FEATURE OF THE WEEK: views of roma

belvedere is a word that seems to pop up quite a lot in my office (aka the vatican museums): the villa belvedere, the belvedere courtyard, the apollo belvedere and the belvedere torso all forming part of my tour route. so what does this word actually mean? 'belvedere' is comprised of two italian words: bel/bello/bella (meaning beautiful) and vedere (meaning to see, or view). thus, the word can be translated into english as 'viewpoint'; something that the spectacular villa belvedere most definitely has.
however... instead of fighting through all of the people to get to the fairly small window which enables us to see this view, i would save the 15 euros (although there are a few other things that are worth seeing in the vatican museums...) and get yourself away from all of the hot, smelly, i heart roma tourists and head up to one of the following places where belvedere's you certainly will find:

view from villa borghese at dusk

castel sant' angelo: found at one end of the famous ponte sant' angelo, this building was originally the mausoleum for hadrian and his family (emperor: 117-138 AD). over the years, the site was taken over by the papal state and used as a prison, a castle and a fortress. it was famously used as a refuge for clement vii during the sack of rome in 1527, who would have reached the castle by the passageway that secretly links it to the vatican palace. aside from its layered history, the structure provides one of the greatest views in rome permitting us to see all the way down the river tiber and also towards piazza cavour and the court of cassation (rome's high court).
ENTRANCE: 5E, 2.50E (reduced) or free (if you have a friend who has a friend who works on the door. sure.)

san pietro: you know the score, a walk through the vatican museums ending in the sistine chapel and st. peter's basilica. but if you pause before the sistine chapel for a coffee, you can re-boot your engine in order to climb/get the lift up to the top of the cupola which stands as the tallest dome in the world. as well as getting a great interior view of the basilica from a narrow balcony inside of the dome, when you reach the top, for the first time you are really able to locate yourself within the parameters of the vatican state. up until now, i swear to you, it is a maze of mysteries.
ENTRANCE: 5E (stairs), 7E (lift and stairs)

il vittoriano: its much nicer to be standing on the 'wedding cake' or the 'type-writer' than it is to be looking at it. on first sight, il vittoriano certainly makes an impact, but this fairly modern monument - set up to commemorate the unification of italy and its first king, vittorio emanuele ii in the 19th century - does seem to overpower all other views in rome. but being centrally placed and having an extremely efficient (albeit expensive) lift, the top of the monument is certainly worth a visit. one is able to get an aerial view of the roman forum and the numerous imperial fora on one side, as well as seeing all the way down via del corso towards piazza del popolo on the other. the highly powerful (and freeee) giant binoculars that are placed on either side of the small but uncrowded viewing area give us the perfect means to spot some of the more distant landmarks/spy on people's roof terraces.
ENTRANCE: 7E

il giardino degli aranci: although the garden of the oranges isn't the highest of spots in rome, its my personal favourite. situated on the aventine hill, the viewpoint is set amongst a peaceful garden of eden (with plenty of adam and eves; not naked ,but they may be making things easier for themselves if they were...). not far from the garden is the 'buco di roma' where one is able to see a perfectly framed view of st. peter's cupola through the keyhole of a door in the piazza dei cavalieri di malta. certainly a must in rome if you can avoid the queues of tourists all failing to point their lenses through the gap...

gianicolo: bill bryson gives us a lovely description of this area in 'neither here, nor there' (see FEATURE OF THE WEEK-22/02/12). the gianicolo (or janiculum hill) is supposedly the best panoramic view of the city, the best place to watch the fireworks on new year's eve (so i hear), and the best romantic spot in rome (so i also hear...). check out the statue of giuseppe garibaldi (the hero of italian unification) and donato bramante's tempietto whilst you're up there as well as escaping the fumes further by having a giro in villa pamphili.

villa borghese: just before descending the steps from the borghese gardens into the lively piazza del popolo, you must pause at the viewpoint. often accompanied by some busking tones, this view is best seen at dusk. as the sun sets, you get a fantastic silouette of st. peter's cupola as well as seeing everything else from a different perspective (here we are in northern rome). as long as you make sure that you visit the galleria borghese as well as ducking into santa maria del popolo on reaching the piazza (to see my favourite caravaggio, the execution of st. peter), your borghese experience is complete.

