August is a month which somehow seems particularly apposite for the celebration of Augustus and Italy still pauses for the Feriae Augusti or Ferragosto, the holidays granted by the Emperor to celebrate the harvest (the Christian dedication is to the Assumption of the Virgin though, tellingly, it retains its ancient and vehemently pre-Christian name).

As well as this allusion to agricultural abundance—which is very much in keeping with the idea of Augustus’ reign as a Golden Age of prosperity, flourishing in the fertile soil of the Pax Romana—the association with the month of August also consolidates Augustus’ identification with Apollo, god of the Sun.

Apollo had been among those gods who sought to defend the doomed city of Troy and, though the Achaeans ultimately triumphed with their dastardly wooden horse and Troy was destroyed, Apollo protected the safe escape of the Trojan hero Aeneas. His long and arduous journey across the Mediterranean (of the sort favoured by classical literature) would see him wash up eventually on the shores of the Tyrrhenian.

Subsequently Aeneas’ son, Ascanius Iulius, would found the settlement of Albalonga (tradition says roughly where the papal summer residence at Castelgandolfo can be found today, on the edge of the quiescent crater of Lake Albano), and it was there that, umpteen generations later, Aeneas’ direct descendant Rhea Silvia would give birth to Romulus and Remus, the sons of Mars.

Thus the gens Iulia claimed an illustrious and divine ancestry, far older than Rome itself. This auspicious pedigree had been a key element in the claims to power made by Caesar, and would become the fulcrum of the extraordinary and sophisticated propagandistic campaign of Augustus’ right to rule. After all, as kings, queens, and emperors from the four corners of the earth have found since time immemorial, a divine mandate is the ultimate mandate.

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Apollo and the Sun played a key role in the rich tapestry of Augustan propaganda.

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The story of the foundation of Rome on the 21 April of 753 BCE is as old—almost—as the (seven) hills. It is the culmination of a tale of babies in baskets, divinely-willed destiny, nutritionally improbable cross-species suckling, and, ultimately, fratricide. I have mentioned it in these missives on various occasions, for example here (no paywall), and it features in the first episode of my podcast (which, after a hiatus, I shall be resuming shortly).

In most versions of the story Remus is given short shrift; he is little more than a foil to Romulus. There is, however, an intriguing Sienese version of events which gives Remus a rather more significant role, and saw him promoted to leading man. This tale was one which particularly occupied my thoughts earlier this month when my August peregrinations saw me briefly in Siena.

While there I lunched with my chum Laura Gray from Learn Italy, a small British company specialising in thoughtful, comfortable, pleasantly-paced residential trips with a smattering of talks. From 11-17 January 2027 I’m going to be reprising our “Stones of Rome” trip with an itinerary I’ve been perfecting for over a decade or so. There are three spots left, if you’d like more information about it message Laura here!

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And so back to Remus, and Siena’s medieval fanfic spinoff of the events which legend places on the 21 April 753 BCE. At some point in the early middle ages a tale (not found in any ancient sources) developed. It told that after Romulus had slain his brother Remus on that fateful day, Remus’ sons Senius and Aschius fled the city on a black and a white horse (the colours of the city). They galloped and galloped until they arrived in the depths of Etruria, and there Senius founded Siena (and Aschius Asciano). Thus the she-wolf of Rome became the protecting symbol of Siena, and the city could vaunt an ancient ancestry linking them to the ancient glories of Rome.

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With she-wolves at every turn Rome was, then, very much in mind as we wandered through the piazza del Campo, amid the atmospheric preparations for the Palio dell’Assunta.

We visited the Palazzo Pubblico, which positively exudes centuries of civic pride and contemplated Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s exquisite frescoes of the Allegory and Effects of Good and Bad Government, which somehow I hadn’t seen in over a decade (because frankly in Italy there are just too many incredibly good things).

Lorenzetti was commissioned to create the fresco cycles for the Sala dei Nove (the Hall of the Nine) and began work in February of 1338. “The Nine” were the elected magistrates who governed the Republic of Siena from the late thirteenth century until the turbulent years which followed the Black Death of 1348.

They were representatives of the city’s robust merchant class and heavy regulation sought to avoid corruption: each served a term of just two months, with a repeat term only possible after twenty months absence from power, and constraints in the complex electoral process set the health of the bene comune (common good) firmly above any threats posed by familial, personal, and business interests.

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One of my favourite Roman August movies is, as I have mentioned many times, Caro Diario. Nanni Moretti’s 1993 film is a collection of semi-autobiographical musings, made as he breaches the cusp of his forties. The first of the three parts sees him riding around the deserted August streets of the residential districts of Rome on his Vespa. This, I thought when I first saw it many many moons ago, is exactly what I’d like to do. And so it came to pass.

In the opening scene, Nanni Moretti rides up via Dandolo, gently swooping to and fro across the deserted road framed by Innocenzo Sabbatini’s elegant nineteen-twenties apartment buildings, as it snakes its way up the slopes of the Janiculum Hill above Trastevere.

Last week, on the morning of the first Sunday of August, the city largely deserted as the relentless heat of this enervating summer continued into its third month—already almost unbearable at nine-thirty—I made a foray to via Dandolo on my slightly battered thirteen-year-old blue Vespa. My objective was the one-off (for now, there will be others anon) special opening of the newly restored and intriguing site of the “Syriac” sanctuary, on the site of a sacred wood once dedicated to the beyond-ancient Roman nymph Furrina.

The bosky atmosphere of sacred woods, watered by natural springs, makes them quite my favourite sort of archaic shrine; others of which I am fond in and around Rome include the Nyphaeum of Egeria, the Sanctuary of Diana Nemorense, and Lucus Feroniae, which marries my fondness for sacred woods with my penchant for a motorway service station). All of this atmosphere is particularly enhanced on a scorching, somnolent, August Sunday; parking spaces as far as the eye can see, and no sound but the chattering of cicadas in the pines (sound on for the tiny video above).

The name of via Dandolo—like so many of the streets that rise from Trastevere to Monteverde Vecchio: via Garibaldi; via Goffredo Mameli—is redolent of the blood shed here in the torturous creation of the capital of the new Italian state. The valiant, but ultimately thwarted, defence of the Roman Republic began with the Battle of 30 April 1849 and concluded two months later with the battle of Porta San Pancrazio (the links are to un-paywalled posts of mine). The Roman Republic was defeated, but the days of papal rule were numbered.

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The Dandolo brothers, Emilio and Enrico, took part in the Cinque Giornate di Milano of 1848, the insurrection which led to the First Italian War of Independence. Their friends Luciano Manara and Emilio Morosini, who both have roads named for them here too, were also instrumental. Enrico (not to be confused with the Venetian Doge who died at Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade) died nearby following the battle above Villa Corsini on 3 June 1849, he was not quite twenty-two.

I’m sure that many of those youthful exponents of a new Republican fervour had in mind that it was here on the slopes of the Janiculum that, according to Plutarch, Gaius Gracchus had died in 121 BCE. We are told that Gaius had fled across the Tiber to escape his enemies and, upon reaching the sacred wood he ordered his slave to kill him. Subsequently the Lucus Furrinae would be swallowed up by the Gardens of Caesar, the Republic fell, and the Empire which emerged from its ashes rose and rose, before also falling.

