. Tip: Go in the evening when the shadows are lengthening.


BEST MUSEUM
Divided between various buildings around the city, the best part of Museo Nazionale Romano, a great national collection of classical art, is in the gorgeously renovated Palazzo Massimo at 1 Largo di Villa Peretti. Everything here seems to be a masterpiece. The portrait busts are astonishing: Germanicus, Caligula and a ravishing Sappho. Don't miss the gladiator fresh from the arena (you can almost smell the sweat) or Niobe, a gloriously ambiguous female swoon, 2000 years before Bernini. But upstairs is the real treat: a series of paintings that adorned the walls of Roman villas. They have a freedom and lightness that would not be seen again until the end of the 19th century.

9am to 7.45pm. Closed Mondays.


BEST CHURCH
Santa Costanza: no building in Rome acts as such an eloquent bridge between the pagan and the Christian city. This little church, beyond the ancient walls, was built in AD350 as a mausoleum for Constantia and Helena, two daughters of Constan tine, the first emperor to embrace Christianity. One of the earliest surviving Christian buildings, it has the form and the decoration of a pagan temple. Its ghosts are the citizens of ancient Rome discovering a new religion.

Despite the name, Costantia was hardly a saint. According to the historian Marcellinus, she was a fury who goaded her husband to acts of terrible violence.

349 via Nomentana. 9am to noon, 4pm to 6pm. Closed Mondays.


BEST CATACOMBS
The catacombs beneath Sant'Agnese fuori le Mura, in the same complex as Santa Costanza, are a gloomy labyrinth of passages lined with burial niches. Follow the wide staircase leading down into the church on its south side, adorned with fragments of marble bearing scraps of Latin inscription and early Christian symbols. A guide will take you into the catacombs, which were stripped of their occupants by relic hunters in the 18th century. Gloomy and atmospheric.

9am to noon, 4pm to 6pm. Closed Mondays.


BEST SCULPTURE
The Sleeping Hermaphrodite is one of the most exquisite classical sculptures in Rome and one of the most surprising. There have been at least six copies of the Greek original. The best is in the Palazzo Massimo (see best museum), though the one in Galleria Borghese is possibly more famous. A naked woman lies sleeping, stretched out on a divan, one leg slightly cocked. From the back she is exquisite, sensual and very erotic. Walk round to the front and you see she has male genitals, an ambiguity that seems deeply Roman.


BEST PAINTINGS
A predictable choice, but Caravaggio, the bad boy of 16th-century art, is irresistible. The drama and realism of his work make it more suited to our age than his own. The magnificent The Conversion of St Paul in Santa Maria del Popolo was dismissed as "an accident in a blacksmith shop", while the first versio n of St Matthew and the Angel was rejected because the saint was portrayed as a tired old man with dirty feet. Don't miss the three St Matthew paintings in San Luigi dei Francesi in Piazza di San Luigi dei Francesi.

8am to 12.30pm, 3.30pm to 7pm daily.


BEST COURTYARD
Bramante was responsible for much of St Peters and his cloisters (Chiostro del Bramante) in the more modest church of Santa Maria della Pace are among my favourite places in Rome. The proportions of the courtyard are perfect: it soothes. Best thing of all is that you can enjoy it over lunch. In the arcade upstairs is an excellent bookshop and cafe; there are also exhibitions here.

The courtyard and exhibition space is open 10am to 8pm Tuesdays to Fridays, 10am to midnight on Saturdays and 10am to 9.30pm on Sundays. Closed Mondays. The cafe is open for lunch, noon to 4pm, then for coffee and cakes to 7pm.


BEST STRE ET
Running parallel to via del Babuino, from the Piazza del Popolo almost as far as the Spanish Steps, the via Margutta has been famous for artists' studios since 1600. High rents have forced the artists out, but galleries maintain the tradition. It is a wonderful backwater in the centre of Rome, lined with terracotta-coloured, wisteria-clad walls. The galleries are like pocket-sized museums, featuring everything from classical sculpture to old masters, from Persian carpets to contemporary art. If nothing suits your budget you can always try Alinari at the southern end of the street which sells a wonderful selection of photographic prints of old Rome at reasonable prices.


BEST CEILING
One of the grandest palaces in Rome, Palazzo Barberini, houses the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, a wonderful collection that includes works by Caravaggio, El Greco, Filippo Lippi and Raphael as well as Holbein's portrait of Henry VIII, all dressed up for his wedding to Anne of Cleves. But one of the best things in the palace is the ceiling fresco by Peitro da Cortona in the grand salon. The curators have thoughtfully supplied the room with comfortable benches on which to stretch out and view the ceiling in comfort.

8.30am to 7.30pm. Closed Mondays.


BEST CEMETERY
It may be a well-trodden path but a visit to the Protestant Cemetery by the Porta Ardeatina in Testaccio is like a rural retreat. Keats is buried here, as are Shelley's ashes. Their monuments attract a flow of earnest pilgrims. There is a host of other famous non-Catholics and atheists: Antonio Gramsci, Axel Munthe, Shelley's friend Edward Trelawney, Goethe's son August and more. While there don't forget to leave a donation for the cats (there is a box in the wall).

Via Caio Cestio

More tips from Stanley Stewart

http://www.news.com.au/travel/story/

0,23483,21380110-27984,00.html?from=mostpop

 

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