Concert at the Papal Chancellery

Last night I was pretty tired after work and had a headache, at 6 pm my colleague called and asked me if I was willing to go to a concert at the Papal Chancellery, the Palazzo della Cancelleria. A magnificent building near the Palazzo Farnese seat of the French Embassy in Rome. I took 2 aspirins and got dressed. My personal policy is if you serve food at a party I will be there.

The Concert by invitation only, was given by the Ambassadors of Spain to Italy and to the Holy See to celebrate the Presidency of the European Union who is headed this year by Spain. The great palace like so many in Rome is not heated and it is all stone and marble inside and out, it was a windy and cold night. The great room (magna Aula) has room for 600 people and it was full. We entered the palace and turned left towards to great staircase, I said to my colleague that in Rome you should not have a heart condition with all these great staircases, no elevators anywhere. The concert was given by the Complesso Spagnolo di Musica da Camera. The soprano was Gudrun Olafsdottir who sang pieces from Manuel de Falla, Vivaldi, Rossini and Federico Garcia Lorca. The ensemble also played pieces by Cesar Franck, Boccherini and Ligeti. Afterwards a champagne reception was given with wonderful food, a great parmigiano reggiano cheese carved out of a huge wheel of cheese, and sweets made for Carnival Season. The reception was in the great courtyard and it was a bit cold but the champagne warmed us.

The Palace was constructed between 1489–1513, being the first palazzo in Rome to be built from the ground up in the new Renaissance style. The long facade with its rhythm of flat doubled pilasters between the arch-headed windows is Florentine in conception, though the concept of drafted masonry is ancient Roman in its origin. The grand doorway was added in the 16th century by Domenico Fontana on the orders of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese.

The building's bone-colored travertine was scavenged from the nearby Roman ruins of the Theatre of Pompey,were Julius Caesar was assassinated. The theater of Pompey like the Eternal City was a field of ruins, built for a city of over a million people that now housed about thirty thousand. The forty-four Egyptian granite columns of the inner courtyard are from the porticoes of the theatres upper covered seating.

The Cancelleria was built for Cardinal Raffaele Riario who held the post of Cardinal Camierlengo to his powerful uncle, Pope Sixtus IV. The rumor was that the funds came in a single night's winnings at card playing. The Palace still houses the Papal Chancellery, and is part of the Vatican State, not subject to Italian sovereignty.

The concert was in the great room with its vast mural that Giorgio Vasari accomplished in a mere 100 days. We sat under the gaze of God the Father, who is always pictured in pale pastel colors with a triangle above his head. Since the late 17th century the Cancelleria has been the center of musical life of Rome, though nowadays it has stiff competition from the Parco della Musica.

A walk in Rome

This Saturday Will and I went to the Vatican State on the other side of the Tiber to mail a letter at the Vatican State Post Office.
They have better service than the Italian Post Office at least it is faster.

So we took the no. 62 bus from Porta Pia all the way down and across to the Vatican. Not a very long ride considering you are crossing Rome, only goes to show that this is a very compact city. Then we went to this little restaurant run by two elderly brothers on Via Borgo which is a little street that runs along the long defensive wall between the Palace of the Pope and Castel San Angelo. They have the best Spaghetti Carbonara in all Rome, without exaggeration, I think this is because it is a family restaurant and it is made by another relative of the brothers who wait tables. We also had a secundi, (second dish) I had liver and chicory and Will had Veal Saltimboca alla Romana with roasted potatoes in rosemary.

After lunch we walked back across the Tiber to Rome and crossed at the Castel San Angelo Bridge which was originally built to connect Rome on one side with the gigantic tomb mausoleum of Emperor Hadrian on the other. Then we took Via Dei Coronari,
The street was open in 1475, by Pope Sisto IV, with the name of “ via Recta ” that is to say “straight”, to allow pilgrims to reach the old Saint Peter Basilica without passing through the labyrinth of alleys; it partially repeated the line of an ancient roman street which in the imperial epoch connected “ Via Lata” to a bridge “Ponte Nerone”.

It is nearly 500 meters long and ends at Piazza Navona, it is lined by 15th and 16th century beautiful buildings. At number 156/7 you see the XV century house of Fiammetta Michaelis, Cesare Borgia's preferred mistress.

The present name of the street derives from the many merchants who sold here sacred images and crowns (in Italian “ corone ”) to pilgrims until the 19th century. After Corso Vittorio Emmanuelle II was opened, the street became deserted, but in the 1950's it became a center of little antique shops, restorers and artisans of many specialization. Many beautiful shops line the street today. At one point you arrive at an arch way standing 5 meter below today's street level, it was the main entrance to the Stadium of Emperor Domitian which is known today as Piazza Navona.

