The Mother of all Roman Baths and a Really Big Church

This mornIng we all headed off to visit the Terme di Caracalla which was built by the emperor Caracalla and could accommodate 10,000 bathers (eat your heart out Diocletian with your little 3,000 bather bath).

The Romans were able to erect enormous structures using unreinforced concrete which they faced with brick.  They used concrete to cover large areas with domes or barreled vaults.  Their three groin barreled vault was not duplicated again until the age of the gothic cathedrals, some 700 years later.

After the visit to the baths, Bob and Isa went to visit the Colisseum which they found to be much more crowded and much less impressive than the baths.  Lynne and I walked over to Piazza San Giovanni in Laterano which is the site of Rome's main cathedral. Before visiting the cathedral we found the Trattoria di Buoni Amici where we both had the outstanding seafood pasta.

 

The cathedral was mildly interesting and notable mainly for its size.  It houses relics of both St. Peter and St. Paul.

The French Embassy and the Pickpockets

The notorious no. 64 bus claimed another victim today when Bob McConnell lost his wallet from the secret pocket of his Tilley travel pants.  While he was being distracted by a rather large man who kept trying to keep him from following Isa onto a crowded bus, an accomplice deftly picked the secret pocket.  Fortunately, he cancelled his credit and bank cards before they were used by the thieves.  Here are Bob and Isa shortly after the theft and looking no worse for wear.

Last night we feasted on Bob's artichoke risotto. This seems to be the month of artichokes.  The stores, markets and roadside stands have piles of them.

This morning was bright and sunny but also cool and so windy that Lynne changed her mind about playing golf immediately after getting out of the car at the golf course.  We can play for free in such conditions at home in Victoria.  This limited our activity for the day to a 3 PM tour of the French Embassy which occupies the Palazzo Farnese.  We arrived there after gelatos in the Piazza Navona and a visit to the market at Campo dei Fiori which was in the process of closing for the day.

The tour of the embassy, as advertised, was to have been in English.  However, as it appeared that about half the assembled group were Italians, the guide decided to stiff the foreigners and give the tour in Italian.  Fortunately she spoke slowly and clearly enough for Lynne and I to understand everything.  Unfortunately the star attraction, the hall of the Caracci frescoes was closed for restoration work. We settled for looking at them on Google when we got home.

Otherwise the tour was quite interesting.  The palazzo, in part designed by Michaelangelo, was another example of the landed aristocracy making out like bandits when one of the family became Pope and his son became a Cardinal.  In one room of the palace were frescoed landscapes of five of the cities which were part of their fiefdom. 

Augusta Distraction

The blogging abruptly ceased last week as any spare time I had was spent watching the Masters on my Slingbox.  Also our one trip into town late last week was devoted to Lynne's shopping which makes for pretty dull blogging.

We did play a new golf course which was pretty good value for money because the owners are trying to promote their real estate development and with the poor state of the economy they have not had the money to maintain the course in a condition comparable to other courses in the area and certainly not like Augusta National. 

On Sunday Bob and Isa McConnell arrived after visiting Poland and Prague. We picked them up at the airport as the regional trains had been shut down by a 24 hour strike. Their arrival definitely improves the standard of cooking here as Bob is a master chef and last night's pasta with a fresh fish marinara sauce was superb.  Yesterday, Monday, Lynne and I visited the palazzo Doria Pamphili and its museum in the heart of Rome.  It was another example of how the landed aristocratic families who claimed the papal throne made out like bandits with the tithes of the peasants helping to pay for sumptuous palaces and staggering art collections.  This collection included a who's who of Italian and Flemish  masters. One of the corridors in the palace called the Hall of Mirrors is shown in the photo.

And one of the bandits, a Pope painted by Velazquez, was the uncle of Count Carmelo Pamphili who built the place.  On seeing the portrait, the Pope was reported to have been quite upset because it was far too perfect a likeness for his taste.

Castles and Eels

The weather has suddenly warmed up here to what at home would be summer temperatures.  However, many Italians remain sceptical and continue to wear their quilted winter jackets called puffers.  Lynne and I have spent the last couple of days taking it easy as we try to shake off colds.  Lynne blames me for hers and calls it the gift that keeps on giving.  Sunday's only activity was a walk in the nearby country side where we found that the paths and tractor roads we had walked the previous week end were now closed by gates.  So, we found alternatives.  Yesterday, after a long session at the golf practice facility and lunch on our deck we headed off to Lake Bracciano where our first glimpse of the lake included the town of Braccaino and it's imposing castle, another major building project of the Orsini family. 

We decided to save the visit to the town and it's castle for a later date and headed along the lake side road to Anguillara, presumably named after the eels that support a local fishery, and where we stopped for a walk and gelatos.  On our first attempt to leave this village we chose the wrong road and found found our selves travelling at slow pace behind locals who were walking to the cemetery following a funeral service.  A U turn and some fancy maneuvering brought us back to the lake shore drive and we headed home.

