Category Archives: Italy

Rome: seasonal stations

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If you happen to be in Rome in early spring, it is fun to follow some of the ‘Lenten Stations’. For each day of Lent, a particular church is assigned, and Mass is celebrated there. The tradition of the stational church dates back to the early years of Christianity, when on certain appointed days the community of the faithful would gather in a designated church to celebrate Mass together. Today the tradition is kept up during Lent. Sometimes, the pope himself officiates (to find out when, check the Vatican website and click on ‘Liturgical Celebrations’).

The church assigned for the second Sunday in Lent is Santa Maria in Domnica, an ancient church on the highest point of the Caelian Hill. It is also commonly known as Santa Maria della Navicella, after the ancient Roman stone boat (probably a votive offering from soldiers at the nearby Castra Peregrina, a barracks for non-Romans) that was placed here by Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici, the future Pope Leo X, when he rebuilt the church in the 16th century. It still stands outside the church today, and now functions as a fountain.

Inside the church all eyes are turned to the lovely mosaics on the triumphal arch and apse, dating from the 9th-century restoration of Pope Paschal I. On the arch sits Christ in Judgement, robed in gold with the orb of the earth between his feet, holding a scroll and flanked by angels and the apostles dressed in purple-fringed togas. Paul is the first apostle on the left, Peter the first on the right, with Moses and Elijah below them. In the conch are the Virgin and Child enthroned. Kneeling at the Virgin’s feet, with a square halo to indicate that he was still alive at the time that this mosaic was made, is Pope Paschal himself. The Madonna and Child are flanked by angels, the blue of their haloes creating a striking abstract pattern on either side. The whole is rendered against a lovely green ground, the colour of new spring grass, covered with white and red flowers. The monogram of Paschal is in the centre of the underside of the arch.

The coffered ceiling dates from the late 16th century. It was commissioned by another member of the Medici family, Ferdinando, later Grand Duke of Tuscany, who was titular cardinal of this church. Its central motif shows the Navicella, playing the part both of the Ark of Noah and of the Ark of the Host, the tabernacle which holds the Communion bread.

For more on the early churches of Rome, see Pilgrim’s Rome, available in print or digital.

Sustainable living in Bolzano

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The Municipality of Bolzano moved to create Casa Nova in 2002, in response to growing demand for affordable housing. The new mixed-use district was to provide exemplary quality of life despite the high building density (3.5 m³/m² for a total of 350,000 m³). An important goal was to respect the highest standards of sustainability established by the independent European rating agency KlimaHaus, which is headquartered in Bolzano.

Possibly the most successful of the eight building blocks is Christoph Mayr Fingerle’s Castelfirmiano complex of 2008 (EA7, the second closest to the River Adige). Within the bounds of a subsidised housing project with restrictions, Mayr Fingerle has tried to create good, sound architecture that will encourage social interaction among residents. The design fully embraces the project’s core objective of ‘park living’, but to enhance the interplay between the agrarian landscape and the inner garden courts Mayr Fingerle modified the shape and floor plan of the three individual buildings in the polygonal housing block, reducing the depth of the buildings foreseen in the master plan and altering the corners so the inner court would appear larger than it is, its angled sides creating an effect of breadth.

To resolve basic issues such as the design of the façade and the interior finishings the team met several times with the complex’s future inhabitants. A full-scale model of the façade was built to help everyone understand the architect’s intentions and hence close the gap between the clients’ expectations and the building’s final form.

For the flats the architect developed four basic modules, on the basis of which 92 different floor plans were created to meet the needs and desires of 92 families. All the flats receive light and air from the east and the west; there are no northern exposures. The top-floor split-level lofts have rooftop terraces with views of the surrounding mountains. Oak-panelled porches inserted in the concrete façade create a feeling of warmth and comfort; the irregular arrangement of windows reflects the different configuration of the interior spaces while creating an impression of lightness. The building blocks are connected by two levels of parking; three large openings in the ground provide the car park with natural air and light from the garden, making it easier to find one’s way and eliminating ‘scary’ dark areas. Each flat has a cellar, and the car park’s large central atrium can be used for group events.

Circulation from public to semi-public to private space was a key issue for the architect: large entry foyers promote contact and community life, and the garden pathways, some wider than others, mimic the spatial experience of a village with its a main street and narrower cross-streets. In order to meet ground-floor inhabitants’ desire that private gardens be as large as possible, the latter are interspersed with the semi-public green areas.

Visual artist Manfred Alois Mayr helped define surface colours and textures. Externally, the team chose a raw concrete façade, based on a special grain size and using mineral aggregates typical of the region (notably pale yellow and white dolomite). The street-side façades have been treated with a high-pressure water jet to bring out the grain structure of the concrete; the rough surface suggests the monolithic appearance of a ‘hard outer shell’ and accentuates the unity of the building block; the perception varies depending on the light and distance. The garden walls are treated with a thin veil of white paint that emphasises the area’s private character while seeming to enlarge the garden itself. The architectural and chromatic sobriety of the windows and railings increases the buildings’ sculptural effect. The simple, discreet tone of the materials is graduated from the entry areas to the doors of the individual flats. Through small details such as smooth, sensual wooden handrails, the materials create a feeling of warmth and comfort.

