Holidays in Rome, Part II: Listen, Taste, See

 

New Year's Eve 2023 at Circo Massimo (Circus Maximus)

RST welcomes back guest blogger Theresa Potenza. Based in Rome, Potenza is an art historian, private tour guide, and freelance writer. To learn more about her private tours of Rome and read her travel and feature stories about Italy, check out: www.tourwiththeresa.com.

This is the second of two posts - since there is so much happening in Rome over the holidays. Part I, featuring Markets, Displays, The Vatican, and Worshipping, is here. Below Potenza finishes up her great recommendations with Listen, Taste and See.

And from us at RST, Buone Feste e Buon Anno!

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Listen

As part of the culture and music festival Natalè Auditorium, the Auditorium Parco della Musica has shows almost every day of the week from now (they started December 8) to January 7. 

The concert hall, an architectural masterpiece by Renzo Piano opened in 2002, is not only a concert venue but a public music complex with several concert halls and theaters. It is not to be missed on a trip to Rome, and with its endless variety of shows in December there is something for everyone.

 On Christmas Day check out the Harlem Gospel Choir, one of America’s oldest gospel choirs, made up of voices from New York City. Audience participation is encouraged. The repertoire includes traditional and contemporary gospel, jazz, and blues. A fantastic opportunity for a show that has been performed for various Popes and US Presidents. And on New Year's Day check out Tosca-Unico, a concert in three acts with excerpts from three shows.

The Harlem Gospel Choir, scheduled to perform at Parco della Musica over the holidays

For a full schedule, check out the Auditorium website: https://www.auditorium.com/it/festival/natale-auditorium/

 A great way to combine live music with sightseeing in Rome is Tram Jazz. A romantic night made up of a candle-light dinner, jazz concert, and evening tour of the historic center on an old-fashioned tram.  Check out the variety of swing, jazz, and holiday music concerts on their website, https://tramjazz.com/en/ 

Tram Jazz view of the Coliseum and the Arch of Constantine, 2022

For the party animals, on New Year's Eve don’t miss the largest outdoor concert in the city at Circus Maximus. Performers include Blanco, Lazza, and Francesca Michielin. Details (in Italian) on the Roma Capitale website here: https://www.comune.roma.it/web/it/notizia.page?contentId=NWS1117962

 

Taste

When in Rome, do as the Romans do, and feast for the holidays. The Eternal City has been named in 2023 by Travelers' Choice as the best food destination in the world. Make the most of it and try the traditional holiday menus offered in restaurants of all price ranges throughout the city. 

For an exquisite Christmas experience, Mirabelle restaurant offers some of the finest food and views in the entire city. As with most of Italy, Mirabelle offers a Christmas Eve dinner menu that is seafood based with a variety of first course and second course fish dishes including tagliatelle pasta with cuttlefish, and roasted octopus. The Christmas Day lunch menu includes fine delicacies such as foie gras, white truffle risotto, and deer filet. And you can end the year in style and abundance with the New Years Eve menu complete with oysters, lobster, pumpkin and white truffle pasta, veal filet, and even good-luck lentils at midnight! Reservations can be made on the Mirabelle website, https://www.mirabelle.it/en. 

The view from Mirabelle--though maybe not in December. 

If you are looking for a more casual and traditional Roman holiday meal, Casale Appio Locanda offers a fixed menu for lunch on Christmas Day that provides the option for a traditional menu or a vegetarian menu option. The traditional menu includes what most Roman families have for the holiday, cappelletti in brodo, along with fettuccine with sausage and porcini mushrooms, roasted lamb, and Roman artichokes. The vegetarian menu includes eggplant parmesan, spinach and ricotta ravioli, broccoli flan and Roman artichokes. The kids' menu offers breaded beef filets, roasted potatoes, and fettuccine bolognese. For reservations and for their menu on December 26th (also a public holiday in Italy) and New Year's Day, check out their Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/casaleappio

Alle Frate di Trastevere (2015 photo)

Finally, if you are desperate not to cook and prefer instead some of your home-style traditionals for the holiday, Alle Fratte di Trastevere will provide catered meals of whole roasted turkey or baked honey-ham, delicacies typically hard to find in Rome. The restaurant will also be open on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day with a traditional Roman menu a la carte. Their website in English is here: https://allefratteditrastevere.com/eng/home/Restaurant-in-Trastevere-Rome.html  

