Galleria Doria Pamphilj - the Third Time

Courtyard - hard to believe this is off via del Corso

Galleria Doria Pamphilj (or Pamphili) is a stupendous gallery of  paintings and sculpture in the heart of Rome.  For many years it has been on the path of those seeking to see all Caravaggios in Rome and perhaps a few others, in a seen-better-days enormous palazzo sitting on Piazza Venezia.

Bagno di Diana

I always loved the gallery, where I first went in 1993 with Nancy DeConcillis and her intrepid group of international women "stuck" in Rome while their husbands worked (that was me!).  I had been back once about 10 years ago, but returned this year and found the Galleria and the Palazzo totally transformed.  Hard to believe John Cheever lived in an apartment here (and didn't like it, as I recall). I tried to go in through the entrance on the nondescript Piazza del Collegio Romano, which is more a parking lot than a piazza, but even the entrance had changed to the more accessible via del Corso.

You now enter through a lush courtyard and are taken immediately to a previously inaccessible, exquisite "bath" - "bagno di Diana" - built by Prince Filippo Andrea V for his British bride, Mary Talbot.

A family room (!)  Space for foosball--or soccer.

The next set of rooms are the "family" rooms.  These are the main objects of  restoration in the last decades.  Prince Jonathan Doria Pamphilj (the British-raised adopted son - he lucked out!) is your audio-guide voice for the family rooms, and he does a wonderful job of conveying the wealth and restoration while not seeming arrogant - no mean feat for a prince.  The audio guide is free with your ticket.

You must pay an additional Euro 4 for permission to photograph (in the middle of the upstairs galleries at a small bookshop, not when and where you buy your ticket).  Worth it, I think.

Gallery

Most of the sculptures are in this odd room; turns out the sculptures were from the
Pamphilj gardens and moved inside for protection (from the proletariat after
unification?), but the roof of this room collapsed, damaging most of them.
This room now also has the 3 Caravaggios, seen here.



Family chapel

The art galleries themselves are, of course, what one comes for. With more than 500 paintings, among them works  by Caravaggio (3), Guido Reni, Annibale Carraci, Titian, and Raphael, and sculptures, including ones by Bernini.  The audio guide for the paintings is also excellent, allowing you to tune in when you want to and providing just the right amount of information.

Via del Corso, 305 (first block after Piazza Venezia), open 9 a.m. - 7 p.m. every day except Christmas, New Year's, and Easter.  In other words, it's often open when other galleries are not. At 11 Euros not cheap, but you get your money's worth.  There's now a nice cafe in the palazzo as well.

There is more information on the Web site: http://www.doriapamphilj.it/ukhome.asphttp://www.doriapamphilj.it/ukhome.  There are concerts held here at times too.

Worth a visit the second time, or even a third, or fourth or more.

Dianne

Fra Lippo Lippi's Annunciation

Donna Olimpia Aldobrandini - a sole heiress,
she combined the fortunes of the Doria, Pamphilj
and Aldobrandini, and bought a whole lot of art
in the 1600s.

John Cheever: Encounter with Rome

In October 1956, the writer John Cheever (the "Chekhov of the [NYC] suburbs") and his pregnant wife Mary left the Westchester, CT suburbs for a year in Rome.  He had just put the finishing touches on The Wapshot Chronicle, his first novel (it would prove a big success).  A friend found them a place to live: a grand but drafty apartment on the fourth floor of the Palazzo Doria-Pamphili, across Piazza Venezia from where Mussolini had governed. 

The comfy palazzo where the Cheevers lived.

Their landlady was the Principessa Doria herself, but she couldn't or didn't fix the kitchen gas leak or clean the clogged drains.  Thanksgiving soon arrived, but no one in the family knew much Italian and the shopping for the holiday went badly, and instead of roast turkey the Cheevers dined on salami, cheese and bread.  "I still cook breakfast in my underwear," Cheever wrote, "in this Palace of Justice or Haunted Public Library."

No, Rome wasn't an American suburb, and perhaps that's why Cheever had trouble writing during his stay in the city.  He managed one short story--one even he didn't much like--but that was it.  As usual, he socialized, often with a cocktail in hand.  While Mary and the Italian maids took care of their baby (born at Salvador Mundi Hospital, on the Gianicolo), John explored the "Academy" (the American Academy, on the Gianicolo) and what he called the "nonAcademy."  According to his biographer, Blake Bailey, he found a good number of "duds" in each group, which in some cases may have meant they didn't drink as much as he did.  He had a long, pleasant walk with Robert Penn Warren along the Via Aurelia, but despaired at Warren's quoting of Dante and the writer's other intellectual pretensions.  Similarly, he found another Academy Fellow, Ralph Ellison, friendly enough but given to "talking about negroes" and philosophizing about "mass motivation."  Cheever had read Ellison's masterpiece, Invisible Man, and found it--not unlike Warren and Ellison--"longwinded."

Cheever was not the first person to be
uninspired by the Tomb of Augustus

One imagines that Cheever and Ellison, despite their differences, found common ground in their shared inability to appreciate the charms of the Eternal City.  For Cheever, that disaffection owed something to his failure to learn enough Italian to feel comfortable, but it was more than that.  On his first day in the city, an exasperated Cheever, coming upon the less-than-august Tomb of Augustus, lamented, "Is this all, is this all there is?"  No, it wasn't all there is, but it seems Rome's great monuments of antiquity never quite captured Cheever's fancy. 

That said, America's greatest short-story writer (or so some think) may have found in Rome a place in which to revel in his romantic (and bisexual) thoughts and fantasies.  The city's "mystery," as Bailey puts it, appealed to Cheever; he "liked the strangeness of Rome."   "At nightfall," Cheever wrote, "the combination of dim-lamps and Roman gin make me feel very peculiar....The city seems mercurial and while it is lovely in the sun with the fountains sparkling, it looks, in the rain, like the old movie-shot: European capital on the Eve of War....the atmosphere of anxiety and gloom is dense."

Roman gin?
Bill