A millennium or so passed and in the Renaissance the conscious revival of the Horti of Antiquity became quite the thing, pleasure gardens on the edge of the city. The site of the once sacred wood passed from one grand Roman family to the next including to the Barberini and, by marriage, to the Colonna di Sciarra hence the name we know today.

In 1902 the Villa Sciarra (in Italy “villa” refers to the whole park, cf Villa Borghese, Villa Pamphilj etc) was bought by George Wurts, an American diplomat with a fondness for gardens, a significant inheritance, and an even richer wife. She was called Henrietta Tower and the industrialist father from whom she inherited, making her one of the richest women in the United States, was an industrialist called Charlemagne Tower which is, I think we can agree, a brilliant name.

Following the chance discovery of inscriptions in the lower part of the gardens suggesting the veneration of Eastern Mediterranean religious cults, in 1908 the French Academy began excavations, led by Paul Gauckler; In the first instance the site was identified with a sanctuary dedicated to deities which had originated in the east of the Roman Empire, hence the “Syriac” epithet. Subsequent studies have suggested

In fact the dominant, and latest, of the ancient structures discovered date to the late fourth century (identified from the building technique of opus vittatum). These include a hall with an apse which is cut into the hillside (on the left of the plan above).

Among the inscriptions discovered is the second century CE altar pictured above dedicated by a Cypriot woman following a dream to Zeus Keraunios (Zeus of the thunderbolt) and mentioning the Forrinae (by the high period of empire a single nymph had become a proliferation). It is written in Greek and is a fabulous reminder of the eclectic mashup of the Roman religion and today can be found in the (excellent, always quiet) Museo Nazionale Romano at the Baths of Diocletian.

The most celebrated and spectacular find was the small gilded bronze statue of a figure wrapped in snakes which is shown in the photograph at the top of this post. It has been identified as perhaps a figure inspired by Attis or Osiris—both deities with origins in the eastern Mediterranean; both associated with fertility.

The statuette was discovered in the triangular structure pictured above (which is on the right of the plan) buried in a ritual pit beneath offerings of eggs, seeds, and flowers.

I bade farewell to the nymphs of the sacred wood, cicadas and all, and crossed the river and scootered up the Esquiline Hill to the Baths of Diocletian, there to reacquaint myself with the statuette and those intriguing eastern inscriptions. It is yet another reminder to visit this vast, excellent, and bewilderingly empty museum: part of the largest Roman bath complex ever built, a remodelling by Michelangelo, and an extraordinary and beautifully displayed and described collection of ancient inscriptions. Plus, tucked away in corner room, a gilded statuette of an Eastern deity found amid eggshells in a sacred wood where patriotic heroes of Roman Republics ancient and modern fell. What’s not to love?

Saluti!

Agnes

The Quartiere Coppedè, really just a handful of streets tucked between via Tagliamento and viale Regina Margherita, best entered at via Dora, is named for its architect Luigi (Gino) Coppedè. He was born in Florence in 1866 and trained there first at the then recently established School of Industrial Decorative Arts and then took a diploma in architectural drawing at the Accademia di Belle Arti (rather less recently established; it was founded by Cosimo I de’Medici) which qualified him to practise architecture.

In Rome the building of the new capital of the Kingdom of Italy, begun after the proclamation of Roma Capitale in 1871, gathered speed and a new piano regolatore (city plan) was ratified in 1909. Previous plans had developed, inter alia, the area around piazza Vittorio Emanuele and the neighbourhood of Prati. The 1909 plans, drawn up by Edmondo Sanjust di Teulada—civil engineer, Sardinian aristocrat, and (subsquently) senator of the Kingdom of Italy—were implemented by the then mayor of the city, Ernesto Nathan. Among the plans was scope for a new residential building project in the rapidly growing neighbourhoods to the north-east of the Aurelian Walls, between the tuff outcrops of the Monti Parioli and the new districts of Trieste and Salaria.

In 1915 the enigmatically named Società Anonima Edilizia Moderna (The Anonymous Modern Architecture Company) commissioned Gino Coppedè, who had been working on plans for the remodelling of Genoa, to design the mini-neighbourhood. Work began in 1916 and stuttered on, interrupted by war and administrative hurdles, until Coppedè’s death in 1927, when the unfinished project was completed by his brother-in-law, Paolo Emilio André.

The Quartiere Coppedè is best approached from via Tagliamento, taking via Dora which gives the first, wildly scenographic, glimpse of the eclectic and eccentric project. Indeed it has featured in many a movie, from Dario Argento’s Inferno to House of Gucci.

The Palazzi degli Ambasciatori are joined by an arch below which hangs a vast chandelier which appears to have been pinched from a medieval banqueting hall.

Above, a pseudo-crest (based on that of the Medici) is topped with a crown. From the bottom of the shield hangs the symbol of the Order of the Golden Fleece, an order of chivalry instituted in 1430 by Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy. It was indeed an order awarded to a number of members of the Medici family, though here is purely decorative. Below, a stern head of a helmeted deity surmounts the keystone and garlands, bucrania, and theatrical masks abound.

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On the handful of occasions I’ve dropped by Palazzo Barberini since the one-painting exhibition opened on 8 July, both with clients and not, there have been at most half a dozen people. It is just another reason to visit one of Rome’s most splendid painting collections in one of its finest palaces.

Johannes Vermeer was born in Delft in 1632, the same year that Il Sant’Alessio was staged at the newly completed Palazzo Barberini; Baroque opera collides with Netherlandish burghers in a fabulously discordant contemporaneity. My first thought on seeing the painting in the palace built by Pope Urban VIII was of this extraordinary dichotomy between two contemporary aspects of seventeenth century Europe: for a few months the Protestant bourgeoisie of Northern Europe glows, unrepentant, in the heart of Papal Rome’s very own ancien regime.

Vermeer’s father was at the more intriguing end of that burgeoning northern European petite bourgeoisie: silk weaver, art dealer, indebted innkeeper; part burgher, part scoundrel. The infant Jan was baptised at the Reformed Church in Delft, while in Rome Pope Urban VIII’s extravagances would have had Calvin spinning in his grave.

In fact, despite this apparently austere background, Vermeer seems to have had a fairly liberal and cosmopolitan upbringing; after all not many Calvinists were indebted innkeepers with a spot of dealing in art on the side. It is likely that Vermeer’s family were, despite his baptism in the established Reformed Church, followers of the breakaway liberal Remonstrant congregation.

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The tavern in question was on the main square of Delft and backed onto a canal. It was a large place, with four fireplaces and rooms to rent to travellers. If we employ a little imagination it offers an intriguingly tangible glimpse into Vermeer’s early life: This was a place where artists gathered and, as archival evidence reveals, conducted business (presumably often through Vermeer’s father). Delft was also home to an office of the Dutch East India Company, and the inn saw folk passing through on their way to and from distant and exotic climes; we can imagine heated conversations, tales of foreign lands, and serpents of wood and tobacco smoke dancing in shafts of low winter sunlight. Such a tavern seems the ideal place to begin a lifetime spent emulating the nature of light.

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My enthusiasm for the evocative Etruscan delights of central Italy knows no bounds and, as I’ve mentioned here before (and frankly in all contexts to anyone who’ll listen), is exquisitely captured in Alice Rohrwacher’s 2023 film, La Chimera. Ethereal mystery and earthy menace; olive groves and the abandoned carcasses of unfinished illegal building; scrappy 1980s northern Lazio, washed out, grainy and a world away from the oversaturated ersatz colours so often associated with the ubiquitously shiny international version of Italy on screen.