See

The Touch of Pygmalion

For those looking to consume culture, check out the Borghese Gallery, one of the top 5 tourist attractions in Rome, hosting a special exhibit on Rubens until February 2024. The exhibition, The touch of Pygmalion. Rubens and sculpture in Rome, highlights the influence of the painter on new concepts of the antique. And there's a special interactive experience for children. You will need advance tickets for a regular visit (the English tour, btw, is excellent) as well as for the children's experience. Website (in English) is here:

 https://galleriaborghese.beniculturali.it/en/

For a break from ancient and Renaissance art, check out the Andy Warhol exhibition, Andy Warhol Universo Warhol, on until March 2024 at the Historical Infantry Museum (Museo storico della fanteria), not far from the Termini Train Station at Piazza Santa Croce in Gerusalemme. The exhibition brings to life the Pop Art genius through a collection of silk-screen prints, ceramics, legendary vinyl and magazine covers, Polaroid photos and advertising posters from public and private collections. Though the museum is usually free, this elaborate exhibition comes with a price tag. See website here in English - scroll down on that website for opening hours and links to buy tickets.  

The holiday season is also a great time to witness the spectacular light show at Rome’s Botanical Garden. The light show entitled “Trame di Luce” transforms the natural space into a fairy tale world of sensory art, light, and  music. The sensory immersion is part of an international light art festival held for the first time in Italy and on until January 8th 2024.

One of the many family-friendly exhibits in Rome to enhance your holiday spirit in a historic setting. For booking go to their website, https://tramediluce.it/

 

 

 

Caput Mundi Mall: You'll have it all to Yourself--If you can Get There

 

We first learned about Caput Mundi, the new, luxury Rome shopping center that's a stone's throw from Saint Peter's, about a month ago, when it opened. The location seemed curious--elevated in an older building off via della Conciliazione--and we were eager to see how the developers had managed to squeeze a shopper's paradise into a crowded neighborhood of historic buildings. 

The best access, as we later learned, is down via Padre Pfeiffer Pancrazio--there's a less-than-spectacular sign for Caput Mundi at the end of that street. 

And beyond the sign, and closer to the front entrance, a less-than-inviting enclosure for the Carbinieri, taking something away from the welcoming Easter Egg. A typical hallway, ahead. 

But we missed what is intended to be the main entrance and found another, the "back door" entrance if you will, accessed off an underpass at Largo di Porta Cavalleggeri, almost directly south of the Vatican Obelisk. [It could be the "main" entrance is inside the "Gianicolo" bus parking garage - in an attempt to appeal to the thousands of tourists who "enter" the Vatican via tourist bus.]

On our back-door excursion: we found ourselves in a lengthy (estimate: 1/4 mile) passageway, gradually elevating as we trudged along, virtually alone, an occasional moving walkway assisting in the ascent. We thought maybe the architects had modeled this entrance after the Metro walkways we love so much. On the way we stopped at the restrooms--one marked WOMAN, the other MAN.

Heading on up to Caput Mundi. 

At the end of the trek, an elevator brought us to the 5th floor, the door opening onto: CAPUT MUNDI: THE MALL!

All on one floor, Caput Mundi has some of the feel of the most sophisticated of airport shopping areas: gleaming goods, perfectly arranged and presented: a bookstore, a candy shop, an upscale wine store, clothing of all kinds, several inviting places to eat, a pharmacy, a SONY pavilion where one can scratch the chin of an affectionate, responsive techno-dog, impressive art installations here and there (even a small exhibit of the work of Andy Warhol). A giraffe holding a lamp, or cage, or something, in its mouth. 

This says it all. In the foreground, a thinker-type art work. In the background, 
two workers taking advantage of the lack of customers to replace light bulbs.

Oops! A shopper!

Quite a place. Except....except there were no shoppers. Well, maybe a half dozen (high-end estimate). Maybe. A helpful clerk Dianne chatted up told us the lack of shoppers was par for the course, except on the weekend, which implies most shoppers are not tourists but Romans. Every shop has a clerk, every coffee shop or lunch space is complete with cooks and servers. But nobody to serve, nobody to cook for, nobody to buy anything. Well, not quite. Dianne made a stop at the para-pharmacy (all goods OTC).

Surreal. 