Alena, the daughter of the owner of the appartment we are renting, had kindly rounded up a flat screen TV with HDMI ports for our stay, to which I have been alble to connect my Ipad and stream programs from the internet. Thus, we have been able to spend the short interval between a late Italian dinner and an early Canadian bedtime watching Italian movies with English subtitles on Netflix and the Inspector Deluca series, also in Italian, on the BBC.  This morning we learn that Canada will spared another referendum on Quebec sovereignty.  For my delayed viewing pleasure, I will be programming our cable box at home to record the Masters so that I can watch it on the Sling Box as all the sports channels here are devoted to soccer. 

The gardens at Ninfa

Yesterday, Friday, we paid a visit to Casale Sonnino, near Porzio Monte Catone in the Colli Albani south of Rome. We have stayed there on three occasions, often with old friends. George Sonnino, who is the manager and half owner of the estate has become a good friend.  He had kept our visit a secret from the two women who work there and of whom we are very fond.  One of them, Tizianna, who spotted us from an upstairs window was so excited to see us that she literally jumped up and down. Dillon, a one year old once stray and near starving dog, who adopted the household last December, was so excited to see me that he tried to bite my finger off. George assures me he has had his shots for rabies.

We went for lunch with George and were joined by Liliana and her 94 year old mother, Vera, who are old friends of George.  I had a bean soup which is one of the best things I have ever eaten.  Also for an ante pasta we had for the first time artichokes alla Giudea which means in the Roman Jewish style. Lunch was followed by a visit to the retail section of a nearby winery where Lynne purchased four bottles of the wine she had been served at lunch.

Today we visited the gardens at Ninfa. Ninfa was an important medieval town on the road from Napoli to Roma and was part of the fiefdom of the Caetani family.  Before it was destroyed in the mid fourteenth century during a war between two Caetani cousins it was a substantial town, protected by a wall with fourteen towers and containing a castle, seven churches, 150 houses, a town hall, mills and around 2000 inhabitants.  The garden, began in 1900, covers the area within the original walls and is layed out amoung the ruins.

It is described as an orderly disorderly English garden and people who are familiar with more gardens than I will ever see claim it is the most romantic garden in the world.  It is certainly one of the most beautiful places we have ever visited.  Here is a link for an excellent video visit to the garden.  http://youtu.be/UGEjoVlCj6A

Domus Romane

This morning we toured the underground ruins of a Roman Villa which had been destroyed by an earthquake around the year 500 AD and then had laid buried under a renaissance palazzo until it was recently excavated and then opened for tours only last year.  The audio and visual effects were stunning. For example when we looked at the baths and the indoor swimming pool the light effects gave the impression that we were seeing the shimmering surface of the water.  Also the sound and simulated rain falling in the courtyard were eerily realistic.  Visual images of the rooms of the villa as they originally were, were briefly projected on the walls of the renaissance cellar that had been built on top of the ruins.  Also the missing parts of mosaic flooring were also projected to show what the original entire pavement would have looked like. It would seem that the last supper was being eaten by the occupants when the villa came down on them. Their meal included fish and pork.  At the end of tour we passed thorough a Mussolini era air raid bunker which had an exit adjacent to Trajan's column.

Following the villa tour we headed off to the Pantheon to meet Cristiana and discovered that the meeting was not scheduled for 11:30 as I had thought but was in fact to be at 3:30 as Lynne had tried to tell me.  After spending some time in a very crowded Pantheon we set out to find the Enoteca Corsi one of the best places we have ever eaten and also one of the most reasonable. At the end of our meal we were offered a complimentary Limoncello with the bottle pluncked right down on the table.  We then spent the time until our meeting first looking for spectacle frames for Lynne and then in a book store with wifi.  We had coffee with Cristiana in a cafe on the piazza Minerva across from the Pantheon.  Our meeting was a short one as something had come up involving her daughter.

From Raphael to Filippo Lippi, an artful day

On Sunday March 31, Martin and Anna flew back to Stockholm and we had a quiet day in the hood punctuated only by a long walk in the nearby countryside and a session at our local driving range and practice putting green.  On Monday we set off to visit the Palazzo Farnese in Caprarola, having checked the web site for opening and closing days, and found it closed.  Following a stroll around Caprarola and a morning coffee we decided to check out the nearby Golf Club Nazionale. Jane, who lives in our GPS, performed brilliantly and instead directing us to the proper entrance to the club she took us off the main road onto some kind of service road the width of a golf cart path which wound through the golf course including right in front of many tees where incredulous golfers stared at us in disbelief.  The path ended up at a golf school where they directed us to the proper entrance to the club.

Today, we visited the Palazzo Barberini which houses a fine collection of masterpieces by the likes of Lippi, Raphael, Bellini, Titian, Tintoretto El Greco and Caravaggio, shown below with Judith taking the butcher knife to Holofernes.

Lunch was at restaurant whose name suggested food from the hills of Emilia around Bolgona.  Lynne got worked up when, half way through our pasta dishes, one of the staff took the Parmesan cheese off the table.  In my best Italian, I asked another waiter, who appeared to be a Bengali, why the cheese had been lifted.  He just smiled a me and walked away.

After lunch we walked past the Palazzo Quirinale, where Obama met the President of Italy last week, and arrived at the Scuderia (the stables) to visit an exhibition of the work of the Mexican artist, Freda Kahlo.  She was an amazing woman and a superb artist.  She was twice married to Diego Rivera and her other aquaintances included  Leon Trotsky and Andre Breton. She is shown here with Diego.