Sunday

This week all museums in Rome are free. It also coincides with the anniversary of the Eternal City, the theme this year is ''Rome Emotions without end''. So I went to one of my favorite museums in Rome on Sunday, the Massimo on Piazza Cinquecento (500) in front of the Termini Central Train Station.

The Massimo is one of those must see museums in Rome. It concentrates on the Julio-Claudian Dynasty who basically launched imperial Rome. It has per example the dining room of Empress Livia, wife of Augustus from her country Villa at Prima Porta with its exquisite painted walls of a sumptuous garden with trees, flowers, fruits and birds. The colours alone are vibrant and shows the high quality of the art work, you have to imagine what it must have been like when the paint was still fresh with its glossy finish. There was also a special exhibit of antique gold and silver dinner ware from Morgantina in Sicily. Again very fine art work, elegant and refined from the house of a rich merchant. Morgantina was totally destroyed on the orders of Augustus in 35 BC because the city sided with Carthage against Rome. There was also a second special exhibit of funerary dinner ware used during a funeral wake. The various pieces were decorative painted marble to decorate the area of the Mausoleum used by the family for their banquet in honor of the deceased.

Then after this visit, I decided to walk around and ended up at the Barberini Palace, once the seat of the famous Florentine Family which gave us Pope Urban VIII.
Maffeo Barberini, was pope from 1623 to 1644. He was the last pope to expand the papal territory by force of arms, and was a prominent patron of the arts and reformer of Church missions. However, the massive debts incurred during his papacy greatly weakened his successors, who were unable to maintain the papacy's longstanding political and military influence in Europe. He was also involved in a controversy with Galileo and his theory on heliocentrism during his reign.

The Palace is enormous and contains mostly religious works of art by great artists of the Renaissance, of note the famous painting of King Henry VIII by Holbein. The Barberini Pope is famous because he pillaged the Pantheon, removing all the bronze in the temple to make cannons and to also built the great Baldaquino above the main Altar in St-Peter's Basilica. The Romans of the time said, What the Barbarians did not destroy, the Barberini did. The coat of Arms of the Barberini is 3 bees, though the story goes that they use to be horse flies until Maffeo became Pope and changed it to the more noble bees.

Then I came home to discover that our visitors who were to come from Canada could not come because of the Volcanic ash and that Rome airport was partially closed. In fact the Pope was in Malta for the weekend and it was not all together sure he could fly back to Rome on Sunday night. Well this only meant more Veal Saltinboca for dinner and strawberries for dessert.