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.

Making foxes

My grand-niece Emi decided on Sunday that it was time to turn into a fox. Her mom Aya did the favours with facepaint -- the result is above. Then Emi figured her mom should be a fox too, so Aya patiently allowed her daughter to wield the paintbrush on her. Photos of the process below; the first one is by John. 

With the first daubs on her forehead, Emi gets into character; she thinks foxes must be quite fierce. Meanwhile, her mom checks the Internet for how to create a fox face.

Lots of gloopy stuff goes over the eyes and nose.

With a dot to the nose, the animal face takes shape.

With the ears outlined in black on her forehead, Emi ramps up the fox imitation.

The swooping eyes and black upper lip are the final touch.

Turning the tables, the yellow-faced fox uses the paint on her mom. Photo by John.

Intense concentration is required. Photo by John.

A patient Aya awaits the next daub. Emi has given her heavy eye makeup, little black forehead-ears and various colours around the mouth. A fox would be quite bemused.

Emi surveys her creation. She looks like she thinks her mom will be a pretty good companion in the fox den. (Yes, the brown stuff on the table is imitation poop. Emi got it during a recent trip to Las Vegas and has been enjoying the reactions it evokes.)

Facepaint and poop!

Rome diary: Water, water everywhere

Water outlets like this show up all over Rome, providing a constant free-flowing supply of water to whoever comes along. This one is handy for the vendors in the nearby street market.

No stale water for the dogs who romp in the Villa Doria Pamphilj park! 

Water pours out of the mouths of all the creatures in this street-corner fountain.

At first I thought it was a mistake: somebody had forgotten to turn a tap off. Water was pouring out of a little metal hydrant on the boulevard near my apartment in Rome. There was a white plastic bucket – overflowing – under its spout, though, so at least somebody knew this was happening.

Then I realized these little water outlets were everywhere, spouting away. Smack-dab in the middle of sidewalks, in the parks, in the museum gardens. Usually there was a basin carved into the concrete base, and a drain for the continually flowing water. The one in my area, just outside the daily street market, was the only one with a plastic container, though. Market vendors used it as a handy outdoor sink.

The hydrants aren’t the only source of water on the streets of Rome. At intersections, particularly in the older areas, there are often water features, sometimes small, sometimes big and elaborately carved. Most spectacular: the Quattro Fontane – an ensemble of four Late Renaissance fountains at every one of four corners of a busy intersection.

Coming from a place where water conservation is a virtue, all this free-flowing water made me a bit anxious. But after a tour guide told us the street-outlet water is perfectly drinkable, I began using it to refill my water bottle. It turned out to be some of the best water I have ever tasted. Whole rivers of this delicious water may be going down the drain, but no walker – or their dog – ever has to go thirsty in Rome.

The water in this bathtub-shaped sculpture on a Roman street didn't look very drinkable.

A stone creation, complete with inscription,  that would be handy for thirsty dogs. 

Back to the hydrants. Notice how this one is in the middle of a sidewalk. And how close it is to the car, also on the sidewalk.

This hydrant is in the garden of the Etruscan Museum in the Villa Borghese area of Rome. It's a bit secluded; no concerns about a car driving into it. 

Rome diary: Ever-changing Eternal City

"Visitors to Old Rome had recalled the Colosseum as a moonlit ruin in solitude; visitors to New Rome recalled it, if they recalled it at all, as a floodlit monument on a traffic island," author John Pemble writes in a book exploring how Rome went from a must-see centre of civilization to just another tourist city. I took this photo during my trip to Rome in April.

 To modern-day travellers, Rome is just another big international city. But in centuries past, it was the city, the highly anticipated, requisite finale of every Grand Tour of the continent.

“By the early 17^th century, no education was deemed complete that had not encompassed Rome, the central shrine and academy of civilization, and an assurance of rebirth both historical and metaphysical,” writes John Pemble in The Rome We Have Lost, which explores how and why all that changed.

Pemble quotes several people distraught about the changes Rome underwent over the years, including Italian journalist Camilla Caderna, who wrote in 1922: "An unbroken plateau of concrete, a disgusting, suffocating magma of middle-class villas and high-density building invades the valleys, covers the hills, submerges the Campagna, thanks to the exploitation of the last available square foot, almost as though it had been intended to make it impossible to say, 'this was Rome.'"

I never saw Rome in its earlier grandeur, and I wasn't completing a Grand Tour, but in a research trip there last month, I was enchanted by the cityscapes, impressed by the quality of the museums and moved by the effort to turn ancient ruins into something meaningful for visitors. Rome will always have a touch of magic because, where else can you say: "Julius Caesar probably stepped just where I'm walking now"?  But elbow-to-elbow tourists, chaotic streets, spilling garbage and heavy commercialism are constant reminders that you are, after all, just in one great big city. 

Earlier travellers had higher expectations of their long-anticipated trip to Rome, which perhaps hadn't yet turned into an unbroken plateau of concrete. Here are a few of my favourite comments from writers seeing Rome for the first time:

 “At last—for the first time—I live! It beats everything…. It makes Venice-Florence-Oxford-London—seem like cities of pasteboard. I went reeling and moaning through the streets in a fever of enjoyment.” Novelist Henry James, 1869, in a letter to his brother William James. Aged 26, Henry had reached Rome at the end of a long European tour.

