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Suggested by Tour in Rome
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2009 - 2010
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Trastevere in Rome
In every city that has ever had a
river flowing through it, it’s the same story.
The Left Bank, Buda and Pest,
Brooklyn: once over the bridge everything is different.
Often, as in Brooklyn, the odd bit
across the river conserves the old ways and look of the
city better than any other.
The people of Trastevere hold Rome’s
best try at a real neighborhood festival each July, the
Festa de’ Noantri (roughly ‘we ourselves’ in dialect);
in a city full of recent migrants they claim to be the
only real
Romans left. Indeed, neighborhood
historians like to trace the origins of the community to
the imperial sailors kept in Rome to work the grea t
canvas awning at the Colosseum and man the ships for the
mock sea battles.
Trastevere
(‘across the Tiber’) has become a very trendy spot these
days; in the evenings it fills up with Roman tourists
from the other side, come to dine at its many
restaurants and take a stroll around the romantic
environs of Piazza S. Maria in Trastevere.
But being fashionable hasn’t changed
the place too much; Italian rent control, as much as the
strong attachment of the old-time residents, keeps
Trastevere sane and serene.
Divided by its Viale, Trastevere has
a split personality.
Everything to the west, old as it
is, seems well kept and occasionally elegant; the other
side, a little ragged, is full of the warehouses and
workshops that indicate that this has always been a
proletarian, seafaring neighborhood, with pockets of
alleys that have changed little in 500 years.
EAST
OF VIALE TRASTEVERE
Piazza Gioacchino Belli
Tram 8, bus H, 23, 280, 780.
Trastevere’s front door, at the end
of the Ponte Garibaldi, this square is named after the
most famous of Rome's 1th century ‘Romanesco’ dialect
poets.
That’s Signor Belli looking dapper in
his top hat, a top the monument in the piazza’s centre;
a relief on the
back of its pedestal portrays an old
Roman scene, a group of citizens gathered to read some
political satire pinned on to the ‘talking statue'
Pasquino.
Palazzo Anguillara
With its medieval defence tower on
the corner, Palazzo Anguillara was built in the 13th
century; an ambitious modern restoration did its best to
make the palace look the part.
Today it houses an institute and
library devoted to the work of Dante.
Piazza in Piscinula
Tram 3, bus 23,280, 630.
This square, of Via della Lungaretta
by the Tiber, takes its name from an ancient baths
complex on the site.
Tiny San Benedetto, in the corner of
the piazza, has one of the oldest campaniles in Rome (crogo)
and a
fresco inside picturing St Benedict
the 6th- century father of Christian monasticism, who
may once have lived here.
Casa dei Nlattei
The frowning medieval palace (i3th—14th
centuries) opposite, studded with antique fragments -
one of the most evocative and best-preserved of such
buildings in Rome – is the Casa dei Mattei, original
home of one of Rome’s most notoriously quarrelsome noble
families.
Santa Cecilia
Standing behind an imposing
12th—century quadroporticus is the church of Santa
Cecilia.
One of the most popular early
martyrs, the wealthy Cecilia is said to have had her
house on this site.
The bad old Romans tried to
pressure-cook her in the caldarium of her own baths,
without success, whereupon they determined to chop her
head off- she still hung on for three days after that.
(By law,
Roman axe men were allowed only three
strikes; the one charged with Cecilia must have been
sent back to the minor leagues after such a dismal
performance.)
Apparently no church was built on the
site until the 82os; almost nothing from the original
can be seen, although the walls and columns remain,
hidden under a complete 18th-century rebuilding. It
wasn’t a bad job, replacing the old gallery with
clerestory windows to create a light, airy interior; the
frescoes are inoffensive, at best. Connected to a
convent, the church is well—scrubbed, with piped-in
hymns to remind us that Cecilia is the patron of music.
The rebuilders spared a fine
9th-century apse mosaic, a bit archaic in the Ravenna
style; Pope Paschal, who built the church, appears in
the square halo, offering the building to Christ.