Visit to the Synagogue of ROME

Today we went to the Portico d'Ottavia near the Tiber River and the old Roman Forum. This is where the Ghetto of Rome was from 1550 to 1870. The Jews in Rome have been here for 2200 years, they are the oldest Jewish community in Europe. Jews and Palestine are of course part of the fabric of old Rome. Palestine was a Roman Province and part of the career path of any Roman aspiring to high office. After the destruction of the Great Temple in Jerusalem by Emperor Titus in 70AD, all the treasures of the Temple including the Arch of the Covenant were brought back to Rome and put inside the Temple of Peace in the Roman Forum where they remained for centuries, they are all lost today unfortunately.

The great Synagogue was built in 1901 and is part of the project of Garibaldi to make of Rome the new capital of the unified Italian Kingdom. The ghetto was demolished and the Jews freed and made full Italian citizens. What you see today was built after 1870, a modern neighborhood with water and electricity service and clean wide streets.

The Jews in Rome have an interesting history, they operate not as a congregation but as a community as a whole, you have Sephardic and Ashkenazy,Roman and Italian traditions. This is unusual for people visiting from outside Italy, they do not always understand how you can have all this in one building. The jews in Rome follow the Orthodox rite. Rome has a population of 14,000 jews today, there were about 15,000 before 1943. Some 2000 where deported by the Nazis between September 1943 and Spring of 1944, the rest took refuge at the Vatican State and in Churches and hospitals and in the homes of fellow Italians.

The Synagogue itself has an organ which is played during services, that is unusual and the decor inside the building is Babylonian and Egyptian and has some Art Deco touches with colors of Red and Gold, Imperial colors of old Rome. That is to say if we cannot have the Temple in Jerusalem we can have this one in the Eternal City.

The ceiling is painted in blue with little gold stars and the windows are stained glass with colored flowers. It is imposing and joyous all at once.

The museum has many beautiful textiles given throughout history to the community. Many silver objects for the Torah and other religious objects for the service. They have 850 covers for the Torahs, so they can change them daily. Services are held in the morning, afternoon and evening. Visitors in our group from the USA where amazed at this wealth of religious artifacts.

Our guide works at the Synagogue and was knowledgeable and a diplomat all at once. Some of the questions puzzled him, they came from American jews who asked in the way a rich relative asks about your well being, feeling a bit sorry for you and curious about how you are getting along.

One lady wanted to know about mix marriages between jews of different rites,let's say Sephardic and Roman, our guide told her simply we do like everyone else and go to the Hilton. Same lady wanted to know if there was a Jewish hospital, Yes there is one just across the street on the Island.

Another lady wanted to know who turned on the lights inside the Synagogue for Sabbath services. Are all the lights electrified or do you use candles. Our guide just told her, we turn them on, just before the service. The lady was a bit surprised and asked if they asked a non-Jew to do this for them. Our guide said no we don't.
But you are Orthodox Jews are you not, she says. Yes we are said the guide but you can call us Orthodox Italian Style.

Our guide did explain that Judaism for a long period was transmitted by oral tradition, the Popes forbade teaching the Talmud.
It was only with the liberation of Rome by the troops of Garibaldi in 1870 that the Jews finally could once again study. This explains the special tradition of Jewish Roman heritage where the practical joins the reality of everyday life. You also will notice that in and around the old ghettos are Churches set up by the Vatican as reminders to the Jews of the errors or their ways. Inscriptions on the front of the building in Hebrew and in Latin calls to them as unbelievers to accept the teachings of Jesus and the authority of the Pope. Viewed today, this historical legacy helps you understand the politics of religion. Our guide pointed out that it was Pope Jean-Paul II who on a visit to the Synagogue, said that the Jewish Faith was the big brother to Christianity. An interesting perspective after centuries of persecution by the Popes.

We had lunch at the Taverna del Ghetto, www.latavernadelghetto.com
We have been there several times and the food is great, with many Roman Jewish Specialties. We took a walk along the Tiber to help us digest on the old Tiberina Island. The photos here are of our walk on the island, where an hospital has stood for 2000 years. In one photo you see me touching part of the marble remnants of the boat shaped hospital dedicated to the God of Medecine.

House of Augustus, Palatine Hill, Rome

This week I went to visit the Palatine hill in Rome, it is a very interesting area, the original hill was made larger by the building of huge platforms which extended the overall total surface of the hill so more and more, palaces and temples could be located on the hill, after all the Palatine was the prime neighborhood of Rome. It was originally a small hill but as we can see today, huge arches in concrete and brick were built as foundation so palaces could be built. The Palatine has been inhabited since the earliest time, Romulus and Remus are said to have had their thatched huts on that very hill, today you can still see the foundations markers of those huts built some 2800 years ago. 