Charles Dickens, by contrast, finds only disappointment: "...when after another mile or two, the Eternal City appeared, at length, in the distance; it looked like -- I am half afraid to write the word -- like LONDON!!! There it lay, under a thick cloud, with innumerable towers, and steeples, and roofs of houses, rising up into the sky, and high above them all, one Dome."

 “There seemed to be long streets of commonplace shops and houses, such as are to be found in any European town; there were busy people, equipages, ordinary walkers to and fro; a multitude of chattering strangers. It was no more my Rome: the Rome of anybody’s fancy, man or boy; degraded and fallen and lying asleep in the sun among a heap of ruins: than the Place de la Concorde in Paris is. A cloudy sky, a dull cold rain, and muddy streets, I was prepared for, but not for this: and I confess to having gone to bed, that night, in a very indifferent humour and with a very considerably quenched enthusiasm.” Charles Dickens, January 1845, Pictures from Italy.

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, who spent much time in Rome between 1786 and 1788, writes this of his arrival: “All the dreams of my youth have come to life; the first engravings I remember – my  father hung views of Rome in the hall—I now see in reality, and everything I have known for so long through paintings, drawings, etchings, woodcuts, plaster casts and cork models is now assembled before me. Wherever I walk, I come upon familiar objects in an unfamiliar world; everything is just as I imagined it, yet everything is new.”  Von Goethe, Nov. 1, 1786, Italian Journey.

Rome probably has more statues and statuary per square inch than any other city in the world. This statue of Caesar reminded me of how a general celebrating a triumph in ancient days would be accompanied by a slave warning him not to get too carried away, as he was only a man after all. Here, a seagull performs a similar service..

Trajan's market would have been a bustling centre of activity in the second century AD. It's been carefully preserved and an impressive museum brings Emperor Trajan's world to life. 

Castel Sant'Angelo, reached by the pedestrian-only Sant'Angelo bridge across the Tiber river, was originally built to hold the remains of Emperor Hadrian. There are statues at intervals all the way across the bridge, making it into a  kind of hallway of  artwork. One evening as I crossed the bridge, a bride and groom were using it as a backdrop for their wedding pictures: see below.

Rome diary: The chainmail purse

The modest exterior of my new travel purse hides a big surprise for thieves. 

According to its information tags, the purse is so tough that knives would have a hard time cutting through it. Which raises the question: what if the alternative is slashing the human who carries it?

It’s not a purse, no, it’s a “lockable stainless steel cage,” says the tag describing my new travel accessory. “Like chainmail for your bag,” it says, with a little sketch of a vase-shaped sack with lines portraying, I suppose, the stainless steel wires that will foil knife-wielding thieves hoping to slash and grab.

That’s not all. It has zippers that clip into locks, a steel-wire reinforced “slashguard strap” covered with a special tough fabric, and puncture-resistant double zippers. You can even lock it to your chair at a restaurant. And in case the bad guys don’t come with knives, it has blocking material to shield passports and credit cards against RFID skimming.

Preparing for a trip to Rome after decades as a homebody, I may have been carried away by the precautionary goods offered at my local travel store. An RFID-blocking neck pouch to hide valuables under my clothes – why not? And just to be really, really sure, perhaps a little pinkish-satin pocket to clip to my bra!

I expect I will feel quite foolish about this eventually. The thing about not travelling for a long time is that  you forget that wherever you go is just a place where other people live. I’m pretty sure Roman women choosing their summer purses right now aren’t thinking chainmail and lockable steel cages.

One tough purse isn't enough: I also bought a neck pouch and a pocket to attach to my bra. Just in case!

 

Travel stores are big on RFID blocking material to prevent people from skimming passport and credit card information.

John bought me this backpack as a gift long before the Rome trip was on the horizon. But I will use it on the trip along with the purse, as it is also meant for travel.

Yup, it too has internal pockets with that RFID blocking material.

Spring is somewhere

Our spring in Vancouver has been cool and wet, but at least it's spring.  It seems the message hasn't gotten through to parts of the rest of Canada, though. My sister Betty, who lives outside Montreal, says she's still deep in winter on this Easter weekend, and she has had enough. My Alberta relatives are in the midst of a particularly frigid blast, with daytime temperatures hovering below zero, and night-time temperatures plunging to minus 20.

Vancouver pays big-time in housing costs for its earlier springs  -- so I'm not gloating -- but here are a few weekend photos that might bring hope to those still trudging through snowbanks on April 1:

Pink blossoms against a blue sky. How spring-like is that?

My little showing of primulas, hyacinths, daffodils and hellebores. I used to restrict my front-yard beds to blue and white, but I'm finding bright colours a cheerful addition. 

The hellebore flourishes in this spot, but I have others scattered around that have only put out a few blooms this year.

Cherry blossoms in a park near my place. In the distance, you can kind of see the mountains.

Through the hedges from my front steps you can see a red camellia bush that is having the best spring ever.

A close-up of a camellia blossom. 

The two magnolias over my front walk are just getting started. 

A closer look at the star magnolia.

Daffodils by the rock border in  my back garden.

A flowering current is doing well down the hill from me. 

Another view of the front-garden bed at my place.

The winter pansies have recovered from the heavy snow that flattened them for awhile in the winter, and are blooming happily.

Home-grown daffodils!