Blue Guides’ Trentino and the South Tyrol, by Paul Blanchard, is now available as an ebook.

Tastes change

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Tastes change. “The greater part of the sculptures of the Vatican are dead,” wrote Sacheverell Sitwell in the 1930s. Grand Tourists had once gasped at those sculpted nymphs, gods and emperors. They had sought to procure similar examples for the gardens and galleries of their country seats. How could it be, then, that they stirred so little response in the shingle-headed, Oxford-bagged swells of his own generation? But no. They were dead. “Dead, and it is impossible to see how they can ever come to life again.”

Something similar has happened now with High Baroque painting. “Caravaggio to Canaletto” is a great sweep of an exhibition just closed at the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest. The title was artfully chosen because it names two artists in whom the public has a great deal of interest. And, unsurprisingly, the early rooms (with the nine Caravaggios on loan) and the last room (with the Canalettos) were full. Between the two, great halls were filled with works by scores of other artists, among them Guido Reni, Mattia Preti, Guercino, Carracci, Crespi. But the crowds were much thinner. Just imagine! Guido Reni was once, in the 19th century, one of the reasons why people went to Italy. “Second to nought observable in Rome” is how Browning described Reni’s Crucifixion above the high altar of San Lorenzo in Lucina. Nowadays I doubt many visitors notice that it’s there. It surely doesn’t make it into the Dorling Kindersley Top 10. Shelley was much struck by Guido Reni’s Beatrice Cenci and wrote his first play about the girl’s wretched fate. We’ve lost interest in Guido Reni now. But why does this happen?

The Romantic era, when Shelley was writing, was an age of great ‘sensibility’. Grown men did not think it ninnyish to write about daffodils. The Victorian era that followed was sentimental. A novelist could base his greatness on the creation of a character like Little Nell.

But these things all had their root in the Baroque.

Examine the painting at the top of this post. Mantegna’s Lamentation over the Dead Christ of c. 1480. In it, we see a dead body, presented without fuss (but with extraordinary technique), with Mary Magdalene’s little jar of embalming oil tucked away at the back and the only emotion coming from the half-shown faces of the three anguished mourners. The spice jar is not just some random touch. It is there to show that the mourners had no idea that Jesus’ body would not decay. They fully believed that they needed to embalm it. This was the end of his life. Their grief is sincere and comfortless and ugly.

Mantegna was a master and his influence on succeeding generations of painters was great. But the two imitators whose works are shown below imitate only the component parts of the scene. They fail utterly to capture its sober and honest spirit. Why? Because their canvases are soaked with stoked up emotion and become pieces of propaganda as a result.

The first one is by a very accomplished artist: Annibale Carracci. It was painted about a century later than the Mantegna. There are no mourners. The focus is on the gory result of a gruesome execution. The nails and crown of thorns are placed beside the corpse, the body itself is liberally spattered with blood. It is very Counter Reformation. The aim is to ramp up the horror, to appeal to people’s guts rather than their brains, to win them to faith through sensation.

The other version (Orazio Borgianni, 1615) is twee. The oil jar has come to the foreground as a show-off example of how well the artist can render glass. Carracci’s nails are retained. But those are not its main faults. The problem is with the mourners. No longer do they keep a respectful distance, half out of the frame, but they clutch intemperately at the body, lean right over it, giving self-indulgent vent to their tears. Emoting. Inviting us all to have a mass cry-in. They are also young and beautiful. A lovely young woman or beauteous boy will pluck at the heart strings much more effectively than a haggard crone. Anyone in the promo business knows that.

Neither Caravaggio nor Canaletto puts this kind of “spin” on their subjects. That is why we like them. I think we are ready to go back to the Vatican sculptures. Cold stone which lets us draw our own conclusions. The High Baroque is too manipulative—and we see enough advertising in our daily lives. Let art be something nobler.

Francesco Laurana’s serene beauty

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Many thanks to a reader from Sicily who recently sent an email about the famous bust of “Eleanor of Aragon” in Palermo’s Palazzo Abatellis. Not only in the Blue Guide, but in many other sources too, this work (c. 1489), by the Dalmatian-born master Francesco Laurana, has been taken to be a portrait of Eleanor of Aragon, daughter of the King of Naples and later wife of Ercole d’Este of Ferrara. On the website for the Region of Sicily’s Department of Culture, however, Alessandra Merra and Valeria Sola argue that the sculpture in fact represents somebody quite different. The full text can be read here, in Italian. For those who do not understand Italian, I’m summarising it below:

Laurana came to Sicily sometime around or before 1468, to Sciacca, summoned by the influential Carlo Luna (scion of a noble house of Aragonese descent), who had probably become acquainted with Laurana’s work at the court of the kings of Naples, themselves also descended from the royal house of Aragon. Laurana received his first Sicilian commissions from Luna, and the bust is not a portrait of Eleanor at all but of a different noblewoman entirely, the wife of Carlo Peralta, Count of Caltabellotta. She died in 1405 and was buried in the Abbey of Santa Maria del Bosco di Calatamauro. The bust stood on her tomb until its transfer to Palermo in the 19th century. The fact that the bust was a posthumous one (sculpted many decades after her death) makes it not a portrait but an idealised image of a virtuous lady, which explains its famously rarefied quality and formal rigour.

