Rome diary: Beauty

From the smallest piece of pastry to the largest villa, Romans know how to create beauty. Here's the display at a chic coffee place in the downtown area
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The entrance to the museum at the Baths of Diocletian. A central fountain, statues, and bowers of roses turn this into a stunning garden visit before you even get to the museum doors.

If you buy six cookies in Rome, they are arranged carefully on a colored cardboard tray. A strip of cardboard goes over them lengthwise to keep them in place. Then they’re wrapped in the bakery’s own gift paper and tied with a complementary ribbon, complete with bow.

It’s an example of what John Hooper, author of The Italians, calls the “sheer enthusiasm for beauty that infuses life in Italy.” Italians, he says, have always excelled in anything “that has to do with what is visible, be it the art of the Renaissance or modern car design.”

His observations are borne out at every turn in Rome, in ways large and small. Six big oranges in a tall glass cylinder lend colour to a coffee bar’s front counter. The centre median of an ordinary highway to the Roman suburbs billows with purple malvia, yellow-blooming mustard and decorative grasses so high they obscure oncoming traffic from a bus window. The villa near my rental apartment in Rome had not just an elaborately decorated mansion but a meticulously clipped ornamental boxwood garden and water features too numerous to count.

Here are a few examples of the beauty I saw in Rome, including those cookies:

The little gift-wrapped parcel of cookies, appropriately posed in front of a flower arrangement by my artist roommate Mariken. 

Note the restraining strip of cardboard and the gilded tray.

Carefully arranged to maximum advantage, instead of being shoved in a paper bag.

The mansion of the Villa Doria Pamphilj park, which is part of a large public space well used by city residents. The mansion wasn't open, but you could roam most of the garden areas freely. The water feature and the elaborate boxwood garden were behind a wall. 

A stairway on the villa grounds, with an artful tree arrangment.

Many of the museums in Rome were stunning works of art in themselves. This new one is in the EUR section of Rome, which was rebuilt by Mussolini before the Second World War.

The view from a window in the Capitoline Museum in Rome.

One of the many paintings in the Capitoline Museum. Big, beautiful -- and gruesome. The foreground figure has its head chopped off.

Wisteria falls over an entrance gate along the Appian Way just outside Rome.

Ivy falls over the old facade of a building in Trastevere, the medieval section of Rome.

Everywhere in Rome are churches, some more elaborate than others, but all beautiful.

A room in the Capitoline Museum, with a stunning ceiling and marble floor.

The view over Rome from near the Spanish Steps. Romans were smart enough not to destroy the look and feel of the main city area with high-rise towers. The domes still dominate.

This seemingly rural scene is within 10 minutes of a busy Roman street. The elaborate canal, with fountains and walking paths on each side, is part of the Doria Pamphilj park. Birds and turtles love it, and so do people.