FEATURE OF THE WEEK: zumba

'In 1986, Alberto 'Beto' Perez forgot his tape of aerobics music for a class he was teaching. He took the tapes he had in his backpack — consisting of traditional Latin salsa and merengue music — and improvised a class using this non-traditional aerobics music.'

for me, this wikipedia extract describing the 'history and origins' just draws the most EXCITING picture of a zumba class. in 1986, the year i wish i lived in every year of my life, you can just imagine this impromtu class: leg warmers, flourescent lycra and a LOT of sexy dancing. yes that.
having only heard good things about this form of exercise (how can learning to dance like shakira not be a good thing?), i attended my first zumba class on monday. obviously conducted in italian, i placed myself firmly at the rear of the group so as not to midunderstand any of her instructions, and uno-due-tre, i was zumba-ing. if it hadn't been for the extremely malcoordinated woman in front of me (who looked like an epileptic hailing a taxi), i think i would have picked up the rythmn much easier. having said that, by the end of the class i was certainly in the flow and most definitely exhausted.

watching one woman's behind for an hour suggests to me that this is more of a female activity. having said that, a man resembling lenny from of mice and men took up the right hand side of the group and stayed right until the end; not letting those hips stopping from wiggling. whether it was his incentive to get fit or to watch 8 females girating on the spot, one cannot be sure.

nevertheless, i would recommend zumba to EVERYONE. feeling thoroughly exercised, extremely sexy and happy throughout, exercise has never been better...

for more information on zumba classes in the centre of rome, visit http://www.farnesefitness.com/

FEATURE OF THE WEEK (29/02/12): caffè propaganda

it was my birthday on the 27th february. it was glorious. i hope this explains to you all why i have posted my FEATURE OF THE WEEK pages for the last month over the last few days. for me, birthday celebrations start a month before, and then continue for a month after...its just the way i work.
months ago, it was a priority for me to ensure that i had a weekend of fun and games organised considering i was to be celebrating the big day 'a roma'. so the family made a trip to the city of dreams (minus my brother who was imprisoned at the office on a saturday morning...how cruel) and so did my friend emily. oh what fun was had.

birthday dinner resumé: 'i would like to go somewhere central, with young people, delicious italian food and a buzzy atmosphere. somewhere similar to angelina in testaccio'...and oh how caffè propaganda gave me all of this and more. do not be fooled by the french music playing on the website (extraordinary...) as the only thing that is french about the restaurant is its extensive range of deLICIOUS macaroons (i'd go for the chilli chocolate flavour. wowza). a rather international dessert selection actually with english trifle and sticky toffee pudding as well (perhaps a slight negative if there has to be one; the puds perhaps distracting us from the surrounding italian vibes). on arrival they will sense your english speaking blood and hand over the english menus but make sure you get your hands on an italian one as well. understanding it aside, you will want to have a gander at the broadsheet newspaper-esque menu that everyone else is reading around you. nope, its not breakfast time.

food highlights are most definitely the carciofi/artichoke antipasti cooked in three different ways, the spinach and ricotta cannelloni, the hamburger (so sue me. i live in italy so who's to say i can't have a hamburger on the eve of my birth?) and without DOUBT the chocolate fondant and tiramasu. the tiramasu here and at angelina are the only tiramasu i have ever liked. given to you on a platter with three components: a jar of custardy mixture, some biscuit fingers and an espresso, the consumption of this dolce is not only a gastronomic delight but also a great game of dip, dunk, eat. what fun.

so yes, a must if you are in rome and want a trendy night out. see http://www.caffepropaganda.it/ for more details.

(also check out http://www.ristoranteangelina.com/ another favourite restaurant of mine).

FEATURE OF THE WEEK (22/02/12): 'neither here nor there' by bill bryson

recommended to read this by a friend and then further encouraged by my father, i have finally found my niche in the reading world. i whizzed through this book 'lol'-ing at every turn of every page. describing his travels through europe, the book reaches its peak on the author's arrival in rome: 100 percent correct (a number of his experiences in this chapter have indeed happened to me) and 100 percent hilarious. so, reaching out to roman inhabitants in particular, i must share at least some of this with you...