Any further thoughts?

Thoughts on Rome

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Some thoughts and insights from Karl Audenaerde:

We just returned from our annual month in Rome, and as always were pleasantly amazed by all the new stuff there still is to discover.  You may be aware of most or all of it, but in case you are not, here are our five cents worth:


(1) Priorato di Malta: I never met anyone who had got in by calling the Cavalieri, but various Roman cultural associations offer guided tours.  We used www.info.roma, but there are others as well.  Interesting detail: a fountain in the magnificent gardens with an inscription referring to the Templars; it is supposed to be the only visible sign of them left in Rome.

(2) In the Castel Sant’Angelo the route has been completely changed, bringing the visitor to spaces that previously were not accessible.

(3) Santa Maria in  Cosmedin: the archaeological narrative seems to have undergone a major revision, and the newer version makes more sense, at least to us.  (When we’re in Rome we belong to the Greek-Melkite parish there.)  Here follows what I wrote in our travel diary, immediately after the visit:
It all starts with the Invicti Herculis Ara Maxima, a huge 20x20m altar, built in the sixth century BC and related to one of the Greek myths (as opposed to Romulus and Remus) explaining the origin of Rome. In short: the area of the Foro Boario, near a fordable crossing of the Tiber, was halfway between the Etruscan North and the Greek South, and became a major meeting place for all kinds of merchants traveling the Mediterranean basin.  And since Hercules had roamed the entire area…
The enormous altar was located where now the front half of the church is.  Some of its tufa blocks can still be seen near the entrance of the current crypt. It was built where the hero was supposed to have slain the monster Cacus, and its construction was attributed to Evander in 495 BC.  Later it was embellished with a propylon that obtained its final form after the great fire, and of which a number of columns can still be seen, incorporated in the current structure of Santa Maria in Cosmedin. The theory that this building was the Statio Annonae has been abandoned.  The area had been inhabited by Greek expatriates for the longest time, and when Greek refugee monks from the Kosmadeion (Constantinopolitan convent devoted to Saints Cosmas and Damian) arrived, they chose to live where they encountered fellow countrymen. Whatever building was already there was adapted to their use, but together with everything else was destroyed by the Normans of Robert Guiscard.  Under Pope Hadrian II (867-872) the Eastern wall of the propylon (or what was left of it) was breeched and the church was expanded towards the East.  A crypt was dug into the tufa base of the Ara Maxima.  The niches in the crypt originally served as seats, more or less like stone versions of the later choir stalls.  The shelves that one sees now halfway up in each niche were added later to accommodate urns, likely from martyred Saints whose remains were removed from the catacombs during the Middle Ages.  Around 1123 Cardinal Alfano (camerlengo of Calixtus II, 1119-24) had the church rebuilt.  Except for the winter chapel all Baroque additions were removed in 1894-99.  
In parentheses, the church is trying to raise money (1.2 million Euro…) to restore the winter chapel.

(4) Casino dell’Aurora Pallavicini: Aurora is invariably described as “scattering flowers before the chariot of the sun.”  But I didn’t see any scattered flowers, and came up with an alternative interpretation: a literal version of Homer’s rose-fingered dawn with rosesemanating from her finger tips.  I wonder if I’ll make some converts…

(5) The newly discovered and excavated Auditoria di Adriano off the Piazza Venezia.  It has been called the most important archaeological find of the last 80 years.

(6) Santa Maria della Concezione (the Cappuccini) is closed for restoration.  They have a brand new museum detailing the history and spirituality of the order, and their infamous bone collection is now accessed through the museum of which it has become an integral part.

(7) San Paolo fuori le Mura: the excavation to the south of the basilica is finished, and open to he public.  The excavated area contains remnants of various monastic buildings belonging to the abbey as it existed during the papacy of Gregorio II (715-731).  It is very well presented with labeling in Italian and English.

(8) Palazzo Valentini (the administrative seat of the province of Rome): below it is an excellent excavation of two domus and enough circumstantial evidence to conclude that the long-lost temple of Trajan has been found.  The whole thing is made exciting by a very sophisticated multi-media show with alternating presentations in English and Italian.  It is even wheelchair accessible!  They have some info on-line, but expect a book out by this spring.  It is one of the best things we’ve ever seen in Rome!  And so far no guide book mentions it.

(9) A few rooms of the Palazzo Lancellotti have been rented out to a Turkish cultural center.  Not much of interest there, but it gets you in the door at the Palazzo Lancellotti, and that is more than worth the effort.