Category: italy

Postcard from Rome, Italy: A numbers game sparked by the baths

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Visualizing times gone by is difficult, even when surrounded by highly visible ancient remnants.

Baths to accommodate 3,000? That number finally hit me for some reason. Wait, how big was Rome?

The Diocletian Baths, built beginning about the year 290, could accommodate 3,000 people bathing, getting a shave and a haircut, exercising, reading in the library, gathering for gossip and, well okay, visiting the brothel. Not sure in which order these activities were engaged.

But the Diocletian Baths were not the only baths. There were hundreds and hundreds of them in ancient Rome.

Which finally sent me back to try to understand the immense size not of the sprawling Roman Empire, but of Rome itself.

The AlamoDome in San Antonio seems large to this girl; it can accommodate 64,000. The Coliseum in Rome could house somewhere in the range of 75,000 people, who could all exit within a 15-minute period after Emperor Diocletian (244-311) had executed some of the thousands of Christians he made into saints during several prime years of persecution.

But that was still a small house in Rome. Other special events attracted even larger crowds; close to 300,000 could gather to watch chariot races at Circus Maximus.

Wait, where did all those people come from? The majority were just locals. The population of Rome then was well over 1,000,000. So hard to envision an ancient urban environment that dense.

Things would change dramatically in only a view years. The collapse of the empire, invasions by those pesky Goths. The population evacuated for new opportunities or was devastated by pestilence. During the 1300s, with schism in the papacy between Rome and Avignon, Rome had fewer than 20,000 inhabitants.

But I digress, once again.

The photos below are from the collection of the Museo Nazionale Romano housed on the grounds of the former baths and portions renovated/remodeled into cloisters for a Carthusian monastery, commissioned in 1561 by Pope Pius IV (1499-1565) of the Medici clan and designed by Michelangelo (1475-1564).

More recent remodeling to house the collection and special exhibits was completed in 2014. Thousands of the museum’s holdings once crammed akimbo into this one location are now spread out for improved viewing around several locations.

And, by the way, sometimes there was a lot of r-rated activity happening on the outside of those sarcophagi.

Postcard from Rome, Italy: Springtime

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“Cupid and Psyche,” ceiling fresco by Rafael (1483-1520) in the loggia of Villa Farnesina

April has been dry in Rome, meaning, for a pair of flaneurs, it approached perfection.

One would think flowers feel differently about it. Yet bright pink blossoms defiantly cover the trunk of a tree maimed by an errant trimmer, and tiny flowers force their way through seemingly inhospitable cracks and crevices of ancient walls.

May Day arrives with showers, so no telling what blossoms will spring forth tomorrow.

Perhaps, instead of wandering afar, these boulevardiers need to devote part of the drizzly holiday admiring the greening of the thirsty plants around the patio, toasting the workers’ day off with a refreshing spring dose of Campari and tonic.

Postcard from Rome, Italy: ‘Time Is Out of Joint’ reflects Roman reality

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The time is out of joint. O cursed spite,
That ever I was born to set it right!
Nay, come, let’s go together.

Hamlet, William Shakespeare

La Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna has pulled the rug out from the rigid presentation of its collection in any form resembling chronological order.

Instead, works drawn from the collection for “Time Is Out of Joint” are positioned in the galleries to stimulate a refreshing dialogue between seemingly disparate themes and genres; between the art and the architectural design of the galleries themselves; or between the art and patrons, as the Mister so gamely illustrates.

The dismemberment of dateline restrictions resembles Rome itself, where ancient art runs into that of the Renaissance and then runs smack into manifestations of everyday contemporary life within almost every block of the historic center. Roman reality.

Centered on both Italian and international 19th and 20th-century art, the collection of the National Museum of Modern Art is housed in a 1911 neoclassical building designed as a “temple for the arts” by Cezare Bazzani (1873-1939). The building is located on the edge of Villa Borghese Park and a row of embassies.