The two cities on the ends of the
mosaic possibly represent Jerusalem and Bethlehem, Below
the mosaic, the high altar is graced with a glorious
Gothic baldaquin by Arnolfo di Cambio.
The saint, moved here from the
catacombs by Pope Paschal when he built the church, was
dug up again in 1599,for reasons not entirely clean the
pose of her uncorrupted body is captured exactly in the
lovely statue by Stefano Maderno, under the high altar.
Other survivals include some medieval
frescoes of St Cecilia’s martyrdom, in the first chapel
on the right, and the Renaissance tomb of Cardinal
Forteguerri by Mino da Fiesole near the door; on the
opposite tomb,
that of an English titular cardinal
called Adam Easton, who died in 1398, can be seen the
coat of arms of the Plantagenets.
Down in the crypt, besides some
flashy neo-Byzantine decoration of the 1900s, you can
see the tombs of Cecilia and other saints, along with
rooms from what may have been the saint's home (some
with mosaics).
The Rococo restorers may have done
one very serious disservice to Roman art when they
bulldozed their way through this church with their
gilding. Much of the church was originally covered by
frescoes by Pietro
Cavallini, perhaps his finest work.
You can see fragments of his Last
Judgment, later recovered and detached from the walls.
No one else, in Italy or anywhere in
Europe, was capable of anything like this work in the
year 1293.
The careful, naturalistic draughtsman
ship and intensely spiritual expression (especially in
the figure of Christ himself) make the greatest evidence
for considering Cavallini, along with Giotto, as one of
the
precocious antecedents of the
Renaissance.
Santa Maria dell’Orto
Via Anicia; bus 23, 280. Closed to
the public.
Not too interesting to look at in
this city of 901 churches, but a landmark of a strange
interlude in the progress of the expiring Renaissance.
Vignola, that restless and underrated
architect from Modena, built it in 1566; its facade,
spare and strange with its little obelisks, but correct
according to the
architectural canons of the age,
records a modest reaction against the busy and over
decorated work of the High Renaissance.
This tendency was even more
pronounced in Spain, where Juan de Herrera had
inaugurated the estillo desornamentado three years
earlier with his design for El Escorial.Herrera too was
notoriously fond of obelisks.
San
Francesco a Ripa
Piazza San Francesco d'Assisi, tram 3, bus 23, 280.
Open daily 7.30-11 and 4-6.30..
One of the first Franciscan churches
in Rome, San Francesco a Ripa has two treasures : the
squirming, erotic statue of the last chapel on the left
, expressing divine ecstasy with the same Hollywood
spirituality as his famous Santa Teresa in S. Maria
dell Vittoria; and the cell in the adjacent cloister
where St Francis stayed In 1219 , while trying to
persuade the Pope to reform the Church.
The thoroughly Baroqued cell includes
a 13th century painting believed to be a
likeness of Francis himself.
Ripa, incidentally, was the old name
of Trastevere’s rione.
WEST
OF VIALE TRASTEVERE
San Crisogono
Piazza Sannino, tram 8, bus H,23, 280, 780.
Open Mon-Sat 7am-7.30pm,Sun 8-1 and
4.15-7.30; crypt open Mon-Sat 8-11.30 and 4-7 Sun 8-1
and4-7.
San Crisogono has a rather sober
Baroque facade (by GB. Soria,1623) and a typical Roman
portico (Fontana, 1702) covering a largely medieval
church.
The13th century campanile survives,
along with the pavement inside and mosaics in the apse
by followers
of Pietro Cavallini.
Down in the crypt, the body of the
original church of AD 499,fragments of medieval frescoes
remain.
Caserma deivigili della Settima Coorte
The small, currently empty building
with the papal arms down a little street opposite San
Crisogono is the Caserma dei Vigili della Vll Coorte,the
world’s oldest police station.
