- It’s open 8:30 am to 7:30 pm. WHAT?!
- When I got there, an installation of lions was just being put into place. There were 10 of them total, five on the steps of the museum itself and five on the steps down from the park which face the museum from across the street. It was neato to watch them lowering the lions into place and I liked the way the dude lions looked with their harnesses still on, but most interesting of all (to me) was that there was only one lady lion (which is, FYI, not how lion prides work). She was kind of hidden at the top of the museum staircase, against a pillar, while all the dudes were out in the open, but she somehow felt like the most interesting one. She had the tip of her tail in the air and while she looked super chill, if you know a cat, when the tip of the tail is up, they’re thinking about something. What are you thinking about, lady lion? About to get up, stretch, and pad away from this nonsense? I’m with you, honey.
- They have (free) lockers where you can dump your stuff, no muss no fuss, and it is such a treat to be walking around unencumbered, without having to wait in a stupid line (I’m look at you, coat check at the Met). I was able to spend lots of time with my arms folded, tapping my paper map against my lips as if deep in thought.
- Holy smokes this museum is glorious—the rooms are huge and there is so much light.
- I don’t know if it was in service to this exhibition (Time is Out of Joint/Joint is Out of Time) or what but most pieces were identified only by artist, title, and date—that’s it. Some pieces I never found info for, and then there was this room where they just put a bunch of stuff on a table and tagged each with the artist’s name and date and…enjoy!
- There was some work (?) going on while I was there and so museum people were just doing that—I saw some pieces being moved/carried through the galleries, there was easy visibility into rooms that were in-installation-progress, and then this blue water piece was getting…I don’t know what was happening here, tbh, but at one point a lady was trying to skim something off the water in one of the squares and then just finally gave up and stuck her hand in and sometimes it’s okay to show how the sausage gets made.
- My experience was perhaps colored by the fact that there were like 12 people in the whole museum. I was alone in rooms probably 75% of the time. I saw four guards, total, all of whom were in civilian clothes, sitting on chairs, with only a neck lanyard to identify them and three of whom were assiduously staring at their phones. It was nuts!
I spent quite a while in the museum and eventually stopped
for a glass of wine and a snack in the café. I didn’t get to order a snack,
though, because my wine came with some kind of tapenade in cups, bruschetta,
and potato chips. Ooooookay—thank you?
Post-museum I did a loop of the park and saw an excellent
tableau: this gorgeous ruin (which had no explanatory anything anywhere), and
in front of it some Americans who had to get out and push their little bike up this
little hill. Yay, us!
I saw some wild parrots but (you’re welcome) no pictures; I
also saw some excellent dogs, statuary, and was asked for directions twice.
Today I was asked twice more, and I am starting to feel like I look like I work
here.
I had a lovely dinner—more cacieo e pepe and some amazing
artichoke thing—and then I’ve been going to bed around 8, largely so I can make
sure I’m up at 3:30 am, which hahahaha that is NOT a personal goal at all but
that’s where my sleep cycle is these days. So…maybe I’ll get to see the lunar
eclipse tomorrow night? I have a feeling I’ll be up!
Saturday I made a day about English Romantic poets, which was
excellent. I accidentally climbed the Spanish Steps because I thought the
Keats-Shelley museum was at the top but NO, it is at the bottom, so first I
took a good look at all the rooftop ariels and the guy selling packets of seeds
to all the tourists who were clamoring for them (none), then I carefully
stepped all the way back down because all
of Rome—cobblestones, marble—is very slippery when wet. I do not envy the
two-wheeled drivers in rainy weather.
The Keats-Shelley house museum was SUPER cool. I was the
only person there and so the ticket lady queued up the intro movies just for me
and I got to spend a fair amount of time in the apartment where he and his pal Joseph
Severn lived and—at the age of 25—Keats died. Though all of the contents of
Keats’s bedroom were burned after he died they’ve recreated the chamber and it was
really something goose-bump-y to hang around in the very room where he breathed
his last. There is a little fireplace about two feet from the bed where Severn
used to cook for them and sometimes Severn would carry Keats into Severn’s own
room, just for a change of scenery (this is a distance of about 5 feet). Otherwise
Keats spent his last eight weeks in bed, but he could listen to the crowds on
the Spanish Steps and hear the noise of the fountain and now there is a Sephora
directly across the street and I don’t even know what kind of product John was using
on his hair but in his portraits he looked like he had pretty perfect beachy-waves.
