A Month in Bella Italia

[Flutterby]

It's a pleasure leachy...so glad you're enjoying it!

[Lisbeth]

I am not very keen on baroque architecture, but I must admit that Sant'Andrea della Valle is impressive!

I also love the area of the Pantheon, maybe because it is quiet

....luckily they don't do the same with larger rubbish.

Lucky that you were not there two years ago, when there was rubbish all over the place. There was a very serious issue about Mafia, strike a new Mayor etc. The Italians are famous for making the most simple of things to a nightmare and while discussing, everybody speaking at the same time, the problem that could have been resolved in a few days, lasted for months
Common sense is a rare product in Italy

William Kentridge's artwork is still there. It is sad to think that sooner or later it will disappear

L'Altare della Patria is the ugliest monument ever built! Typical fascism exaggeration, almost obscene

you must have grown a lot shorter with all the walking done during your stay in the Bel Paese

Awaking memories

[Richprins]

Exquisite stuff, Flutts, you should become a tour guide when you are big!

The food looks interesting...no idea what the names mean!


Naughty painting fake dome...

Lovely pics - I like the slomo fountain!

[Flutterby]

I am not very keen on baroque architecture, but I must admit that Sant'Andrea della Valle is impressive!

I also love the area of the Pantheon, maybe because it is quiet

....luckily they don't do the same with larger rubbish.

Lucky that you were not there two years ago, when there was rubbish all over the place. There was a very serious issue about Mafia, strike a new Mayor etc. The Italians are famous for making the most simple of things to a nightmare and while discussing, everybody speaking at the same time, the problem that could have been resolved in a few days, lasted for months
Common sense is a rare product in Italy

William Kentridge's artwork is still there. It is sad to think that sooner or later it will disappear

L'Altare della Patria is the ugliest monument ever built! Typical fascism exaggeration, almost obscene

you must have grown a lot shorter with all the walking done during your stay in the Bel Paese

Awaking memories

Thanks Lis. L'Altare della Patria is certainly big and I have to say that we thought it was very impressive, but I suppose I can understand the locals thinking it was obscene.
The one good thing about walking so much was that I didn't put on any holiday weight!

Exquisite stuff, Flutts, you should become a tour guide when you are big!

The food looks interesting...no idea what the names mean!


Naughty painting fake dome...

Lovely pics - I like the slomo fountain!

Thanks for the comments RP. Whenever I get back from a trip I always look up the places we've been to, to learn a bit more about them. When you are sightseeing it's impossible to remember everything you've read, so this way I remember the details and learn a lot more too...Google is a wonderful thing!
Panini are basically sandwiches but with nicer bread than sliced bread, prosciutto is Parma ham, and mortadella is sort of like polony but 100 x nicer and usually with pistachio nuts inside.

[Richprins]

Polony with nuts?!

These Romans are crazy...

[Flutterby]

For our second day in Rome we had pre-booked to see the Vatican Museums, the Sistine Chapel and St. Peter's. Thank goodness we did pre-book...the queue for the Vatican Museums was 4 hours long!!

The Vatican Museums display works collected by popes throughout the centuries including several of the most renowned Roman sculptures and most important masterpieces of Renaissance art in the world. The museums contain roughly 70,000 works, of which 20,000 are on display. There are 54 galleries, with the Sistine Chapel being the very last gallery within the Museum. It is one of the largest museums in the world.



In the museums you move with the crowd from gallery to gallery. Besides the paintings/sculptures on display in each gallery, the floors and ceilings are also beautifully decorated and it is absolutely impossible to take in everything you see, so you have to pick out your favourite things and concentrate on those.

Perseus with the head of Medusa by Antonio Canova



The statue of Laocoön and His Sons, also called the Laocoön Group has been one of the most famous ancient sculptures ever since it was excavated in Rome in 1506 and placed on public display in the Vatican.



The Belvedere Torso is a fragmentary marble statue of a nude male, known to be in Rome from the 1430s, and signed prominently on the front of the base by "Apollonios, son of Nestor, Athenian". It is believed to be a copy from the 1st century BC or AD of an older statue, which probably dated to the early 2nd century BC. Legend has it that Pope Julius II requested that Michelangelo complete the statue with arms, legs and a face. He respectfully declined, stating that it was too beautiful to be altered, and instead used it as the inspiration for several of the figures in the Sistine Chapel.