It was built in the 19th century, but
imagine the surprise of the papal gendarmes when
archaeologists in 1866 discovered beneath it the
excubitoriurn of the 7th cohort of ancient Rome's police
like the modern Carabinieri, the Roman vigili were
technically part of the army, and organized in cohorts
and centuries.
Conscripts probably often wished they
had been sent to the German frontier; besides doing the
night watch on pitch dark streets full of
desperadoes,they had to double as firemen, and pull down
collapsed buildings.
Just behind San Crisogono, on Via di
S. Gallicanoyou can see a delightful Rococo building by
Rome’s most imaginative 18th-century architect, Filippo
Raguzzinfs Ospedale di San Gallicano.
Santa Maria in Trastevere
Piazza di S. Maria in Trastevere is
the peaceful, completely lovable heart of the district-
no traffic, no Baroque, no obelisks, only a few cafés
and children playing ball.
Behind Fontana's fountain, with an
ancient Roman basin, you’ll see the only church in all
Rome that has retained its medieval appearance, Santa
Maria in Trastevere.
lt may be the oldest church in Rome,
and the first dedicated to the Virgin Mary.
An old legend had it that on the day
of Christ's birth, a spring of olive oil- an Italian
house-vvife's dream miraculously gushed up from this
spot, flowing down to the Tiber.
There may have been a Christian
building here as early as 220, but the building you see
now was begun by Pope Julius I in 337,3Hd rebuilt in the
1140s.
Carlo Fontana built the portico,
probably replacing an earlier, simpler one.
Above it, the beautiful 12th-century
gold—ground mosaic on the facade shows how most
important medieval Roman churches were decorated; this
is the only one to survive time and the Baroque
rebuilders.
Mary in the centre is flanked by 10
maidens with lamps who probably represent the Wise and
Foolish Virgins (from Jesus’ parable, Matthew 25, 1-14);
the exquisite palm trees below were a symbolic tree of
life' in some early Christian art, and quite common in
some Islamic work. Palms weren't grown in Rome in the
Middle Ages, part of the case for ascribing this mosaic
to artists from the Greek East.
The portico, full of inscriptions and
early Christian decorative panels, leads to an interior
with a Cosmati pavement (restored), accented with deep
red porphyry and green verde antico.
Many of the massive nave columns came
from the Baths of Caracalla, and some of the capitals
atop them are especially fine.
Like the pavement, the pretty
Cosmatesque spiral candlestick, choir screen, tabernacle
and throne owe more to the 19th century than
to their medieval originals by that time the pendulum
of Roman taste had
swung completely back, and instead of
covering churches in Baroque plaster, the pope end
cardinals were trying their best to imaginatively
recreate the Middle Ages.
The apse mosaics are among Rome's
best, done at the same time as those on the exterior.
The enthroned Virgin sits among Jesus
and the saints, with Isaiah , Jeremiah, and the symbols
of the Evangelists on the surrounding triumphal arch.
Note the caged birds underneath them
a charming conceit, reminding the faithful how Jesus
imprisoned his own spirit in an earthly body to redeem
the sins of the world.
The rich coloring, and nervous yet
controlled line of these mosaics reflect the classical
revival in Byzantium, an influence to which the Italians
(however much they hate to admit it) owe many of their
own advances
in late medieval and Renaissance art.
How well they learned their lessons
can be seen in the mosaic scenes from the life of Mary
below, another masterpiece by Pietro Cavallini
(129o),which complement his paintings a few blocks away
at Santa Cecilia.
To the left of the altar, the
pleasant, airy Altemps Chapel has frescoes of 1588
portraying the Council of Trent.
In the left aisle, the Chapel of S.
Girolamo is an elaborate late Baroque fancy (Antonio
Gherardi,1680s), a little theatre lit by its own small
cupola.
At the entrance to the sacristy are
two small ancient mosaics.
Museo di Roma in Trastevere
An unassuming former convent just
behind S. Maria in Trastevere has been converted into
this interesting but little known tribute to the Eternal
City’s not so distant past.