Bill 

Coochie Coochie

Michael Graves: The Rome Connection

Graves's studio at the American Academy (#9)

We've never met Michael Graves, the famous architect.  But we have had a close encounter, or so it seems, looking back fifty years into the early 1960s.  We were Stanford students then, doing the current version of the European tour: undergraduates on a "junior year abroad" (actually my sophomore year), thinking that Europe would always be dirt cheap.  Our base was Florence, but they insisted on taking us to Rome, and in the fall of 1962 we got there, astonished by the Coliseum and the Forum but also confronted with the city's excursion into modernism: Pier Luigi Nervi's Palozetto dello Sport, which had recently been completed.  We had no idea what we were seeing. 

The Portland Municipal Building (1982)

And we had no idea, of course, that we had just missed Michael Graves, who had months early departed, having spent much of 1960, 1961 and early 1962 (we arrived in the fall of that year) at the American Academy in Rome and elsewhere on the continent, absorbed in his own European tour.  He was not famous then.  He had not yet designed the Portland Municipal Building--one of the founding works of "postmodern" architecture--nor the Humana Building, nor the Denver Central Library, nor dozens of other important structures, and it would be decades before he became one of the world's foremost designers of commercial products, producing designs for Alessi (teapot, 1985), Steuben, Target, Dansk, Disney (the Swan and Dolphin hotels), and Delta Faucet (I was repairing a Delta faucet this afternoon--perhaps one that had its origins as a  Graves sketch).  While in Rome, he was already thinking about product design.

Graves, sketching in Rome, 1961.  He sold some
to tourists for $50. 

No, at the time of our near-crossing in Rome, Michael Graves was mostly an intense 28-year old full of expectations and dreams, a Harvard M.A. in Architecture (1959), and good enough to win the Rome Prize at the American Academy, but not yet really an architect--not yet really anything.  I wish we had met him then, before he became, well, "Michael Graves."  We could have shared our drawings. 

A Graves sketch of the Villa Borghese, c. 1961

It is not too much to say that Michael Graves was made in Rome, transformed by that year or two (however long it was) at the American Academy and by the tour of Italy and Europe that followed.  Nothing gets written about Michael Graves that does not emphasize that formative Rome moment, and Graves has fed the myth with his own words.  In the introduction to a recent book that recounts and fixes the architect's Rome experience with his drawings, sketches, and photographs, Graves begins right there: "The extraordinary experience of two years at the American Academy in Rome in the early-1960s transformed how I looked at the world around me.  In that rich and marvelous city, I came to understand architecture as a continuum from antiquity to the present day, and thus as a language.  I discovered new ways of seeing and analyzing both architecture and landscape.  I also developed an urgent need to record what I saw and created hundreds of photographs and drawings." 

A Graves-designed school building

Enrico del Debbio building, 1931-33

The Rome drawings that fill the early pages of Brian M. Ambroziak's Michael Graves: the Grand Tour (2005) are mostly of ancient Rome--the Coliseum, the Basilica of Maxentius, the Arch of Constantine--or of Renaissance/Baroque Rome--the Aqua Paola Fountain, Santa Maria Maggiore, Villa Borghese.  He was particularly taken with the buildings and ornamentation of Francesco Borromini.  But Rome's monumental and rationalist architectures of the 20th century were there to be seen, too, and it seems to us that some of Graves's later works draw as much on these buildings--essentially, the aesthetics of the Fascist era--as they do on earlier periods.  (See comparison in photos above).   

Graves,  the Denver Public Library

By 1967 Graves had emerged from obscurity, joining Richard Meier, Peter Eisenman, Charles Gwathmey and John Hejduk (with Philip Johnson as mentor) in The New York Five.  He was mostly a house designer in the 1970s.  1982 was a breakthrough year.  With the Humana Building in Louisville, Kentucky, the Portland Building, and two major museums, he quickly became an exemplar of the movement known as postmoderism.  He came to terms with Alessi in 1985, agreeing to design the whimsical tea kettle for 1.5% of each sale; over 2,000,000 have been sold. 

Rome transformed Graves, but that experience was iconic in a larger way, too.  By 1960, existing movements in architecture and the arts had reached a point of exhaustion.  In painting, abstract expressionists had reduced the form to an extreme of simplicity: a canvas painted in one color.  There was nothing beyond, except perhaps not to paint the canvas at all.  The rectagular glass box had done the same in architecture, showcasing a rigid and extreme modernism that suggested that the form, having been perfected, was untouchable.  They ran out of ideas in Detroit, too, desperately attaching huge, space-like fins on the new models in an awkward, failed effort to tap the future. 