...Rome was as wonderful as I had hoped it would be, certainly a step up from Peoria. It was everything Stockholm was not - warm, sunny, relaxed, lively, fully of good food and cheap drink...

My hotel was in a battered, out-at-the-elbow district just off the Via Cavour - it was the sort of neighbourhood where you could pee on the buildings and it would be all right - but it had the compensating virtue of being central. You could walk anywhere in the city from there, and that's what I did, day after day, just walked and walked. I rose daily just after dawn, during that perfect hour when the air still has a fresh, unused feel to it, and watched the city come awake - whistling shopkeepers slopping out, sweeping up, pulling down awnings, pushing up shutters.
I walked through the gardens of the Villa Borghese, up and down the Spanish Steps, window-shopped along the Via dei Condotti, admired the Colosseum and Forum, crossed the river by the Isola Tiberina to tramp the hilly streets of Trastevere, and wandered up to the lofty heights of the Gianicolo, where the views across the city were sensational and where young couples entwined themselves in steamy embraces on the narrow ledges. The Italians appear to have devised a way of having sex without taking their clothes off and they were going at it hammer and tongs up here. I had an ice-cream and watched to see how many of them tumbled over the edge to dash themselves on the rocks below, but none did, thank goodness. They must wear suction cups on their backs.
For a week, I just walked and walked. I walked till my feet steamed. And when I tired I sat with a coffee of sunned myself on a bench, until I was ready to walk again.

Having said this, Rome is not an especially good city for walking. For one thing, there is the constant danger that you will be run over. Zebra crossings count for nothing in Rome, which is not unexpected but takes some getting used to. It is a shock to be strolling across some expansive boulevard, lost in an idle fantasy involving Ornella Muti and a vat of Jell-O, when suddenly it dawns on you that the six lanes of cars bearing down upon you at speed have no intention of stopping.
It isn't that they want to hit you, as they do in Paris, but they just will hit you. This is partly because Italian drivers pay no attention to anything happening on the road ahead of them. They are too busy tooting their horns, gesturing wildly, preventing other vehicles from cutting into their lane, making love, smacking the children in the back seat and eating a sandwich the size of a baseball bat, often all at once. So the first time they are likely to notice you is in the rear-view mirror as something lying in the road behind them.
Even if they do see you, they won't stop. There is nothing personal in this. It's just that they believe that if something is in the way they must move it, whether it is a telephone pole or a visitor from the Middle West. The only exception to this is nuns. Even Roman drivers won't hit a nun - you see groups of them breezing across eight-lane arteries with the most amazing impunity, like scraps of black and white paper borne along by the wind - so if you wish to cross some busy place like the Piazza Venezia your only hope is to wait for some nuns to come along and stick to them like a sweaty T-shirt.

I love the way the Italians park. You turn any street corner in Rome and it looks as if you've just missed a parking competition for blind people. Cars are pointed in every direction, half on the pavements and half off, facing in, facing sideways, blocking garages and side streets and phone boxes, fitted into spaces so tight that the only possible way out would be through the sun roof. Romans park their cars the way I would park if I had just spilled a beaker of hydrochloric acid on my lap...
Italians will park anywhere. All over the city you see them bullying their cars into spaces about the size of a sofa cushion, holding up traffic and prompting every driver within three miles to lean on his horn and give a passable imitation of a man in an electric chair. If the opening is too small for a car, the Romans will decorate it with litter - an empty cigarette packet, a wedge of half-eaten pizza, twenty-seven cigarette butts, half an ice-cream cone with an ooze of old ice-cream emerging from the bottom, danced on by a delirium of flies, an oily tin of sardines, a tattered newspaper and something truly unexpected, like a tailor's dummy or a dead goat.
.
Italians are entirely without any commitment to order. They live their lives in a kind of pandemonium which I find very attractive. They don't queue, they don't pay their taxes, they don't turn up for appointments on time, they don't undertake any sort of labour without a small bribe, they don't believe in rules at all. On Italian trains every window bears a label telling you in three languages not to lean out of the window. The labels in French and German instruct you not to lean out, but in Italian they merely suggest that it might not be a good idea. It could hardly be otherwise...
I was in a neighbourhood bar on the Via Marsala one morning when three workmen in blue boiler suits came in and stopped for coffees at the counter. After a minute one of them started thumping another emphatically on the chest, haranguing him about something, while the third flailed his arms, made mournful noises and staggered about as if his airways were obstructed, and I thought that at any moment knives would come out and there would be blood everywhere, until it dawned on me that all they were talking about was the quality of mileage on a Fiat Tipo or something equally innocuous, and after a minute they drained their coffees and went off together as happy as anything.
What a wonderful country.