You can read all you like about Rome
in the last centuries of papal rule, the timeless,
retrograde city that captivated northerners on the Grand
Tour, but this is the only place to see it come to life,
with a unique collection of prints and paintings from
the 18th century.
The British artist Paul Sand by
starts the fun with a series of Hogarth an prints of the
old Roman Carnival with colour and incident unthinkable
in the staid Rome of today.
Others include scenes from the fish
market at the Portico d’Ottavia, public scribes
scratching out billets doux and government forms for the
illiterate, housewives doing the wash in the Acqua
Vergine fountain, and picturesque ciociari, peasants
from southern Lazio (so called for their wooden clogs,
or ciocie), posed around a half-buried Porta San Lorenzo
— until the archaeologists got seriously to work in the
18oos, most of the ancient monuments projected from the
centuries’ accumulation of soil like so many marble and
travertine spring posies.
Some amazing pictures record the
fire-works and illuminations of old Rome, the
greatest shows any 19th
century Italian city had to offer.
For papal festivals, papal roofers
would clamber over Castel Sant’ Angelo and St Peter’s
dome, placing strings of oil lamps to light the outlines
of the buildings against the night sky, while their
fellows below set
Off giant Catherine wheels and, of
course, Roman candles by the hundred.
Beyond these/there are casts of
Pasquino and the Bocca della Verita, and every other old
Roman landmark, a series of life sized tableaux with wax
work figures, portraying Roman shops, taverns and homes
from long
ago, and quite inexplicably to the
foreign visitor the reconstructed quarters of one of
the last and most beloved of Roman dialect poets,
Trilussa (Carlo Salustri, d.195o).
Trilussa's works can be found in any
good Roman bookstore; although not the sort of stuff
likely to be found in anthologies or poetry courses,
they comment blithely on the passing Roman scene, with
some pointed satire reserved for Mussolini and the
Fascists (and not at all hard to read if you know some
Italian).
Trilussa seems to have been
interested in everything, and on a slow day the curators
will be glad to point out his funny mythological
paintings, bug collections, and other clutter, Keep an
eye open for exhibitions, often held on the lower floor.
Santa Maria della Scala
Santa Maria della Scala serves the
adjacent Carmelite monastery, and has had a reputation
in the practice of medicine for centuries.
The monks run a completely modern and
up-to-date pharmacy, facing the square, but if you ask,
they'll be glad to take you up for a look at the old
one, a genuine 18th-century Roman pharmacy with pretty
majolica jars full of exotic herbal cures.
Palazzo Corsini
Sharing the collection of the
Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica with the Palazzo
Barberini is this small, attractive museum hardly ever
troubled with visitors.
The palazzo, one of the more
ambitious creations of18th-century Rome, turns its back
on Via della Lungara waiting for a grander facade facing
the Janiculum Hill, which was never built.
The Corsini were bankers, and
relatives of more than one 17th-century pope, one of the
last families to make it big off the centuries old papal
banking racket, Queen Christina lived here for a while,
as
did Napoleon’s mother, Letizia
Bonaparte.
The back of the palace suffered
considerable damage during the French attacks against
the Roman Republic in 1849; after Napoleon
Ill’s armies breached the Janiculum
walls, this part of Trastevere found itself in the front
line of French reprisals.
You enter through a quiet courtyard,
then up a stairway decorated with miscellaneous ancient
sculptures and neoclassical works of the Napoleonic era.
ln the first room, there is a little
model of how the palace was meant to look; it would have
been the grandest in Rome, or at least the biggest.
The paintings are typical Roman
museum fare, largely ltalian artists, with a few
Flemish, ranging from the late 15oos through the
Baroque. Murillo’s Madonna and Child stands out, one of
the pious Spaniards less
saccharine attempts.
The second room is devoted to the
northerners, with two Breughel winter scenes and some
overripe Rubens; a Madonna and a St Sebastian. Followers
of Caravaggio occupy rooms three and four, including one
fine painting of St John the Baptist, a copy made by the
master himself of the work in the Capitoline Pinacoteca.
