Cosi-Cosi

Today was such a mix of things being awesome and things not quite working out. My itinerary for the afternoon included one museum, two churches, and an archaeological site, which is what I consider a good day's work. Unfortunately, the Doria Pamphilij gallery to which I went first was kind of a waste of my 9 euro. Unless you sprang another 4 euro for the audioguide, you basically knew nothing about any of the works, as labelling was almost non-existent except for a few of the most major works. The museum does have a lot of works, including an underappreciated Raphael double portrait, an early Titian, and a couple of Caravaggios (his St. John the Baptist was beautiful) but the walls are hung the way they've always been, absolutely choked with frames, and the lighting was so awful you couldn't see the ones up higher. The one bright spot was Velazquez' portrait of Innocent X, which was apparently one of the most admired portraits in the seventeenth century and which the pope, upon seeing it, exclaimed "It's too true!"

After this I headed to Il Gesu, where Baciccio's illusionistic ceiling totally blew me away--it really looked like there were people falling from the ceiling! He even shaded the gilded ceiling around the figures to look like shadows. So incredible. From there I got some gelato over on Via Arenula by the cat sanctuary, which has some of the best I've had in the city, and then walked to the Theater of Marcellus and the adjoining church of San Nicolo in Carcere.

In this church, I waited with another couple for the guide to take us down into the excavations underneath, which revealed the remains of three Roman temples which were incorporated into the church's structure. He turned out to be a very handsome Italian lad! The other couple spoke Spanish and I told him I spoke English, so he started off doing the tour in both languages, though he claimed his Spanish was not very good. He kept looking at me as though I could be translating parts he had difficulty with in Spanish, because, it turned out, he thought I was their daughter! In the end I asked him to just do the tour in Spanish, because his slow, steady pronunciation of Spanish was exactly perfect for my comprehension, even if the Spaniards probably thought it was awful. The guidebook warned that anyone checking out the excavation shouldn't be afraid of close spaces, but it turned out to be laughably expansive compared to those tombs in Cerveteri. It was so amazing to see the bases of these ancient columns and how they formed the support structure for the church, as well as to see the Roman roads that once ran between them; he pointed out two niches on either side of the middle temple where the money changers did their business. That level is now two or three meters below the modern street level.

From here it would be a long walk to the metro, so I tried waiting for a bus. It didn't show after ten minutes, so I started walking; of course, I got no farther than the Forum Boarium before the 81 bus I had wanted buzzed past me. So I walked for about twenty minutes along the Circus Maximus, which did offer amazing views of the Palatine. Then I got to the metro, which was the unairconditioned, graffiti-bedecked, and totally fetid B line; it's diametrically opposed to the A, which is new, clean, air-conditioned and even has TV screens (why the discrepancy when the city only has two freaking lines, I don't know). It's rush hour so it's totally crowded. The train absolutely crawls through one stop. Then, after the second, it REVERSES and crawls backwards to the station. An announcement blares, the Italians grumble and get off, and I'm left with walking 25 minutes to Termini to catch the A line. It's hot out, so I'm sweating like a pig, and I grabbed a Diet Coke in the station which I was chugging like it was my job, when up pops Dustin, one of the art kids in my class! He's nice, but at that moment I really, really did not want to talk to anyone. Alas, I had to make conversation for another twenty minutes!

Thus, as I wrote above, it was kind of a mixed bag today; I wasted nine euro on a museum and got screwed by the metro, but I loved the Gesu and the excavations. Oh wait, and I got gelato--that definitely tips the scales in favor of "good day." :-)