One of the most impressive galleries has to be the Gallery of Maps which extends for 120 meters and houses the largest group of geographical paintings ever created. It contains a series of painted maps of Italy based on drawings by friar and geographer Ignazio Danti. The gallery was commissioned in 1580 by Pope Gregory XIII and it took Danti three years (1580–1583) to complete the 40 panels. However, it's the ceiling which really catches the eye! These colorful works show scenes from the history of Rome and the early Papacy and seem to go on forever! It is impossible to convey the scale and opulence of this room in photographs!



The School of Athens is a fresco by the Italian Renaissance artist Raphael. It was painted between 1509 and 1511 as a part of Raphael's commission to decorate the rooms now known as the Stanze di Raffaello. The picture has long been seen as "Raphael's masterpiece and the perfect embodiment of the classical spirit of the Renaissance".



Dispuation of the Holy Sacrament, also by Raphael.



The Museums also contain a sizable collection of modern religious art, including works by Francis Bacon, Marc Chagall, Salvador Dalí, Paul Gauguin, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Pablo Picasso, and Vincent van Gogh. My favourite was the Matisse Chapel, a space for the display of Matisse's full-sized studies and designs for the Chapelle du Saint-Marie du Rosaire in the French Riviera town of Vence. These include magnificent, 5-meter high paper cutout collages in green, yellow and blue that served as the models for the chapel's stained glass windows, a massive line drawing of a Madonna and Child, and ecclesiastical robes designed by Matisse.





The last stop in the Vatican Museums is the Sistine Chapel. Unfortunately you are not allowed to take photos in here so you will have to use your imagination! Again, it is impossible to describe these masterpieces but this quote from Johann Wolfgang Goethe just about says it all, "Without having seen the Sistine Chapel one can form no appreciable idea of what one man is capable of achieving."

Today, the chapel is the site of the Papal conclave, the process by which a new pope is selected. It is famous for its frescoes by Michelangelo - the Sistine Chapel ceiling and The Last Judgment. The ceiling was completed between 1508 and 1512, and is about 40m long by 13m wide. This means that Michelangelo painted well over 460m2 of frescoes...on his back. His figures (of which there are more than 300), showed the Creation, Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and the Great Flood.

He painted the Last Judgment, over the altar, between 1535 and 1541. The painting depicts the second coming of Christ on the Day of Judgment as described in the Revelation of John. There was a bitter dispute between Cardinal Carafa and Michelangelo because he had depicted naked figures in a sacred place. He was accused of immorality and obscenity and the offending genitalia were later covered by the artist Daniele da Volterra, whom history remembers by the derogatory nickname "Il Braghettone" ("the breeches-painter").

To exit the Vatican Museums you descend via the double helix staircase, commonly referred to as the "Bramante Staircase". This staircase is a double helix, having two staircases allowing people to ascend and descend without meeting. It encircles the outer wall of a stairwell approximately fifteen meters wide and with a clear space at the centre.



And here endeth the history lesson...for now!

[Mel]

I think, I'd lose interest to see the museum if I had to wait for hours to get in there and imaging the crowds that I'd probably be confronted with inside (as your pix prove…) But taking the trip through it with you and the Brat from the comfort of my couch is highly enjoyable

[Flutterby]

Mel, because this was only our second day in Italy we were still very excited about everything we saw, but after a while we couldn't look at anymore churches!!

[Lisbeth]

One of the "curses" of Italy is that there are too many artefacts They simply cannot keep up with them and many end up falling to pieces, like the Colosseum was about about to do, if a private moneybag had not taken over and paid for it, luckily

Now it is Pompei's turn

Luckily I have seen it all, before tourism started its boom

As I told Vanessa, we used the churches to cool down on the hot days, there is always one around

[RogerFraser]

Very interesting Flutts . Don't think I have the patience to sit for 4 hours just to get in would probably have given up and gone elsewhere -I tend to do the same in the gameparks when I see queues

It must be really amazing to see the works and artifacts in person just a pity it is so busy that you have to go with the flow .