Room five was Queen Christina’s
bedroom; she died here in 168g.This and the last two
rooms contain works of painters Mattia Preti, which
include a striking Martyrdom of St Bartholomew; Pier
Francesco Mola; Guido Reni; Carlo Dolci; Guercino (one
of the Et in Arcadia Ego paintings); Luca Giordano; and
Salvator Rosa, who wins the prize for
fright and gore with his Prometheus, complete with
hungry eagle.
Botanical Gardens
Behind the palace, the Corsini
grounds have become Rome's Botanical Gardens, or Orto
Botanico.
They are your best chance in this
part of the city for some rest and shade under the tali
palms.
See also Sport and Green Spaces.
Villa Farnesina
The Chigi family came originally from
Siena, Banker Agostino Chigi hit the jackpotin the early
150os, at the beginning of the great Renaissance orgy of
Roman acquisitiveness, by winning the papal account.
Other
families, most notably the Medici of
Florence, had already made their fortunes in this way;
the Chigi never became Grand Dukes like the Medici, but
for conspicuous consumption nobody could beat them. in
the gilded reign of Leo X, nouveau riche Augustine’s
Trastevere villa was the cynosure of Rome, with
cardinals, poets, princes, tremendous courtesans and
fashionable artists for dinner almost every night. The
best story about Agostino has him hosting banquets on
the riverbank, with the servants tossing the gold and
silver
plates into the Tiber after each
course to show off. Of course there was a net at the
bottom, to retrieve the loot afterwards.
Baldassare Peruzzi, another Sienese,
designed the villa in 1508 and helped decorate it with
his paintings, along with Raphael and Sebastiano del
Piombo. After decades of the high life, the Chigi found
themselves
overdrawn, and sold the property to
the Farnese family.
The Bourbons of Naples held it for a
while, and since the 1920s it has served as home for the
Accademia dei Lincei, a scientific circle founded in the
early 1600s (Galileo was an early member).
For visitors, the main attraction is
Raphael's famous fresco on the ground floor, of Galatea
daintily riding the waves like a marine Venus; Cupids
aiming rather dangerous-looking
arrows float above. Raphael’s elegant
mythological fantasy, just what Renaissance bankers and
cardinals preferred, sets the tone for the rest of the
villa.
The architect, Peruzzi, added the
ceiling frescoes of astronomical constellations, and the
semicircular
paintings below are vignettes from
Ovid's Metamorphoses by Sebastiano del Piombo.
In the other room on the ground
floor, the Loggia of Cupid and Psyche, Raphael’s pupils,
including Giulio Romano, contributed a series of
paintings from Apuleius’ Golden Ass.
Upstairs, the main hall of the villa
is an eccentric masterpiece of Peruzzi, the Salone delle
Prospettive; trompe l’oeiI archways enclose mock window
views of Roman vistas, a rare chance to see what
Trastevere and the Vatican Borgo looked like in the 16th
century.
Nearby is Agostino Chigi's own
bedroom.
II Sodoma did this room, the Sienese
painter whose name reflects contemporary opinion
crediting him with every sort of vice; really he was a
good family man, devoted entirely to his pet badger and
the rest of his sizeable menagerie.
He was also one of the greatest
artists of his time, who never got over the shock when
his frescoes in the Vatican were destroyed by Julius II,
to be replaced by the sweeter, more fashionable art of
Raphael.
His major work here is a large scene
of the Marriage of Alexander the Great and Roxana.
Via della Lungara continues
northwards towards the Vatican from here, passing the
Regina Coeli Prison, Rome’s main lockup for centuries,
and the scene of some memorable Nazi atrocities in
1943-4;The prisoners murdered in the Fosse Ardeatine, in
reprisal for partisan activities, were taken from here.
JANICULUM HILL
The trans-Tiberine Janiculum Hill ,or
Gianicolo has always been the odd man out among Rome’s
hills the biggest, but not even one of the canonical
Seven, and not included within the city walls (a branch
of
the fortifications, following the
crest of the Janiculum was built strictly out of
defensive necessity).