I went one morning to the Museo Borghese. I knew from a newspaper clipping that it had been shut in 1985 for two years of repairs - the villa was built on catacombs and for years has been slowly collapsing in on itself - but when I got there it was still covered in scaffolding and fenced off with warped and flimsy sheets of corrugated iron and looked to be nowhere near ready for the public - this a mere five years after it was shut and three years after its forecast reopening. This is the sort of constant unreliability that must be exasperating to live with (especially if you left your umbrella in the cloak-room the day before it shut), but you quickly take it as an inevitable part of life, like the weather in England.

The care of the nation's cultural heritage is not, it must be said, Italy's strong suit. The country spends $200 million a year on maintenance and restoration, which seems a reasonable sum until it is brought to your attention that that is less that the cost of a dozen new miles of highway, and a fraction of what was spent on stadiums for the 1990 World Cup. Altogether it is less that 0.2 per cent of the national budget. As a result, two-thirds of the nation's treasures are locked away in warehouses or otherwise denied to the public, and many others are crumbling away for want of attention - in March 1989, for instance, the 900-year-old civic tower of Pavia collapsed, just keeled over, killing four people - and there are so many treasures lying around that thieves can just walk off with them. In 1989 alone almost 13, 000 works of art were taken from the country's museums and churches, and as I write some 90, 000 works of art are missing. Eighty per cent of all the art thefts in Europe take place in Italy.
This casual attitude to the national heritage is something of a tradition in Rome. For a thousand years, usually with the blessings of the Roman Catholic Church (which had a share in the profits and a lot to answer for generally, if you ask me), builders and architects looked upon the city's ancient baths, temples and other timeless monuments as quarries. The Colosseum isn't the hulking ruin it is today because of the ravages of time, but because for hundreds of years people knocked chunks from it with sledgehammers and carted them off to nearby lime kilns to turn into cement. When Bernini needed a load of bronze to build his sumptuous baldacchino in St. Peter's, it was stripped from the roof of the Pantheon. It is a wonder that any of ancient Rome survives at all.
Deprived of the opportunity to explore the interior of the Borghese, I wandered instead through the surrounding gardens, now the city's largest and handsomest public park, full of still glades and piercing shafts of sunlight, and enjoyed myself immensely, except for one startled moment when I cut through a wooded corner and encountered a rough-looking man squatted down crapping against a tree, regarding me dolefully...

Let us make our way to the Vatican City and St Peter's - the world's largest church in its smallest country, as many a guidebook has observed...
St. Peter's doesn't look all that fabulous from the outside, not at least from the piazza at its foot, but step inside and it's so sensational that your mouth falls open whether you want it to or not. It is a marvel, so vast and beautiful and cool and filled with treasures and airy heights and pale beams of heavenly light that you don't know where to place your gaze. It is the only building I have ever been in where I have felt like sinking to my knees, clasping my hands heavenward and crying, 'Take me home, Lord.' No structure on earth would ever look the same to me again...

On my final morning I called at the Capuchin monks' mausoleum in the church of Santa Maria della Concezione on the busy Piazza Barberini. This I cannot recommend highly enough. In the sixteenth century some monk had the inspired idea of taking the bones of his fellow monks when they died and using them to decorate the place. Is that rich enough for you? Half a dozen gloomy chambers along one side of the church were filled with such attractions as an altar made of rib cages, shrines meticulously concocted from skulls and leg bones, ceilings trimmed with forearms, wall rosettes fashioned from vertebrae, chandeliers made from the bones of hands and feet. In the odd corner there stood a complete skeleton of a Capuchin monk dressed like the Grim Reaper in his hooded robe, and ranged along the other wall were signs in six languages with such cheery sentiments as WE WERE LIKE YOU, YOU WILL BE LIKE US, and a long poem engagingly called 'My Mother Killed ME!!'. These guys must have been a barrel of laughs to be around. You can imagine every time you got the flu some guy coming along with a tape measure and a thoughtful expression...

