Wednesday, Briefly

We had to reconvene at school at 5pm today for a lecture, so I spent the intervening 4.5 hours in the Borghese Gardens, having planned ahead this time by bringing with me a sandwich and a book. The book was P.G. Wodehouse's "Life with Jeeves," which I found quite funny; it's kind of Garrison Keillor-ish in tone, except it deals with the ridiculous antics and scrapes of an idiotic English society gent in the 1920s and his clever butler instead of mid-twentieth-century Norwegian bachelor farmers and other Lake Woebegonian residents.

But I digress, and this needs to be short, since it's after 11 and I'm already the last one up in the apartment! Aside from reading, I paid a visit to the Etruscan museum in the Renaissance-era Villa Giulia on the grounds of the garden. They said Borghese Gardens, but if you look at a map, I swear the gardens cover a sixth of the size of the city on that side of the river. I wandered for quite a while looking for the museum, and managed to find two other museums, as well as various national institutes, such as the Danish Institute of Rome, the Romanian Institute, etc., etc. Anyway, the museum was perfect for a rather quick stroll-through (I'm really not that into bronze grave goods and painted vases, I have to admit) but there were some fabulous things. The Sarcophagus of the Spouses is here, not at Cerveteri like I thought, and I love it for the happy and relaxed expressions of this pair, who demonstrate such an optimistic viewpoint. Death: the eternal banquet!

Meanwhile, I was totally surprised to find the Euphronios Vase, formerly of the Met in NY but finally repatriated to Italy a few years ago. I knew it left, but I didn't know exactly where it went, and there it was, the Death of Sarpedon in all its glory, just as when Eliasoph blathered on about it at length on my first trip to the Met as an art history student, which would be first semester freshman year! That seems forever and a day ago. Anyway, now I've seen this work of art on two continents, go me!

There were a lot of wonderful objects demonstrating the trade connections the Etruscans had with other Mediterranean cultures, particularly Greece, Egypt, and Persia, but unfortunately, there was a no photo policy, and I was only able to get a few photos when the gimlet eyes of the guards were elsewhere. It didn't help that I was literally the only person in this off-the-beaten-path museum on a Wednesday afternoon, either.

And now, to bed!