This visit took us to the newly re-opened house of Augustus, about 18 months ago, the house in which Gaius Julius Octavius lived as an adult was re-opened to the public after 50 years of restoration.  Gaius Julius Octavius who became known as Augustus first Emperor of Rome was born in September of 63 BC and died at Nola near Naples in 14 AD at the age of 76 from eating too many figs, his favorite fruit. He was the nephew of Gaius Julius Caesar and his heir. He was not in Rome when his uncle was assassinated on 15 March 44 BC but he was waiting for him with the legions in Greece for a new military campaign near what is Iraq today. The reading of the will of Julius Caesar on the Rostra of the Roman Forum declaring Octavius sole heir started his political career and ascension to power.

The house we see today is connected to the larger official palace. This house is very cleverly situated, next to all the sacred site of the foundation of Rome, it is next to the hut of Romulus, the house is also above the grotto where the She-Wolf suckled the twins Romulus and Remus. The grotto recently discovered in 2008 still has to be excavated. It is also next to the temple of the Cybele the Mater Magna, (Earth Mother) and between the Lares, protective spirits of good and evil and the Temple of Apollo, god of music and poetry and so many other things.

The house is small and not the sort of Imperial Palace you would expect. Augustus lived modestly, his wife Livia made his tunic from a rough wool, simple and practical, he ate simple food, slept in a simple little room all his life and wore thick sole sandals to give himself a boost, he was a short little guy, though very good looking. You first enter the house by a service door at the back, you are at the foot of a great staircase which connected the larger palace above, to your left, a door gives into a large room for audiences, capacity about 30 people maximum and next to this room his study, a rather small room with enough room for 5 people no more, one desk and a chair. The rooms are beautifully painted with scenes from mythology, Pompeian red very much in fashion then, dominates, you can see that the best artist worked on the decorations and motifs of those rooms, money was no object. The floors of the most beautiful colored marble. The house was a great political project for Augustus, it was started even before he became Emperor and August, Father of the Country, everyone in Rome knew of the house and its symbolism, all was thought out, no detail was left to chance. It is wonderful to be able to visit for a few minutes these rooms and imagine that Augustus who left his mark on his world, also left us with a large legacy, in laws and concepts that still influence our society, lived and worked there. To me this was by far the best visit ever of any ancient site, a priviledge moment.  

The only photos are by special permission only, I found only these 2 photos of the ceiling in the entrance and of the north wall of the dining room, the paintings on the walls and ceilings are still fresh and vibrant, even after 2000 years. 

In November, Rome will celebrate the 2000 birthday of yet another great Emperor, Vespasian of the Flavian dynasty which succeeded Nero in 69AD who was the last of the Julio-Claudian family. Vespasian was born in Rieti near Rome in the year 9 AD. He is the emperor who built the famous Amphitheater of the Flavians, also know as the Colosseum, for this reason the Forum is alive with his memory and many teams of archeologists at this time busy working on digs everywhere, tourists seem like an unwanted distractions.   

Old Aqueduct park, Rome

We took the metro this morning to the outskirts of southern Rome and got off at Giulio Agricola station, this area of Rome was built up in the 1970's and is composed mostly of a very pleasant neighborhood of low condo buildings. At the end of the street in front of us stretches the park with its gigantic aqueducts stretching across the landscape, the low one is the Aqua Felice and Marcia, the tall one is the Aqua Claudia whose arches have a height of 28 meters. It was started by Emperor Caligula and completed by his uncle Emperor Claudius, I still drink water from that spring every day.

 

The old Via Latina also comes by there, in ancient times you would use it to go south towards the Pontine Marshes, the Via Appia antiqua is also part of this park. We also saw an old Roman Villa which in the year 900 was transformed into a fortified farm house. The Villa is very ancient and no one lives there now, but several others have been bought by wealthy people who turn them into luxury homes, imagine owning a 2000 yrs old house. People are proud of a 150-year-old house back home. It is quite marvelous to see those old aqueducts, at one time Rome had 11 of them stretching 750 Km bringing water to the city. The first one was built in 330 BC and 2 aqueducts still function today, the Aqua Marcia and the Aqua Vergine feeding fountains like the famous Trevi fountain. It is thought today that more clean water was available to every citizen of ancient Rome than today. Enormous cisterns were built everywhere to store water and even wealthy individuals could build their own cistern for their private homes. We saw one near by built by a man who made an enormous fortune selling bricks, the ruins of one of his villas is in the park with the enormous cistern next to the aqueduct. We also heard of the army of slaves needed to clean, maintain and repair the aqueducts, quite the workforce. Considering that mathematics and other sciences were in their infancy, it required quite a lot of ingenuity to devise such a system. The Romans simply built big and solid arches so the aqueducts could carry the load of all this water rushing towards Rome. What we see in the open air is only 70 Km of the whole system, everything else was underground. The Aqueducts functioned until 537 AD and then bit-by-bit the system disappeared, by the year 1000, the system no longer worked and the knowledge was lost. We would have to wait until 1500 to see the system partially restored.