Speaking of hair, exchanging locks of it was kind of a thing
for a while and so this museum has a lot
of hair, including a great pile of it
from when Shelley had his boy curls cut off at 13. I’m not a particularly
sophisticated museum goer but even I can tell you that shit is c-r-e-e-p-y.
My next stop was the non-Catholic cemetery for foreigners and
naturally one of the quickest ways to get there was to wrap around the freaking
Colosseum and then swing past the Circus Maximus and then it was a straight shot
down to the cemetery which also includes a pyramid from 12 BCE, a(nother!)
colony of feral cats, some really amazing monuments, and oh yeah there is a
castle in the middle of a roundabout across the street. Rome is just crammed with artifacts and history and I’m
pretty down with taking Shelley’s direction:
Go thou
to Rome—at once the Paradise,
The
grave, the city, and the wilderness;
And where
its wrecks like shatter’d mountains rise,
And
flowering weeds, and fragrant copses dress
The bones
of Desolation’s nakedness
Pass,
till the sipirt of the spot shall lead
Thy
footsteps to a slope of green access
Where,
like an infant’s smile, over the dead
A light
of laughing flowers along the grass is spread
There’s more (a lot more) to “Adonais” than just these famous
lines but they’re popular around these parts and I get it (the last bit there
is about the daisies growing over Keats’s grave). This is a helluva place to
feel alive and also such a teeny part of the inexorable march of time.
I’m off to Florence today and can only hope more handsome,
disdainful feral cats await!
Pictures
This is the view from one of Keats's two windows.
Ok, sure, this pyramid and a castle. (The "castle" is actually the Porta San Paolo, which is from the 3rd century and served as a gate in the Aurelian Walls, and it was because the wall put the pyramid on the inside that the thing survived--apparently there was a bunch of stuff from that time that got left on the other side of the wall and was destroyed. It's all just a roll of the dice, isn't it?)
Pyramid with slit-eyed dgaf cat.
I'm ashamed to say Carstens is someone famous but I needed to get this handsome orange fellow in. He was trying to stalk some birds and failing miserably but he ignored the shit out of me.
Keats died at 25 and Severn lived into his 80s but was buried next to his pal. Keat's epitaph has an interesting backstory. Apparently he just wanted the writ in water part but a jerky friend insisted on the rest of it (Severn didn't think it was a good idea) and so now his grave makes him seem like a whiny bitter man but in fact he was not the end. (Though their little grave area is nicely tended with some benches and whatnot.)
I liked the juxtaposition of these two monuments.
So this dude W.W. Story was a lawyer and then a sculptor and his last work was the Angel of Grief, which he made for his wife's tombstone, and where he was buried with her a year later when he died. It's absolutely heart-breaking in person and to the right of the angel's wing you can jusst see part of a sign that threatens cctv is watching and there should be NO laying on or posing with the monument. There are also a lot of signs in the cemetery that point out you can't just come in and scatter people's ashes and once again any time I see signs like these I always wonder who the jerk was who tried to do the thing that made them have to put up a sign about it, THANKS, Americans! (I'm guessing but still--totally sounds like us.)
Percy Bysshe Shelley is buried here, also next to his long-time pal Edward Trelawny, and the Shelley's three-year-old son William is nearby. Shelley was drowned at age 29 and his body washed up two days later. His body was then burned right there on the beach where he was found and there's something about that that gets me--it's just so not what I expect in terms of modern burial rites but I guess okay, fuck it: gather up some driftwood, heave him up, and set everything on fire.
Heyyyy handsome disdainful cat. We're all a bunch of nonsense, aren't we? (Shortly after this s/he yawned, rose, and elegantly padded away. I'm with you, hon.)
x
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