Still Fall in Rome

Today we went to Monte Testaccio and the Vatican Museums. Overall, a very good half-day field trip. Monte Testaccio is a huge pile of busted amphorae which were mostly used to get olive oil from Spain to Rome. We climbed it briefly and the paths were paved with pottery fragments. I was skeptical about our ability to get into the Vatican on time, but when we got there, the line was jaw-droppingly nonexistant, so we walked right in and got our tickets. There’s way too much amazingness in that place. The concentrated nature of it all seems like the universe might implode into that spot.

We saw the real Prima Porta Augustus, and some famous statues of other emperors and gods, and emperors as gods, and the Cancellaria reliefs, and the reliefs from the Haterii tomb, all of which I studied last year so I was particularly excited. We also saw the awesome and famous Laocoön. Then we were free to roam the place for a couple of hours, so I followed some other people who had been there before (I, though having lived in Rome for three months, had been to the Vatican area only once, to send mail, and had never entered the basilica or the museum, which is a shameful thing to admit) and we fought the crowds to look at the Sistine Chapel, which is just freaking breathtaking, and the Raffaelo room which has the real School of Athens on the wall, and some other really famous painted rooms that even people who don’t know anything about art like me have heard of.

I stuck with Liz because she had gone to these places for class with the exceptionally intense Art History teacher, “Tags,” who lectures nonstop and totally from memory at the sites. She explained the ceiling work of the Sistine Chapel and how the place would have worked. It’s really cool to me how much the works of art are influenced by where they are placed and what the space is used for. School of Athens is supposed to inspire people to look in the bookshelves for knowledge. The Sistine Chapel was divided between laypeople who took Communion beneath a painting of the Fall of Man, and the clergy who got to sit under paintings of a time before original sin.

It was a gorgeous day, so all of this was great. Yesterday was absolutely beautiful too. We went out to Tivoli, to Hadrian’s pleasure villa, which is ridiculously large, and was amazing to explore in the warm late-November sunshine. We followed that up with a visit to a pair of temples on top of a hill, and then to the Villa D’Este, which has sweet wall paintings but even sweeter gardens with amazing fountains. The idea is that Hadrian’s Villa would have had water features like the Villa D’Este, and there were fountains everywhere. In the hallways of the villa itself all along this one wall, and all over the garden. It was like a look-but-don’t-swim water park. I took lots of pictures, but we spent a good two hours roaming the gardens looking at the various fountain features. It was stunning beautiful, and I thought it would be the best thing ever to be invited to a garden party at a place like that. I could just see knots of people chatting in the alcoves, and the couples making out in the fountained corners.

It’s almost December, but it’s still fall in Rome, and I love it!