The film once again came to mind when last week, between a tour and a visit to the dental hygienist, I made a foray to the glorious National Etruscan Museum at Villa Giulia. I went to admire the François Tomb, newly acquired from the Torlonia family at a cost of fifteen million euros and now part of the permanent collection. After one and half centuries in the private collection of the Torlonia at Villa Albani—where they were kept in the Kaffehaus in conditions which can, at best, be considered to have been less than ideal—they are for the first time regularly and publicly accessible.

The political impetus behind this recent flurry of acquisitions by the Italian State —Maffeo Barberini by Caravaggio; Antonello da Messina’s Ecce Homo; and now the François Tomb—by a profoundly nationalist government is not the purpose of this post but is, as an aside, worthy of mention.

Whatever the motivations behind the purchase, the thoughtful display of these extraordinary paintings is yet another reason to go to one of Rome’s best (and, inexplicably, most under-visited) museums. Quite apart from the splendid collection within, the Etruscan Museum is housed in a Late Renaissance villa which counts Michelangelo and Vignola among its architects (and with a relatively newly-restored nymphaeum which, I spotted recently, features in Sorrentino’s latest movie La Grazia). The first time I visited Villa Giulia, on a university class trip in 1998, it was the Villa not the Etruscan collection we came to see.

The François tomb is named for Alessandro François who discovered it in 1857 and comes from the ancient city of Vulci in Northern Lazio, just before one reaches the border with Tuscany. Vulci sits on the river Fiora, is fifteen kilometres or so from the coast, and was once one of the most prosperous of the twelve major settlements of the Etruscan League. It was famed for the sophistication of its artistic output, particularly bronze and ceramic production.

The fourth century BCE Chimera of Arezzo (now in the Archeological Museum in Florence where you can almost always have it to yourself) is believed to have been made at Vulci; and, although more recent studies have suggested a considerably later date, tradition says that the famous Capitoline Wolf was also the work of a sculptor from Vulci. Such attributions are indicative of the esteem in which the city’s artists were held.

In the nineteenth century a flurry of archeological activity at Vulci revealed a proliferation of grand tombs. Most notable among them was that discovered by Alessandro François at the necropolis of Ponte Rotto, on land which then belonged to the Torlonia family.

On 19 April of 1857 François wrote to his business partner Adolphe Noël des Vergers that he had found an inscribed cippus at the entrance to what appeared to be a grand family tomb; in a letter of 1 May he reported having entered the five chamber hypogeum close to the River Fiora thus, the translation from Italian is mine:

“One might imagine that this tomb belong to another age, such is the beauty of the paintings which recall the glorious times of Botticelli and Perugino.

It belongs to warriors of this city and is made up of five chambers, the first of which is painted with figures, and there will be indeed much to write when the drawings are made for they depict most intriguing themes and many figures bear Etruscan inscriptions.”

Within a couple of weeks the painter Nicola Ortis was the first artist charged with copying the paintings. A slightly later series of full-scale paintings, also predating the detachment of the paintings, were created by Carlo Ruspi shortly before his death in 1863 for the Etruscan Museum inaugurated by Pope Gregory XVI at the Vatican.

These full-size copies show many of the details subsequently lost through the process of detachment of the paintings and the vicissitudes of time.

The display of the tomb paintings is beautifully choreographed: one first enters a room where an introductory video projected on the walls describes the paintings and the circumstances of their discovery (in Italian, there are subtitles in English). One then enters a climate-controlled room which echoes the form of the original chamber where the paintings were found.

On entering the recreated chamber, to the right we see Vel Saties. He is shown wearing a toga picta, the purple cloth decorated with dancing figures, and a laurel crown. In front of him the small figure of Arzna (both have their names written above their heads, in Etruscan script written from right to left) holds a tethered bird, perhaps a swallow, ready to fly. Vel Saties is thus interpreted as being depicted as an augur, ready to interpret the bird’s flight, and Arzna as his assistant, perhaps a dwarf.

There is an immediacy to this scene which I found especially moving; the bird on the cusp of taking wing for all eternity.

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To the left of Vel Saties and Azna the long section of painting which turns the corner shows figures whose names were visible when the paintings were discovered. On the extreme left of the photo below Caile Vipinia is being liberated by a figure indicated as Mastarna. Caile Vipinia is clearly the figure the Romans called Caelius Vibenna. Various tales orbit the semi-legendary Caelius, but he is always identified as an Etruscan nobleman and usually considered an ally of Servius Tullius, the sixth of Rome’s seven kings and the second of the three Etruscan kings of Rome. In another story alluding to Caelius’ support of Tarquinius Superbus, Rome’s last king, we are told (by Claudius who is reported by Tacitus) that the Caelian Hill was named in his honour.

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There is a tradition which tells that Ponza was named for the family of Pontius Pilate who owned land on the island, though it more probably derives from the Greek Pontia (Πόντια) meaning “of the sea”. Either way it is a place rooted in the sort of evocative fusion of ancient legend and history which is exactly what I require of a Mediterranean island.

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It is sometimes identified with Aeaea, the island of Circe in the Odyssey and was a strategic trading point first for the Phoenecians and then for Greeks. Many moons later, Augustus’ daughter Julia was exiled on charges of adultery and treason to the small island of Santo Stefano, off Ponza’s neighbour Pandataria (Ventotene) where she spent five years or so.

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On one of those jolly sailing trips in the early two thousands (more Swallows and Amazons than oligarch, which is how sailing holidays should be) we all swam to the deserted island of Santo Stefano from a dinghy and saw the ruins of the Villa where poor doomed Julia and her mother Scribonia are believed to have lived.

On that occasion, over two decades ago, further up the squat island we wandered through the then abandoned ruins of an eighteenth century prison. It is a precocious example of the panopticon ideated by Jeremy Bentham built by the Bourbon rulers of the Kingdom of Naples, clearly early adopters of cutting edge prison technology. Bentham’s idea was that all cells should look onto a central courtyard—an allusion to the many-eyed Argos Panoptes of Greek mythology—and thus can be monitored by a single guard.

The island would once again become a place of exile in the Fascist period, and the crumbling eighteenth century panopticon would be employed for the confinement of political prisoners. Among them was Sandro Pertini who would hold the office of President of the Italian Republic from 1978 until 1985; and it was here, in 1941, that Ernesto Rossi, Altiero Spinelli, and Eugenio Colorni wrote the Manifesto of Ventotene, one of the founding documents of the European Union.

Jeremy Bentham, European federalism, Odysseus, prickly pears, water so clear it’s almost invisible, and a proliferation of tiny Fiats; plus a nod to Aeneas glimpsed from the train back from Anzio (by the suitably named Imperium Boxing Club): a glorious, eclectic mix!

Saluti from back in torrid Rome!

Agnes

Below there is an inscription from Dante:

La faccia sua mi parea lunga e grossa
come la pina di San Pietro a Roma

Divine Comedy, Inferno, Canto XXXI

“His face seemed to me as long and as fat as the pinecone of Saint Peter’s in Rome” it reads. The vast visage Dante alludes to belongs to Nimrod, the giant who guards the ninth circle of hell; that reserved for traitors. If we look beyond the simultaneously anachronistic and wildly unflattering description, it tells us that when Dante (probably) visited Rome during the first Jubilee year in 1300 the pinecone was still in front of Old St Peter’s.

