Years of Poems and Spirits

Taking cues from yesterday, we woke up early, ate simple breakfast and ran down the metro station to check the strike status. Thanks God it is over today.

We first visited the Boghese Museum. There was once a Cardinal Boghese, who was the reigning Pope’s nephew. He was a, shall we say, Machiavellian connaisseur: he would get what he wanted to collect by all means, including imprisionment, actual theft and the threat of excommunication. Other than this little vice, he was an excellent collector. He had the right taste and was keen to discover emerging artists. Caravaggio was one of them.

He loved Baroque style and patronized Bernini during his life time. With some neoclassical master pieces, his collection was not vast but exquisit. One of his offsprings married Napoleon’s sister, and was coerced to sell or gift some pieces to Paris. After Napoleon’s down fall, by treaty, Italy only got back what was taken for free. Later, one of the Rothchilds wanted to buy a Titian’s work, priced it out of reach of governments. But thanks to an Italian law, which forbad selling individual pieces off a collection, the painting was preserved.

There were just way too many masterpieces, many of them could anchor other museums individually. Pauline Napoleon’s statue by Canova was great. It was said Canova wanted to create the sense that she was leaning on a soft bed with satin sheets so he polished the cold hard marble many times and coated it with wax. The result was unforgettable. We both liked the Apollo and Daphne by Bernini, and thought it was his best. His David, in comparison, looked a little Roman Rockwell-ish.

The Museum was the Cardinal’s private villa. It is surrounded by a forest of pine and cyprus trees and a manicured garden. The museum we visited in the afternoon, though, was a stark contrast. The National Roman Museum was an undistinguished brick building next to the bustling train station (Termini). It had a vast collection of coins and minting process/equipments from antiquity to Middle Ages. When we visited the Capitol Hill museum and saw the She-Wolf statue, the description said the two brothers were added later in Roman Imperial period. Sure enough, some of the coins from early Roman Republic period had the same statue without the two bros. The museum also had frescos and mosaics from the Imperial period, many of which were carefully preserved and we had to be escorted by museum employees to look at them.

Downstairs we saw a piece of stone tablet that was from the very very early Roman times (before the Republic?). It was a calendar used at the time. Next to every day of the month (lunar calendar), the engraving marked what activities were allowed or not allowed on this date. In old China, there was this Huang Li (”Yellow Calendar”) that street soothsayer used to decide when is the best time to do what (wedding, for example). Song and I have our own

This is our last full day in Rome. Still we found something new, like we stayed REALLY close to Vatican Museum. On day one, we followed the tour book to the letter and took a subway to the Museum. Today, we just found out that had we walked passed the subway station another block and turned our heads, we would have seen the Museum right in front of us! It was pretty silly, and funny. Then we found there was a Chinese take out place close by. It was our first Chinese food in Europe … and it was not bad. Back at our apartment, we ate from the ubiqutous Chinese takeouut box and watched the videos we shot during the day on a small TV … I will say the food was the best part:)