Rome gave Graves--and, in the larger sense, architecture--its new direction: it would draw on the past, the collective past, on the buildings of Rome and Athens, on Egypt's pyramids, on the monumentalism of the ancients, on the towers of medieval Europe, on English furniture of the 18th century, on the fascist aesthetic, on the colors of Italy.  The past was complex and seemingly limitless and, for better or for worse, it would fuel the architectural resurgence of the late-20th century.  What Graves found in Rome was the raw material of the postmodern aesthetic experience. 

Why Graves would start thinking about designing commercial products while in Rome is less clear, but he was hardly alone in connecting the artistic and commercial.  In 1962, while Graves was wrapping up his European sojourn, Andy Warhol was having his first important solo exhibitions in Los Angeles and New York, featuring representations of Campbell's Soup cans and Coca-Cola bottles.  Graves designed products; Warhol used products to make designs.  Both understood the limits of modernism; both had a playful side; both drew on the unparalleled dynamism of American consumer culture to revitalize aesthetic forms.

There was one big difference--well, surely more than one, but one that's especially relevant here.  Warhol cared little about the past, and he had not been to Rome--at least, not that we know of.  Where Graves discovered the a glorious past that could be fashioned into the future, Warhol imagined only irrelevance.  "They call Rome 'the Eternal City,' he wrote, "because everything is old and everything is still standing.  They always say, 'Rome wasn't built in a day.'  Well, I say maybe it should have been, because the quicker you build something, the shorter a time it lasts, and the shorter a time it lasts, the sooner people have jobs again, replacing it.  Replacing it keeps people busy." 

Bill

We highly recommend Brian M. Ambroziak's lovely book, Michael Graves: Images of a Grand Tour  (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2005).  Foreword by Michael Graves.

Street Art: Sign Modifications

One of the most recent developments in the street art world, appalling to some, amusing to others, is the adaptation (some would say abuse) of street signs.  These adaptations run the gamut from simple tagging and stickering to clever reuse, and the best of them--we are sticking our necks out here, into a universe we know to harbor understandable concerns--have a Warholian feel in the way they manipulate the most common of symbols to produce new meaning.  We've been recording the results for several years.  


Bill

Rome, at night.  Our first sighting of the genre, and a
design that's been copied. Two dimensions become
three.  Right hand a nice touch. 

Upper left, the same design as the first sign.  Lower right, the
standard sticker job--no cigar. 

A mess

On the Gianicolo.  That appears to be the
Mona Lisa. 
 

Anti-apartheid.  Sign politics.  Nothing
clever here, or artistic.   





From a distance, looks like another mess.

Close up, it's serious and nicely designed.
Unfortunate tagging. 

 

Florence.  Good work with 3 dimensions.

Florence.  Looks normal from a distance. 
Nice color work, paint job. 

We've since learned that the Florence pieces are by a French artist, Clet Abraham.  Clet's work is not appreciated by the Florence authorities; he's been fined, and fined again.  He has also left his mark in Brussels, where he goes about the city on a bicycle, modifying signs.  You can see him at work in this video--and following it, about two dozen examples of his work.  

Original Fake: Store-window takes on Originality

It's getting harder and harder to be "original."  Andy Warhol made that clear in the early 1960s, when he capitulated to capitalism and advertising in the most obvious way, making art that looked very much like a can of Campbell's Soup.  And, to add to the confusion over originality, much of his work was produced by his assistants, not by Warhol himself.  

At about the same time, architects abandoned the quest for the uniquely original aesthetic, retreating to the postmodern preference for mixing and matching historical forms: a bit of the neoclassical here, the pyramids there, and hey, why not a mansard roof?  It was original, but only if the definition includes reassembling the past in a somewhat different way. 

Popular music has always been evolutionary, the province of covers and copies, but especially so after 1970, with the widespread acceptance of "sampling."

That's all background for a couple of photos we took of Italian store windows, each of a shirt with a phrase on it.  One advised, "Don't Copy/Be Original,"  a curious injunction, given that the shirt was obviously mass produced--that is, copied.  The other questioned the idea of originality even more directly: "Original Fake."  

Bill