Understanding Rome

Today’s jaunting began with a private visit to Palazzo Colonna and concluded with a very special foray to St Peter’s where we meandered by Carlomagno and glimpsed Pope Leo holding the funeral Mass for Cardinal Luini

Twenty-five years ago today, on 17 June 2001, Roma won the scudetto and I gave my first full tour. The day after Bloomsday. The tour was of the Jewish Quarter and Trastevere and I was twenty-three. Time indeed flows like a river.
So many versions of me have walked past the Bar San Callisto in the intervening quarter of a century; so many coffees melt into a positively Joycean temporal hologram eddying around that single cobbled street corner.
One thing that has remained constant, however, is my excitement in the sense of discovery which comes from following those infinite threads which make up the extraordinary and complex fabric of the city.
Thanks to everyone who has joined me over the years to explore Rome, and will in the future!

I’m a sucker for a glittering mosaic. Filippo Rusuti, circa 1285, Santa Maria Maggiore

This morning’s specially requested itinerary looked at the last of the Stuarts and took us from St Peter’s to Palazzo Muti. One of our stops was a foray to the church of the Venerable English College, usually not publicly accessible, there to contemplate the space where *maybe* Bonnie Prince Charlie was illicitly crowned as King Charles III in 1766. Twenty years after his defeat at Culloden we imagined him contemplating Durante Alberti’s 1580 Martyrs’ Altarpiece and the painted gate leading north to the throne that, surely he knew by then, would never be his. I feel another newsletter coming on about those—doomed, thwarted—Catholic “Kings over the Water”!

The Mausoleum of Costanza looked like this earlier today. It is, in my opinion, one of the very finest buildings in Rome. Mosaics gleaming in the gloaming on the very cusp of Christian Rome; atmospheric motes of dust playing in the sunlight; beyond the heavy door the muffled sound of excitable children playing football on the parish pitch on the first day of the school holidays. What’s not to love?

Iterations of Caravaggio. His 1599 portrait of Monsignor Maffeo Barberini (the future Pope Urban VIII) was recently bought for the nation and is destined to join the glorious permanent collection at the inexpressibly fabulous Palazzo Barberini. It’s on display (& free) at the Senate Library on piazza della Minerva until 21st June (& don’t tell anyone but inexplicably there’s no one there). Buon weekend chums!

Just a few glimpses from today’s tour (which is, if I say so myself, a very good tour): Delights of Subiaco, an excellent luncheon among limestone mountains, plus a foray to see quite the finest Nilotic mosaic on the way home, all laid on just for us. It is, as they say, a tough job…

I’m a big fan of the eighteenth century penchant for a scrapbook aesthetic in museum displays. The Galleria Borghese looked like this today

A glimpse of the inestimable Antoniazzo Romano’s glorious Annunciation at Santa Maria sopra Minerva on this morning’s meander through the Field of Mars

Details of exquisitely timeless tenderness, almost overwhelming in their humanity, at the excellent Giotto show