It had been there since the eighth century when it was moved from the place it had languished near the Pantheon.

The bronze pinecone was originally gilded and is almost four metres in height (about thirteen feet). It dates to the second century (when things were going well and the statue output of Rome was at its peak; without meaning to be overly facetious, if in doubt the second century is always a good bet). It was cast by a certain Publius Cincius Salvius who is otherwise unknown but was a clearly celebrated enough sculptor to have signed it.

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For the Romans pinecones spoke of fertility and prosperity, and this one originally functioned as a fountain. It originally perhaps perhaps decorated the Iseum, the great temple of Isis in the Field of Mars and came to light in the eighth century in what had once been part of the Baths of Agrippa and which is now the piazza della Pigna in its honour.

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Who, then, was Cestius,
And what is he to me?
Amid thick thoughts and memories multitudinous
One thought alone brings he.

I can recall no word
Of anything he did;
For me he is a man who died and was interred
To leave a pyramid […]

At the Pyramid of Cestius near the graves of Shelley and Keats, Thomas Hardy, 1887

I’ve always found Hardy’s opening line about the Pyramid of Cestius simultaneously charming and tiresome, but if I’m honest I lean towards the tiresome. His poem goes on, with inimitable British solipsism, to determine that really whatever it was that Gaius Cestius had done in life to merit such a splendid tomb (and he’s certainly not going to any effort to find out), in death his chief purpose was to “beckon pilgrim feet, with marble finger high” as they flock to the tombs of Keats and Shelley in the adjacent cemetery. Poor old Gaius Cestius becomes, for Hardy, little more than a signpost for dead Romantic poets.

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Had Hardy torn himself from his reverie and instead looked at the inscription—which Cestius had especially ordered on two sides, that it might be seen by all passing traffic—he could have determined who indeed then was Cestius. For it tells us:

C CESTIUS L F POB EPULO PR TR PL

VII VIR EPULONUM

Which is to say, Gaius Cestius Epulo, son of Lucius, of the voting tribe Poblilia, praetor [chief magistrate], tribune of the plebs, one of seven state priests in charge of public banquets [the epulones] which celebrated various religious festivals.

Cestius’ splendid marble-faced funerary monument was built during the reign of Augustus, and served to advertise his erudition and travels across the nascent Empire. The choice of the tall, narrow pyramidical form, distinct from those of the Pharaohs, suggests that he may have served in Nubia. There we can imagine he admired the steep slopes of the sandstone pyramids built by Kushite kingdoms from the eighth century BCE and commissioned one of his own, to be clad in marble from the quarries of Luni (Carrara).

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When it was built, the pyramid was outside the pomerium (the spiritual boundary delineating the city limits) and Rome had no need of walls; almost three centuries later the city had grown, and for the first time in six centuries fortifications were once again an urgent necessity.

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I’m a big fan of small museums, or picking specific areas of big museums to look at. For example the Pinacoteca of the Vatican Museums is extraordinary, and usually one can contemplate the paintings in peace: Giotto; Melozzo da Forlì; Benozzo Gozzoli; Raphael, a whole room of Raphael!; Bellini; an unfinished Leonardo; Caravaggio.

The late Philippe Daverio (a sort of Franco-Italian Jonathan Meades: eccentric, erudite, acerbic, extremely amusing) whose excellent Rai series Passepartout I watched with great pleasure in the early two thousands, had a splendid line which often springs to mind. He said, “you wouldn’t walk into a library and expect to read all of the books, so why on earth would you visit a gallery and look at all of the paintings?”

In that vein, exhibitions of single paintings are very much my bag, and there is a lovely one at Palazzo Venezia at present. It’s called La Maddalena di Piero di Cosimo: art, history and the lives of women in the Florentine Renaissance. I’ve always been enormously fond of Piero di Cosimo’s painting of Santa Maria Maddalena which usually glows quietly in a corner, often overlooked among the panoply of delights of Palazzo Barberini.

It’s super to see her given a bit of limelight in a show which uses the painting as a prism through which to view the lives of women, and as a study of the decorative arts in the Florentine Renaissance.

The life of Piero di Cosimo spans the late quattrocento and the early cinquecento, a particularly serendipitous ecosystem for the nurturing of his indubitable talents. He was born Pietro di Lorenzo on via della Scala in Florence, not far from where the modern visitor may hop off the train at Santa Maria Novella. His father Lorenzo di Pietro d’Antonio was a goldsmith of modest means; that his son be apprenticed as a painter was a natural path.

Piero (a common diminutive of Pietro) joined the bottega of Cosimo Rosselli in 1480 aged eighteen and the following year Rosselli was called to Rome as part of the group of artists who were to paint the new papal chapel in the Vatican Palace for Pope Sixtus IV.

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The first phase of decoration of the Sistine Chapel, a quarter of a century before Michelangelo was brought in to (re)paint the ceiling, was an extraordinary project on which the young Piero would cut his teeth. He would also take the name of his influential master, becoming Piero di Cosimo.

A decade or so after working at the Sistine Chapel—sometime between 1490 and 1495— Piero painted his exquisite, luminous Maddalena for an unknown patron. It is a private work of devotion, with an extraordinary contemporaneity that the exhibition celebrates.

Mary Magdalene wears the deep, rich, sumptuous colours of an elegant Florentine lady, the details of folds and the bow positively tangible as her lustrous hair tumbles, gleaming, over her shoulder.

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As the events which commemorated the eightieth anniversary of the birth of the Italian Republic—a flypast and parade and the unfurling of the tricolore down the facade of the Colosseum—I escaped the chaos and went for a swim, taking a circuitous route on my Vespa to circumvent the road closures.

As the centre of town pullulated with visitors, including lots of folk from other parts of Italy making a long weekend of the public holiday, and Romans decamped to the beach I rode along the deserted roads skirting the Aurelian Wall. Heat rose from the asphalt, the poppies of spring were already a distant memory, replaced by the summer scents of oleander on the warm breeze. There was not a soul about.

I’ve mentioned this elsewhere (here specifically, paywall removed) but this stretch of the Aurelian Wall always brings to mind the (excellent) 1992 movie Caro Diario. It’s here, on a similarly deserted day in the torpor of August, that Nanni Moretti runs into Jennifer Beals whom he recognizes from Flashdance. It is fabulously bizarre encounter by the third century walls: a collision between nineteen-eighties musical cinema and the great harbinger of imperial decline.

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I wended my way back along empty roads, almost as the barricades were being removed. At the lights by the Baths of Caracalla I spotted a red Vigili del Fuoco truck heading the other way. Its oversized load was the huge furled tricolore, which had been hanging from the Colosseum less than an hour before (the subject of my last missive), on its way back to the national fire service training centre at Capannelle.

All of those celebrations commemorated not only the creation of the Italian Republic, but also another major milestone in Italian history: the referendum was the first national ballot to be held under universal suffrage. The right to vote for women was embraced with enthusiasm, and in the wake of the war there were more women Italian citizens of voting age than men; women’s votes played a decisive role in the creation of post-war Italy.

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With thoughts of suffrage in mind, then, I shall take this opportunity to plug my fabulous mama’s latest book, The British Women’s Suffrage Movement in 100 Objects which is published by Bloomsbury next month and has lots of photos. It is an extremely readable distillation of a lifetime of research and study (and is incredibly good value), I urge you all to buy it!

