Villa Borghese and Much Tramping

Skipping lightly over the usual "slept late, cafe and brioche" bit, Nancy still not feeling well so I was again off on my own.

Metro mosaic. All the stations have them. If it's a mosaic it gets photographed.

Ditto

We had reservations for tickets (an important finely distinguished bit of language to be explored with some bitterness below) for the Villa Borghese Museum at 1pm so I set off well in advance of that thinking that I would take the Metro to Spagna, take the elevator to the top, and then loop the opposite of my former Trinita dei Monti trip; all very well thought out.  Until I got to the Spagna station and along with my usual Piazza di Spagna signs there were some I had ignored before, Villa Borghese.  Well that sounded convenient; perhaps I should forget about my well laid plans.

The Villa Borghese exit consisted ultimately of a very very long, like maybe a quarter of a mile, of slightly inclined slidewalks. The ones going up were great but I noticed that some of the ones going down were out of order..  So slide, slide, slide, arrive and out the door to an empty lot filled with weeds, rocks, and a road. Pause. Pause longer. Oh yeah. Villa Borghese refers not only to a villa, it's also the name of the large park that the villa is set in. I could go back down but then I remembered the broken sections. If I trusted Google Maps the road would take me a long way back to Spagna but that would be like admitting that I had made a mistake. No, onward. The rocky weedy bit led to a mud hole. Pause.

From the mud hole I could see tourists moving along a path slightly elevated from mine and I figured that they must meet up eventually. Google Maps confirmed this and showed that if I pushed on my path would finally intersect the road that I would have taken from Spagna. I knew that I was back in civilization when, around when my road merged with the other, there was a statue of Goethe.

This all ended up being quite a long, slightly uphill, walk. But it did finally lead me to the villa where where was a very long line at the entry. Hahaha, chumps; I've got tickets! Well ... no. I've got pre-paid tickets waiting for me to pick up at the box office. Which is at the nether end of this very long line of people. Said line consists of some people who have reservations for tickets and some who don't.  Those who don't, having spent a half an hour or so (not really too bad) in line feel entitled in some way, like, say, to a ticket. Niente doing. This took a certain amount of explaining. To. Each. And. Every. One.

Okay, Paul has his tickets but Paul has to check his bag; none allowed. Another very ... long ... line. And, in a way that was oddly pleasing, the human touch and all that you know, I got to experience someone behind a desk just completely freak out. She just stood up and shouted (in English to which there may be a point) something like "Okay people I know you're angry! I'm angry too! We're all angry! But that isn't going to help!" When I got to the head of the line I made sure I got her and I used all my powers to jolly her up; she was laughing when I left.

So, did you hear? I went to the Museo di Villa Borghese today; it was fabulous; spiral stone staircases a bit wearing to the aged knees, but worth it. I start with the picture above showing a typical room; pretty rich stuff.  There were maybe two dozen of these rooms of various sizes just packed, and to some degree over-packed, with mostly top notch stuff. You have to consider the where and when on all this so its no surprise to find mostly classical style statuary, baroque paintings, and some medieval tossed in as well.  However the Dutch were represented which was refreshing and the mixture was leavened with an occasional mosaic (duly photographically recorded) and bas-relief carving.

Photos ensue:

Persephone (note Cerberus to lower right) included mostly because I like Nancy's Persephone so much.

An Ultima Cena, Last Supper. Blow it up and decide for yourself if the person to Christ's right is the only person in the painting without a beard.

A very beautiful and simple crucifixion, quite a relief after some of the crowd scenes.

St. Peter is released from prison by an angel. I include because it reminded me of a William Blake painting.

I photographed quite a few portraits of this period noting how much more realistic, almost photographic, portraiture became in the hundred years or so after Michelangelo Buonorotti's more cartoonish ones. 

This mosaic is maybe two feet or thirty inches wide.

A closeup of the mosaic above. Using my index finger for comparison look at the size of the pieces in that knee.

I conclude the art review with this one capturing a couple of my quirks.  First of all I record how "glory", the radiance of  holiness, is portrayed. Michelangelo gave Moses "horns" as you may recall.  Here Tobias got a punk spiky hair-do. The other quirk? Well, its Tobias; I always photograph Tobias paintings.  How do I know it's Tobias? Holy people in paintings have identifiers; St. Augustine carries a little city (City of  God author you know) and evangelists carry pens. Tobias carries a fish. I've got to look that one up.

So, as I said, pretty rich stuff. But after a couple of hours of it I was pretty much done.

I took a brief spin through the gardens at the back of the villa then decided to head back.

A statue of Victor Hugo with a pond and fountain behind. The Italians celebrate peoples of all nations. Hugo of  course French and Goethe earlier German. I was at this point walking I think of Via di Fiorello Laguardia, former Italian-American mayor of New York City. This joined in a bit Via di George Washington.

A fountain and grotto at the main entry to the park.

Having gotten so far off the beam on the way in you would have thought that I would have taken the safe and sure route back; how little you know your intrepid hero. No, I figured that those tourists on the upper road were coming from somewhere and a little Maps work made it look like they might have come from the Flaminio Metro station.

I had some concern about the topography, whether my road would lead to the bottom of a hill capped by a Metro station for example but as it turned out all was well in that regard. It was a long walk however and at some point a bit of the romance wore off of that. But at the end it did leave me at the (I'm stretching my memory here) Porta Flaminio, the Flaminian Gate in the Aurelian Wall.

There was a mercato in progress; lots of little pop-up vendors but I was too whacked to engage. The Metro station was right amongst them and in I went. An uneventful if rather crowded ride back to Monti where I called Nancy. She came down and we shared some dolci.

That was late afternoon and I've spent until early evening typing this stupid thing.  Time for dinner.