Neither Here Nor There, B. Bryson, London 1991 (pp. 161-174)

FEATURE OF THE WEEK (15/02/12): caricatures

inspiration. it is a wonderful thing isn't it? i hope that by being out here in rome, i am inspiring some of you lot. perhaps to do something similar (ie. up sticks and go and live in a foreign country da sola); or at least i hope i am inspiring those in my tour groups and encouraging them to go home and intellectually plunge themselves deep into the abyss that is history/art.

i love to be inspired and i can tell you, having my aunt out in rome for a week inspired me to do many things. i now struggle through il messagero as often as i can, i greet strangers with a friendly smile and a 'come stai!' as if they should know who i am, and bingo, i've got another friend. but more than anything, i was inspired by her love for caricatures. her first day in rome involved a 4 minute/10 euro solo sitting in piazza navona resulting in the most fantastic cartoon portrait i have ever seen. leaving me with a gift of 10 euros, i followed in her footsteps and did exactly the same. being a caricature virgin, i was unsure what to expect, and nothing could have prepared me for the gypsy-come-prostitute i was depicted as:

how could he have interpreted me like that when i was wearing a woolley hat and a thick sheepskin coat?? a stock caricature for any female under the age of 25 me thinks...
the arrival of a friend in rome called for another caricature but this time a double. and the second artist got us BANG on (although needless to say neither of us were posing topless...)

so not only was i inspired by my aunt to have a caricature done with every visitor that comes to see me in rome, but the artists bestowed on me a desire to learn how to create my own. what a talent it would be to turn all of your best friends into topless cartoons in 4 minutes? bring on the youtube tuition i say...

FEATURE OF THE WEEK (08/02/12): snowy roma

ponte sisto

fountain, piazza della rotonda

lemon trees, palazzo doria pamphili

column of marcus aurelius, piazza colonna

bernini's fontana dei quattro fiumi, piazza navona

the danube, fontana dei quattro fiumi

the nile, fontana dei quattro fiumi

rio de la plata, fontana dei quattro fiumi

blue skies, beautiful monuments, a sprinkling of snow...rome couldn't be more perfect. DO NOT BE FOOLED. although the baltic conditions meant that i was able to take these wonderful photos, it also meant that i got through eight pairs of socks, two pairs of trainers and three pairs of jeans per day...

rome + snow = a disaster. if you take into consideration how bad the english are at dealing with snow having had piles of it every winter since forever, imagine how the italians (who treat any problem as though it has an expiry date in 2020) coped with the only week of snowfall since 1986. answer? they didn't. every single cobbled street resembled an ice rink and even the main streets of the city, such as via del corso, were just left for pedestrians to make their own tracks in the slush. after queueing for 20 minutes at a shoe shop before being told that the only shoes i could be given in a size 40 were those for uomini, i eventually purchased some serious boots just as the weather became sunny again. never in my life have i wished more for my gold sparkly moon boots that were sitting in england. who would expect to need those in rome??

putting up with shops, cinemas and bars being closed (or lacking any heating bar del fico) as well as no public transport, as one can see from the photos, the settled snow and the blue skies that came at the end of this 'natural disaster' were almost worth it. for me, it was gian lorenzo bernini's fontana dei quattro fiumi that was most dramatic. the nile, whose head is covered by a veil referring to the mystery location of its source, was suddenly mirrored by the other three rivers, snow now covering their faces to create a similar effect. the rio de la plata, falsely perceived to be shielding his face from la chiesa di sant'agnese in agone, designed by bernini's greatest rival francesco borromini, enforced the theme of this rumour further by being blinded from the building by snow.

despite the extreme chaos, sights like bernini's fountain made me happy that there had been 26 years of no snow in rome and here i was to witness its return...