Saluti from Roma,

Agnes

This is an annual occurrence and comes at the culmination of the parade along via dei Fori Imperiali which celebrates of the declaration of the Italian Republic following the referendum of 2 June 1946. (Incidentally this was the first Italian election to apply universal suffrage, the subject of the 2023 movie C’è Ancora Domani.)

Anyway, all those firemen atop the surviving section of the outer wall, forty-eight metres (about 150 feet) above the ground proved a useful illustration for discussion of the velarium which once protected spectators from the elements. This retractable awning was anchored by two hundred and forty wooden posts slotted into holes in the external overhang and resting on the stone brackets below.

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The awning was manned by sailors from Cape Misenum, during the Roman Empire the busiest naval base of the western Mediterranean. Sailors are, after all, good at ropes and heights, though presumably that didn’t save at least some of them from being taken unawares by a sudden gust of wind or a loose rope. Such things, however, are not the stuff of imperial record so we can but wonder, and I often do.

As we watched the firemen trotting atop the dizzying outer wall I thought of those sailors, hoped the firemen had rather more in the way of harnessing, and hummed this song under my breath. Mostly literal translation is mine, it’s an eccentric song. Also Lucio Dalla’s comments about “real men” are most definitely extremely tongue in cheek.

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Ma dove vanno i marinai
con le loro giubbe bianche
sempre in cerca di una rissa o di un bazar
Ma dove vanno i marinai
con le loro facce stanche
sempre in cerca di una bimba da baciar.

But where are sailors going

with their white jackets

always looking for a fight or a bazaar

But where are sailors going

with their tired faces

always on the lookout for a girl to kiss

Ma cosa fanno i marinai
quando arrivano nel porto
vanno a prendersi l’amore dentro al bar
qualcuno è vivo per fortuna
qualcuno è morto
c’è una vedova da andare a visitar.

But what do sailors do

when they dock in port

they go to find some love in a bar

some are alive by luck

some are dead

there’s a widow to go and visit.

Ma come fanno i marinai
a riconoscersi sempre uguali sempre quelli
all’Equatore e al Polo Nord
ma come fanno i marinai
a baciarsi tra di loro
a rimanere veri uomini però.

But how do sailors manage

to recognise each other, always the same, always they

from the Equator to the North Pole

how do sailors manage to kiss each other

while remaining real men

Intorno al mondo senza amore
come un pacco postale
senza nessuno che gli chiede come va
col cuore appresso a una donna
una donna senza cuore
chissà se ci pensano ancora, chissà.

Around the world without love

like a parcel

without anyone to ask how they are

with a heart stuck on a woman

a woman with no heart

who knows if they think about her still, who knows

Ma dove vanno i marinai
mascalzoni imprudenti
con la vita nei calzoni
col destino in mezzo ai denti
sotto la luna puttana e il cielo che sorride

But where are sailors going

feckless scoundrels

with their life in their trousers

with destiny gripped in their teeth

under the fickle moon and the smiling heavens

come fanno i marinai
con questa noia che li uccide
addormentati sopra un ponte
in fondo a malincuore
sognano un ritorno smaltiscono un liquore
affaticati dalla vita piena di zanzare
che cosa gliene frega
di trovarsi in mezzo al mare
a un mare che più passa il tempo
e più non sa di niente
su questa rotta inconcludente
da Genova a New York

How do sailors manage

with this boredom that kills them

sleeping on deck

deep in melancholy

dreaming of return as they work off the booze

exhausted by mosquitos

what do they care about being in the middle of the sea

a sea which as time passes loses meaning

on this never-ending route from Genoa to New York

ma come fanno i marinai
a fare a meno della gente
e rimanere veri uomini però.
Intorno al mondo senza amore
come un pacco postale
senza nessuno che gli chiede come va
col cuore appresso a una donna
una donna senza cuore
chissà se ci pensano ancora,
chissà.

But how do sailors manage

to do without people

and still remain real men

around the world without love

like a parcel

without anyone to ask them how they are

with a heart stuck on a woman

a woman with no heart

who knows if they still think about her, who knows

The small San Lorenzo, usually at the Uffizi was also perhaps commissioned by Maffeo, and we know from Filippo Baldinucci’s biography—written during Bernini’s lifetime—that when Bernini carved the furrowed expression of David for Scipione Borghese it was Maffeo who held the mirror that the young sculptor might study his own expression of concentration for inspiration.

These are just some of the indications of the esteem and friendship in which Cardinal Maffeo Barberini held the young Gianlorenzo Bernini, and his patronage would prove perhaps the most significant of Bernini’s long and prolific career.

While Bernini was working on the David, and following the death of Pope Gregory XV Ludovisi, the Conclave met in the Sistine Chapel. After two—discordant, hot—weeks of voting, on the night of the fifth of August of 1623 Cardinal Maffeo Barberini was elected in the first papal conclave to employ a secret ballot. Ten of the fifty-four cardinals in the Sistine Chapel were recorded as suffering from malarial fever on the third of August, and in the immediate wake of the election eight cardinals died. Among those who fell ill was Scipione Borghese. He survived but reluctantly had to leave the conclave, ceding his papabile status to Maffeo Barberini and encouraging his supporters to vote for Maffeo.

The ballot which sealed Barberini’s election was missing a single vote; lest there be questions raised over the validity of his divinely-ordained mandate, Maffeo insisted the vote be repeated. He won again, with a resounding majority, and this time with all votes cast.

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It was said that a swarm of bees (the heraldic symbol of the Barberini family) alighted on the chapel as the Conclave reached its conclusion on the fifth of August, evidence of the Divine Providence which heralded the reign of Pope Urban VIII and which would be the subject of Pietro da Cortona’s spectacular ceiling at Palazzo Barberini. Here’s a post I wrote about that (no paywall).

Upon his election, the newly-elected pope called for Bernini. Gianlorenzo was then twenty-four years old and already holder of a papal knighthood granted by Gregory XV which granted him the title Cavaliere. Pope Urban is said to have told him:

Gran fortuna è la vostra, o Cavaliere, di veder Papa il Cardinal Barberini, ma assai maggiore è la nostra, che il Cavalier Bernini viva

“Yours is a great fortune, o Cavaliere, to see the Barberini Cardinal as Pope, but far greater is ours, to live in the time of Cavalier Bernini”

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It is bucolic and timeless, yet simultaneously hums with an undertone of menace. Sporadic waves of hurtling traffic bounce along the cobbles and there is no pavement. Walking down it is not a good idea; if looking for a relaxing walk along the Appian Way my advice is to start at the splendid mausoleum of Cecilia Metella.

But back to the Tomb of the Scipios. It is one of several sites which fall under the aegis of the Comune di Roma but which are usually closed (there are quite simply too many extraordinary things in Rome), though one of the perks of being a qualified guide means I can request special openings.

And so it was that I and some charming folk found ourselves cutting through the park of the Scipios from the Porta Latina—a pair of toddlers on tricycles; an elderly chap reading the paper on a bench; a lady with a very small dog—little more than an enthusiastic stone’s throw from the crowds of the Colosseum. We arrived exactly as a chap from the council appeared with a key and opened the gate for us. It’s one of the umpteen aspects of my job that never ceases to be exciting!