 

On our way to the park, we passed one metro station called Porta Furba, I thought this was a very odd name, it means traitors gate, I asked Nancy our guide why was it called that, she tells me that Coriolanus, the same fellow who has a play written by Shakespeare, was a hero of ancient Rome, he turned against Rome and went to help the Volci, a people who lived south of Rome about 2300 years ago, when Rome was still a small city and an emerging power. He brought the Volci army to this gate and as he was about to attack the city, his mother appears, she said to him: who am I meeting, my son or the enemy of Rome?

Apparently Coriolanus was so ashamed of what he was about to do that he listened to his mother and turned his army away from Rome. A fitting story for Italy and the power of motherhood. 

 

Dining in Rome

Last night we went to a restaurant in the old Jewish Ghetto of Rome. The area is alongside the Tiber and by the Teatro di Marcello (nephew of Augustus) and the Portico d'Ottavia (sister of Augustus). The area in antiquity was built by Augustus outside Rome, it was considered the Suburbia (suburb), though it is immediately next to Roman Forum. In the middle-ages the area was the fish market of Rome and until the 20th Century it was thus. The Jews lived inside this precinct surrounded by walls and gates and were locked in at night. Today the area is quite beautiful and surrounded by a lively neighborhood. Only a few Jewish families still live in the shadow of the great Synagogue of Rome. Many shops and Kosher restaurants maintain the Jewish traditions of this old Roman neighborhood.

We went to La taverna del Ghetto, Via Portico d'Ottavia 8 (www.latavernadelghetto.com), the food was wonderful with a good wine selection and friendly service. We ate outside on tables set-up on the sidewalk surrounded by the ruins of the Portico. The area is charming and has a lot of character. The menu is kosher and offers many dishes of fish, meat mostly lamb and poultry. Many dishes are also both Roman and Jewish in character, Jews have lived in Rome for 3000 years, as a community, they are part and parcel of this city and its evolution through the ages.

I had an antipasto of Spiced Chicken liver pate and then a grilled Tuna steak with a side dish of spinach in lemon juice and garlic.
Will had an antipasto of oven roasted tomatoes in olive oil, with chopped garlic and parsley and as a main veal goulash with a side dish of roasted potatoes. Quite a good meal.

Monday Holiday in Rome

Today is a Canadian holiday so I have the day off and a beautiful day it is. We visited with Nancy de Concilliis, who has lived in Rome for 40 yrs and has one of the best walking tours in Rome. All exclusive spots off the beaten track and quite different from what the crowds go to see. She is also a professional and has a sense of humour.
Today we went to the Aventive Hill which has 2 spurs with both ending in cliffs above the Tiber river. We took the metro to Circo Maximo ( the ancient roman chariot racetrack) and got off there. This is where the FAO ( food and agricultural agency) of the UN has its HQ. We then walked up the hill to Santa Sabina which is a 4th century church this was the first church we visited today with Nancy. We then visited San Alessio, who is believed to be an Eastern Saint next door and then San Prisca. All 3 buildings are of the same age about 1600 years old. But only Santa Sabina has kept the look inside and out of the old Roman basilica style. So when you walk in, it is as it was all those centuries ago, you are stepping back in time. This is also the church where Saint Dominic lived and worked all his life, today Dominican friars tend the place.

The 3 churches are also built on top of once private roman homes, once owned by the Saint after which they are now named. Sabina, we known little about her, except that she was a wealthy Roman lady and her house was a meeting place for early Christians. This church is amazing because the doors of the Church are carved wood and have miraculously survived to this day. In the top left panel of the door is one of the very first representation of the cruxificion. It is rare because the cruxificion only becomes a widespread symbol of Christianity in the 7th century. Seeing these doors alone is worth the visit. The inside is austere and offers a glimpse of imperial roman style for temples and other buildings. It was so peaceful and quiet.

San Alessio next door to Santa Sabina is another church built above a private house which legend says belonged to Alessio's parents. He was amongst the first hermites and left his wealthy parents and his bride on his own wedding night, only to return 17 yrs later. No one recognized him and he worked for his wife and parents incognito, living like Harry Potter under the stairs until the day he died. Only revealing who he was on his death bed, the Pope canonized him because Alessio symbolized humility.

Santa Prisca is a church which in the 1500 was modernized by Pope Sixtus, unfortunately today it looks like he vandalized the church removing magnificient early Christian mosaics for reasons that are not clear to us. Only one large panel remains today and it is magnificient.

We also visited the Rose Garden of Rome in what was once the Jewish cemetery of Rome (1546 to 1934). Mussolini had the cemetery moved out to make for a green park overlooking the Circo Maximo. Today it is a beautiful rose garden with thousands of different rose plants, all blooming now in the bright roman sun.