In latter days most of the hill has
been preserved as parks. It’s worth a climb for the
views over Rome, and for one very special building-the
Tempietto of Bramante, the most characteristic work of
the Roman High Renaissance.
San Pietro in Montorio
This ancient church was rebuilt at
the behest of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain in the
148os.And a good choice it was for the Spaniards.
Today’s students at the adjacent
Spanish Academy enjoy one of the most peaceful corners
of Rome, with the best views over the city.
One of the Academy's more recent
students was King Iuan Carlos, who still remembers his
days on the
janiculum with affection, and drops
in for a visit every now and then. In the church, the
most noteworthy painting is a Flagellation of Christ by
Sebastiano del Piombo, in the first chapel on the
right.
The next chapel’s ceiling has a
Coronation of the virgin by Peruzzi; two chapels further
on, Florentine Mannerism makes one of its rare
appearances in Rome, with sculptural work by Ammannati
and a
fresco of St Paul by Giorgio Vasari.
Under the high altar are buried two troublesome Irish
earls, Hugh O’Neil and Roderick O’Donnell, unsuccessful
Catholic rebels against King lames I.
Tempietto del Bramante
Bramante’s Tempietto can be seen in
the little courtyard to the right of the church.
Do not think that this ambitious
attempt at perfect architecture was intentionally tucked
away in an obscure spot; at the time (about 1501) this
was believed to be the exact location of St Peter’s
upside-down crucifixion, making it one of the most
important pilgrimage sites in Rome. But at the climax of
the Renaissance, somehow this holy ground acquired a
monument steeped in pagan antiquity.
Bramante was the first modern
architect to recapture entirely the Doric order from
Vitruvius’ ancient textbook.
His tiny temple, only large enough
for a few worshippers at a time, stands as a unique
monument to the Renaissance ideal of expressing the
inexpressible in architecture.
Everything is sliced down to basic
principles, without a trace of Gothic bravura or the
free-spirited experimentation of the early Renaissance.
The perfect symmetry of the
6-columned, radial temple proclaims abject submission to
a simple ideal. Bramante wished to build as the ancients
did, and he sacrificed all the experience of the
medieval
centuries to erect his impeccable
little cylinder.
The clumsy hulk of St Peter’s only
emphasizes the impotence of an architecture that sought
to translate its perfection to larger sizes.
Michelangelo and his successors could
never have built this, but only mock its form into
shapeless gigantism.
Across the road from this
exhilarating, perhaps disturbing building is the
brazenly fascist Monument to the Fallen of1849-70, a
chill travertine pavilion (1941) with battle scenes of
the Risorgimento wars, and imbecilic patriotic
inscriptions from Gabriele D’Annunzio.
There was some talk of moving
Garibaldi's remains here from his last home, in
Sardinia, before the war intervened.
Fontana dell'Acqua Paola
This fine miniature Trevi Fountain
built under Paul V is part of the papal works which used
the remains of Trajan’s aqueduct to bring the waters of
Lake Bracciano into Rome.
ln ancient times, near this spot,
water from the aqueduct powered ranks of mills that
ground Rome’s flour.
The columns of Paul’s fountain come
from the facade of the original St Peter’s, and other
parts came from
the forum.
For the first three decades of the
2oth century, the waters of the fountain powered a
hydroelectric generator.
Piazzale Garibaldi
This is a fine viewpoint, adorned
with tourist clutter (including a miniature puppet
show).There's a huge bronze equestrian Garibaldi in the
piazza, but even better is the equally massive bronze
equestrian Mrs
Garibaldi a little further on.
The remarkable Anita,who is buried
underneath, certainly did her part through all the
battles of1849 —even though she was pregnant; the statue
shows her galloping towards destiny with a pistol in one
hand,
and cradling her baby in the other.
The Brazilians erected it to honor
their brave daughter; Garibaldi had brought her home to
Italy after fighting in the South American wars of
independence.
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