The unwavering pragmatism of ancient Rome stated that the remains of the dead should be outside the city of the living. Very sensible. Cities, however, grow. When a family tomb of the Scipios was established here in the very early third century BCE it was outside the pomerium, the spiritual boundary that delineated the city. Such was Rome’s incremental, but inexorable, growth that when the Aurelian Walls were built—hurriedly and in a desperate attempt to stave off imminent invasion—almost six centuries later, the tomb of the Scipios was among innumerable tombs—perhaps most notably the Mausoleum of Augustus in the Field of Mars—well within the eighteen kilometres circumscribed by the fortification which served also as pomerium.

While existing tombs were to be respected under pain of conjuring the wrath of the underworld, newer funerary monuments were built outside the gradually shifting city limits. One can thus identify the growth of a Roman city by the proximity of its older tombs to its centre.

The tomb of the Scipios exploited an outcrop of cappellaccio tufo: a pyroclastic rock (pyroclastic from the Greek: fire and fragments) and eventually housed the remains of six generations of the Cornelii Scipiones. Tufo, or tuff, is a scrappy, inhomogeneous, friable sort of stone, largely made up of compacted ash and other volcanic detritus; cappellaccio is a specific type of tufo, grey in colour, which was produced by the explosive volcanic system of the Alban Hills between six hundred and thirty-six millennia ago. Easy to dig into, it lends itself to hypogea (as per the neighbouring catacombs in centuries to come).

Before being used for funerary monuments these expanses of cappellaccio were quarried for building materials; as the city grew the quarries moved further afield and—just as the catacombs of Saint Sebastian would centuries later—the tomb of the Scipios may have taken advantage of an area of rock previously partially excavated as a quarry.

Originally the tomb of the Scipios faced onto a side road between the vie Latina and Appia. Both roads linked Rome and Capua and, although the Appian Way was the first paved Roman road, the via Latina is the more ancient route of the two; it was used by the Etruscans to colonise Campania from the eighth century BCE when Rome was but a glint in Romulus’ eye.

However, the Appian Way—subsequently called the viarum regina; “Queen of Roads”— offered a more reliable surface for the marching of troops. It was begun in 312 BCE, during the consulship of the eponymous Appius Claudius Caecus, and part of this first stretch runs along the lavic ridge which, like the cappellaccio, was the product of the eruptions of the Latium volcano. Rome is relentlessly rooted in its geology, its roads and tombs among the panoply of aspects of the city which are ineffably site-specific.

The funerary complex of the Scipios was first discovered in 1614; further investigations were undertaken in the eighteenth century when the finds were taken into the Vatican collections of Pius VI, and there was renewed interest in the site in the Fascist period. The inscriptions and sarcophagi now at the tomb are replicas.

The basic plan is a main central gallery with three branches on either side, the whole supported by four piers subsequently cut into for later burials. It is interesting to note that the Scipios continued to practise inhumation long after cremation had become the norm in Rome. The earliest burial is at the end of the main gallery, the tomb of Scipio the Bearded, here replaced by a copy, the original is in the Vatican Museums. Lucius Cornelius Scipio Barbatus was consul in 298 BCE, and led the Roman army to victory over the Etruscans near Volterra in that same year.

He was the father of Lucius Cornelius Scipio and Gnaeus Cornelius Scipio Asina (Ass for his ill-judged performance at the Battle of the Lipari Islands), both generals in the first Punic War, and great-grandfather to Scipio Africanus, victor of Hannibal Barca in the Second Punic War.

Scipio the Bearded’s career burgeoned during the Third Samnite War, and he was instrumental in Rome’s defeat over a coalition of her neighbours: Etruscans and Umbrians in central Italy, the Samnites in the south and their allies over the Alps, the Gauls.

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His sarcophagus follows Hellenistic Southern Italian models, plausibly made in Magna Grecia. Its Greek form is testament to the sophisticated erudition of the Scipios. The lid bears the name LUCIUS CORNELIUS SON OF CNAEUS SCIPIO.

Below is a later inscription in archaic Latin Saturnian verse emphasising the glorification of the ancestor some decades after the event, and sometimes thought to have been commissioned by Scipio the Bearded’s great grandson Scipio Africanus.

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Of those cardinal one hundred and eight had been elevated to the Curia by Francis. For two days the world watched a temporary chimney for signs of smoke: black smoke to announce a ballot which hadn’t reached the two-thirds majority required; white to announce a successful conclusion to the conclave. Sometimes a seagull landed on it. It was, I think we can all agree, extremely analogue.

Finally, just after six on the evening of the eighth of May, Pope Leo XIV was elected to the Throne of Peter. Soon after I concluded a tour of the Roman Forum and glanced at La Repubblica on my phone to see the words “fumata bianca”, white smoke.

My Vespa was at the mechanic and I was on the wrong side of town, but experience tells me that I had at least forty minutes before any announcement would be made so I used a car sharing app and took a strategic route to the other side of the Tiber before engaging in a spot of creative parking. Of the three election announcements I’ve seen in Rome this was by far the most crowded: it was, after all, May in a Jubilee Year.

I came at the colonnades from the flank, skirting the crowds on via della Conciliazione, and made it into piazza San Pietro with a moment to spare and took advantage of a slightly higher point of the piazza to the side of the obelisk (almost exactly the same spot from which I watched the election of Pope Francis in 2013).

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My phone was on its last bit of juice so I took very few photographs, my favourite of which is the first at the top of this post: some of the cardinals gathered on a lateral balcony as the announcement was awaited by crowds which stretched back to the Castel Sant’Angelo.

The curtain at the balcony opened, a sudden silence fell, and the Cardinal Protodeacon Dominique Mamberti proclaimed annuntio vobis, gaudium magnum: habemus papam!

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Amid the echoing sound system there was a hubbub after the next phrase. What did he say? bubbled through the crowd in umpteen different languages. Some knowledgable seminarians nearby had the answer, è americano! Pope Leo XIV was then presented to the world, the two hundred and sixty-sixth successor to St Peter.

Among Pope Leo’s titles is that of Pontifex Maximus. Once held by the high priest of the collegium pontificum, it was in due course granted to the bishop of Rome following the definitive Christianisation of the Empire in the late fourth century. Which means that a title once held by Augustus—and beyond ancient for him—is today, in the second quarter of the twenty-first century, held by a chap from Chicago. Which is pretty extraordinary, isn’t it?

Saluti from Roma!

Agnes

The monument was designed by Giovanni Jacobucci and inaugurated in November 1941. It is undeniably Fascist in aspect, a darkly hollow irony given the stark contrast between Fascism and the democratic ideals for which those it commemorates laid down their lives.

An inscription on the front bears the words Ai Caduti Per Roma (“to those who fell for Rome”) and in the context of the Fascist regime the imperial symbolism is, to say the least, uncomfortable. Barely three months before its inauguration Mussolini had sent Italian Expeditionary Forces to the Eastern Front in what would prove a long and ultimately disastrous campaign. Over 80,000 ill-equipped and under-prepared Italian troops died in Russia, most of whom died as prisoners of war while Mussolini sat in Palazzo Venezia. I don’t think Garibaldi would have approved.

The battle commemorated today on the via Garibaldi was fought on the Janiculum Hill on 30 April 1849, and marked the beginning of the end of the short-lived Roman Republic. Following the assassination of the Prime Minister of the Papal States (more of which here, no paywall) in November 1848 Pope Pius IX had fled to Gaeta; in February 1849 the Roman Republic was declared.

On 25 April 1849 some ten thousand French soldiers landed at Civitavecchia, sent by the future Napoleon III, then President of the French Republic. A natural French anti-papal instinct was mitigated by the need to appease French Catholics, and to limit Austrian power in Italy. Thus the orders of the “Prince-President” were to reinstate Pius IX, and word was sent from General Charles Oudinet to Giuseppe Mazzini. The Roman Republic refused and a military defence was hurriedly put in place.

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On 27 April Garibaldi arrived in Rome, and on the 29th bersaglieri recently triumphant over Austrian forces in Milan entered the city. On 30th April the French troops, augmented by four thousand or so Spanish soldiers, entered Rome along the via Aurelia. and were met on the Janiculum by Garibaldi. He led a rag-tag army of his red-shirts, the Lombardic soldiers, and vehemently anti-papal Trasteverini against the much larger French force which was forced to retreat to the coast and the Roman Republic survived for another two months.

This morning I pulled up to watch as the ceremony concluded with a prize-giving to children from a local school for essays written from the perspective of some of the protagonists, which I found thoroughly charming. As the chattering teenagers dispersed I took advantage of the opening to visit the ossuary beneath the monument with the names of the dead. A sarcophagus is home to the remains of Goffredo Mameli, who died aged twenty-one of gangrene following injuries received in the French attack of 3 June 1849.

A month after that defeat the Roman Republic fell and Pius IX was reinstated, for a time. The city definitively fell from papal control twenty-one years later, on 20 September 1870, and Mameli’s Fratelli d’Italia would become the Italian national anthem, redolent of blood spilt on the Janiculum.

Gianlorenzo Bernini’s long and productive career was the product of the serendipitous aligning of many a planet, and one of the key figures was Maffeo Barberini, elected to the throne of Peter in 1623 as Pope Urban VIII.

The extraordinary symbiosis between Bernini and Barberini left an indelible mark on the city of Rome, and had far-reaching repercussions on the art of the Baroque both in Europe and beyond. This relationship between patron and artist is the angle explored in the exhibition.

I often think that Berninis (and Raphaels and Michelangelos) are presumably born somewhere in the world every day, but extraordinary raw talent alone is not enough: aptitude requires cultivation and nurturing if it is to blossom. It is to our great fortune that Gianlorenzo Bernini’s innumerable talents fell on wildly fertile ground.

Gianlorenzo was born in Naples on 7 December 1598 to Pietro Bernini and Angelica Galante. Pietro was a Florentine artist and had moved to Naples, a hotbed of cosmopolitan artistic activity, in his early twenties and it was there that he met and married Angelica. The circumstances of Gianlorenzo’s birth were not particularly auspicious, but soon after the election of Pope Paul V of the Borghese family in 1605 Pietro was called to Rome to work as a sculptor at the new Pauline Chapel of Santa Maria Maggiore.

The first room of the exhibition includes the funerary bust of Giovanni Angelo Frumenti, a canon of Santa Maria Maggiore and as superintendent of the Pauline Chapel plausibly the direct commissioner of Pietro’s services. Long overlooked in a shadowy corner of Santa Maria Maggiore, the theorised attribution of the bust to Bernini father and son was first mooted only in 2016.

It is here displayed both in clear sight and following a recent cleaning which has served to emphasise the tight lips, hollow cheeks, and sunken temples of Frumenti which suggest it was carved from a mask made at the erstwhile canon’s death in 1621.

We can, then, imagine Frumenti as responsible for the rapidly growing Bernini family’s move to Rome when Gianlorenzo was six or so. They subsequently lived on the Esquiline Hill adjacent to the ancient basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, a church to which Gianlorenzo would be particularly devoted throughout his life, and where he would eventually be buried.

The context of the Borghese papacy provided the suitably fertile ground upon which Gianlorenzo’s innumerable nascent talents initially fell. Paul V’s “cardinal nephew” (cardinale nipote, from which the word “nepotism”) was the canny, erudite, ruthless Scipione Borghese.

Scipione was a sophisticated patron of the arts; a collector of works ancient and modern, many of which can still be seen in his “Museum of the Universe” in what were once the pleasure gardens of the family, then just beyond the city, and are now central Rome’s largest public park.

Among those pieces still housed in the Museo Borghese are some of Gianlorenzo Bernini’s earliest works: the date of the Goat Almathea harbouring the infant Jupiter is disputed but oscillates between 1609 when Gianlorenzo was ten, and 1615 when he was sixteen. It is certainly very early, and is testament to the young artist’s study of Hellenistic models.

By virtue of his father’s profession and the encouraging context of the papal court, and especially of the figure of Scipione Borghese, the young Gianlorenzo was provided with offcuts of marble and tools with which to experiment, and with the ancient sculptures in the Belvedere Courtyard of the Vatican Palaces—notably Laocoön, the Belvedere Torso, and the Apollo Belvedere—to study.

The large masterpieces Gianlorenzo created for Scipione, and which are still today at the Galleria Borghese, are testament to the enthusiasm for the Antique of the “cardinal nephew” and his circle: Aeneas and Anchises; Pluto and Persephone; Apollo and Daphne.

This last depicts the moment described by Ovid in his Metamorphoses when the bewildered god—an animated interpretation of the ancient Apollo Belvedere—reaches the naiad Daphne only to realise that at his touch she is transforming into a tree. To use the medium of stone—cold; static—to show someone turning into a tree is in itself an extraordinary enterprise; that lithic metamorphosis should be achieved with such success is thoroughly astonishing. As we look at the statue we know it is marble, and yet surely those leaves rustle and those toes take root before our eyes.

Uncomfortable tales of gods pestering women who would rather be left alone is a recurring element in Greek mythology and, despite his prodigious collection of ancient pornography, the Apollo and Daphne perhaps proved a touch outré even for Scipione Borghese. Thus it was that a moralising couplet was carved on the base of the statue.

Quisquis amans sequitur fugitivae gaudir formae

fronde manus implet baccas seu carpit amaras

“Whoever, loving, pursues the joys of fleeting forms fills his hands with sprays of leaves and bitter fruits”

The author of this verse was Maffeo Barberini, created cardinal by the Borghese pope and a member of Scipione’s milieu of intellectuals. Almost a century after the birth of the Protestant Reformation, Barberini had been created cardinal merely two years after being ordained a priest and was composing verses to justify the titillating nature of statuary depicting the very carnal lust of a pagan god made for the inordinately wealthy nephew of the Pope; we can almost hear Martin Luther spinning in his grave.

While Bernini was working on the extraordinary and complex Apollo and Daphne he appears to have paused to work on the David, also commissioned by Scipione. According to Filippo Baldinucci’s biography, as Gianlorenzo worked on the sculpture Cardinal Maffeo Barberini held a mirror that the artist might show his own likeness in the face of David, pursed in concentration as he readies his shot against Goliath.

A month or two after he had held the mirror for Gianlorenzo, on the fifth of August of 1623, much to the chagrin of Scipione Borghese, Maffeo Barberini was elected after a conclave lasting two long, hot weeks; the first use of a secret ballot in a papal election. He took the name Urban VIII and on the day of his election called in Gianlorenzo, then aged twenty-four and already a knight for his services as portraitist to Urban’s predecessor Pope Gregory XV. This would mark the beginning of one of the most fruitful patron/artist relationships in the history of Italian art.

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But I’m getting ahead of myself; the exhibition begins before Urban VIII’s election, while Paul V Borghese still occupied the throne of Peter, and as the burgeoning career of the young Gianlorenzo began, already, to surpass that of his father.

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Michelangelo’s design for the Palazzo dei Senatori unified the higgledy-piggledy medieval additions to the Tabularium, the archive building of the ancient city, built during the dictatorship of Sulla in the seventies of the first century BCE. The medieval fortress of the Corsi family which had—centuries later—swallowed it up became the seat of the government of the papal city in the mid twelfth century. This civic function continues, unbroken, and the Palazzo dei Senatori is today the town hall of the Comune di Roma.

Michelangelo’s design for the piazza del Campidoglio is an extraordinary piece of Renaissance town planning. As well as the rebuilding of the Palazzo dei Senatori the project, completed after his death by Giacomo della Porta, also added a new facade to the fifteenth century Palazzo dei Conservatori, and built the Palazzo Nuovo from scratch on the opposite side of the piazza. Thus the somewhat arbitrary form of the existing buildings—in turn informed by ancient structures and the topography of the hill—was transformed into a regular trapezium. As somebody once memorably said, Rome wasn’t built in a day.

This thought always brings to mind Freud’s description of Rome as an analogy for memory. He views the Capitoline Hill as a sort of temporal hologram, its multiple incarnations simultaneously co-existing in their respective moments of glory. It is, I find, a very appealing idea:

…let us make the fantastic supposition that Rome were not a human dwelling-place, but a mental entity with just as long and varied a past history: that is, in which nothing once constructed had perished, and all the earlier stages of development had survived alongside the latest. This would mean that in Rome the palaces of the Caesars were still standing on the Palatine and the Septizonium of Septimius Severus was still towering to its old height; that the beautiful statues were still standing in the colonnade of the Castle of St. Angelo, as they were up to its siege by the Goths, and so on. But more still: where the Palazzo Caffarelli stands there would also be, without this being removed, the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, not merely in its latest form, moreover, as the Romans of the Caesars saw it, but also in its earliest shape, when it still wore an Etruscan design and was adorned with terra-cotta antifixae.

Civilization and its Discontents, Sigmund Freud, 1929

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A plan to remodel the Campidoglio as befitted the civic hub of the papal city began in 1534, following the election of Pope Paul III. A key element of this plan was moving the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius from the Lateran. The original location of the statue is immortalised in the background of the Dispute of St Thomas Aquinas at the Carafa Chapel (about which more anon, it’s absolutely glorious).

The bronze of Marcus Aurelius is the only complete equestrian statue of a Roman emperor to have survived the Middle Ages, tradition says because it was erroneously believed to have represented Constantine, considered the first Christian emperor. Thus its gilded bronze was saved from being melted down and turned into something less, well, pagan. Such as weaponry.

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The painting is temporarily on view at the Senate library (as of today the Roman viewings have been extended until 19 April after which it will take up permanent residence at the Regional Museum of Abruzzo at L’Aquila) which has occupied the Palazzo della Minerva adjacent to the Dominican monastery of Santa Maria sopra Minerva since 2003, and is named for Giovanni Spadolini. Spadolini was Italy’s forty-fourth Prime Minister, the quondam President of the Senate, and longtime president of the Partito Repubblicana Italiana, Italy’s oldest surviving political party rooted in nineteenth century Radicalism and the legacy of Mazzini and Saffi. Which is also all extremely interesting, if by the by, so let’s return to Antonello.

The subject of the painting was particularly suitable for a Holy Week viewing: the tiny wood panel (20.3 x 14.9 cm, about the size of a paperback) is painted in oil on both sides: on one the anguished, moving Ecce Homo; on the other the penitent Jerome in the desert. It was commissioned as a portable object of devotion by an unknown patron, perhaps a wealthy merchant, and painted around 1465. Thus it dates to ten years or so before the Annunciate Virgin I mentioned in my post about Antonello a couple of weeks ago; he has been rather on the mind recently!

Ecce Homo is the exclamation mentioned in the Vulgate translation of the Gospel of St John (19:5) as being proclaimed by Pontius Pilate as he presented the flagellated Christ to the crowd: Behold the man!

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It is a subject which would be painted many times by Antonello (at least six have been identified, one of which was destroyed in Vienna in 1939) and which was a popular subject for devotional images. The focus is on the Christus patiens; the suffering Christ. This is not the omnipotent pantocrator, but rather we are shown Christ as man and are invited to meditate on the very human, visceral nature of His pain and humiliation.

Antonello returned repeatedly to the theme of Ecce Homo, presumably in response to requests of his patrons as well as any personal affinity he may have felt with the subject, but this is the earliest known example of the six we know he painted.

Christ’s anguish is palpable: His beseeching eyes half-closed with pain and red with tears; the quotidian detail of the rope around His neck, and the shadow it casts are a reminder of the immediacy of the violence inflicted. This is not, Antonello tells us, something which happened far away and long ago; rather it is happening now to a man, right in front of us.

The poignancy of Christ’s suffering is emphasised by the merest hint of drops of blood— now only just noticeable among the cracks in the oil paint—which run towards Christ’s chest. Looking for the source of these drops draws our attention to the crown of thorns, its points shining with a dark malevolence, and barely visible in Christ’s hair.

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At the bottom of the of painting the stone parapet bears the letters I N R I: the Latin acronym Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum (Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews). The reversed “N” is an intriguing, though not uncommon, epigraphic phenomenon. I like to think Antonello is perhaps here once again reminding us of the tangible humanity of the moment, rooted in human experience and a world where illiterate stonemasons often reversed letters.

On the other side of the painting a tiny figure of Saint Jerome, his face all but obliterated by the vicissitudes of time, kneels in a rocky landscape. He beats his chest with stones in penitence and regret for the excesses his worldly life as a young man; and seeks communion with the suffering of Christ. St Jerome was born in Dalmatia around 345 CE before his studies in Rome led to his conversion to Christianity in the 360s. He retreated to the desert of Syria in search of hermetic asceticism for many years but was also a sophisticated scholar in the service of the Church in Rome.

The books—one open, one closed—and the inkwell allude to Jerome’s erudite role as a Doctor of the Church, and the translator of the Vulgate Bible. I wasn’t sure if I was imagining it but I think there is the merest hint of the crucifix, the focus of Jerome’s meditation, above his outstretched hand. Is it, I wondered, perhaps a shadow cast by a crucifix out of view?

In any case the crucifix usually seen in images of the Penitent Jerome is here redundant; the Ecce Homo on the other side reminds us of the reason for Jerome’s physical suffering. Together the two images form a piercing, portable, meditation on the nature of Christ’s suffering, and a profoundly human expression of the very nature of grief.

There were long queues over the Easter weekend but my timing to visit the painting was strategic and successful, not only did I walk straight in but was able to view both sides comfortably and returned to them several times.

As I peered at the glorious detail of the image of Jerome a young floppy-haired Dominican in full robes and with a gentle Southern Italian accent was illustrating the analogy between the penitence of Jerome and the suffering of Christ to a couple of elegant Roman ladies of a certain age.

I left them to it and wandered out through the cloister of the Dominican monastery, into the chill of Maundy Thursday in search of Paschal treats for a weekend which erupted into glorious sunshine, as befits Easter.

Saluti from Roma!

Agnes