Casa Balla: A Visit to the Home of the Futurist Artist - Home in Rome Series #5

Above, a cramped hallway with every surface painted, and light fixtures designed by Balla.

Among its many contemporary wonders, Rome has the home of Futurist artist Giacomo Balla, an apartment Balla made into one of his great works of art, thanks to the contemporary national art gallery MAXXI which restored and manages it. Every surface of the multi-room apartment in the della Vittoria neighborhood (just north of Prati and the Vatican) is covered with the great 20th-century Futurist's art.

The Turin-born Balla moved into the home in June1929, when he was 58, with his wife and two daughters, both painters. They transformed the "clerical" apartment into a work of art in which they all lived until their deaths, the last in 1994.

Every inch is designed and decorated, from chairs and rugs (left) to lights (below).

Clothes, dishware, cabinets, door handles - nothing escaped Balla's desire to shape it, design it, paint it. Below, a small desk and dresser under a loft bed, with Rome the Second time authors taking a selfie in the mirror.

Right, the "Studiolo Rosso" (Little Red Study) where Balla wrote. It's not for the claustrophobic among us.

Left, even clothes were fashioned to the Futurist's design, clothes and the closet doors - inside and out.

When we visited in April of last year, the salone was set up as the artist's studio (above). It also hosted an exhibition of Balla works on paper. The design of furniture - chairs, tables, desks - is, of course, all Futurist.

We've put a few more photos at the end of the post - but you will want to see this for yourself. It's extraordinary. Don't miss it.

Casa Balla's schedule is somewhat unpredictable. It was open this past December and January, and is open now (from March 1) through April 27. After that, who knows? One can visit the home only with a small group tour (in Italian but likely some people will speak some English and it's worth it even if you can't understand the tour leader's talk - a small and informative dual-language pamphlet is available), and advance tickets from MAXXI, get them here: https://casaballa.maxxi.art/en/ - that's the English site. If you scroll down a bit, a bubble will open up at the upper right for conversion to Italian ("IT", if in Italian, do the same and you'll see "EN" for English). Thursday through Sunday, 10-12 and 4-6 on the hour. Interestingly, the building has an elevator (the apartment is on a fairly high floor), but it's generally not available to MAXXI visitors (I suppose they aren't paying for their share of the elevator).

Balla joins our "Home in Rome Series," the other 4 of which were posted in 2011 and 2013: Goethe, de Chirico, Pirandello, and Moravia.

Dianne

A lovely pink and aqua bathroom.

Bottles that would make Morandi proud.

The elevator you can't ride.

The Fascist-era entrance to the building, with no hint of what's inside.

The Catacombs in Torpignattara: Our Candidate for Best Catacombs in Rome

Rome has 500 catacombs.  About a dozen are regularly open to the public, and we've been to half of those.  One of us (guess who) claims re these almost 2000-year-old evocative burial grounds, "seen one, seen 'em all."  But our recent visit to the catacombs of Saints Marcellinus and Peter (Santi Marcellino e Pietro) proved him wrong.


Easily reached by the "trenino" (little train) that runs from Stazione Termini (more directions at the end of this post), these lightly visited catacombs have a wealth of newly restored frescoes dating from about the 4th century on.  The story of the frescoes' restoration includes funding by Azerbaijan (you tell me!).

President of the Pontifical Council for Culture
and of the Pontifical Commission for
Sacred Archaeology, Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi,
 hosts Dr. Mehriban Aliyeva, President of the
 Azerbaijani Heydar Alieyev Foundation in 2014
celebrating the Foundation's funding of the
laser technology restoration of the catacombs, 

New laser technology was used to remove the black gummy coating (from age, mold, candle smoke) and graffiti on the paintings.  The before and after photos are remarkable.


We were not allowed to take photos inside so these pictures (except at the end of the post) are not ours.

2006 excavations of 1,000 skeletons.

There are almost 90 decorated rooms in these 4.5 kilmoeters (3 miles) of burial niches on three levels well below ground.  We saw a dozen or more.  Over 20,000 bodies were once in this "cemetery," 1,000 of which were found only in 2006, with their togas still on.

An elaborately decorated room of likely a wealthy family.

These frescoes apparently document women participating in church rites, though we didn't see enough to draw that conclusion.  They include a painting of Jesus healing a "bleeding woman," the topic of which is of interest in church history.

Jesus healing the bleeding woman.

The frescoes are, of course, highly symbolic, and our tour guide (who spoke excellent English to the three of us on the tour that day) seemed to enjoy elaborating on the symbolism, which we attempted to interpret as well.

The new laser technology has been used on paintings in the more visited Catacombs of Domitila off the via Appia Antica, but those newly-restored paintings are not part of the tour as of 2018.

The mausoleum of St. Helena, undergoing restoration.

You enter the Catacombs of Marcellinus and Peter from the courtyard of the mausoleum of Helena, Constantine's mother, which is in the process of being restored.  When it is, this complex likely will attract more visitors.

One of the more informative aspects of the complex is the mausoleum's use of amphorae in its walls.  Amphorae, old vessels used to carry olive oil and other liquids, were thrown away once they were empty.  These old, often broken, ceramics then were sometimes used in the building of walls to lighten the load, because they were empty.  The wall, which basically was a tower, deteriorated over time, so that it now shows the amphorae inside.  A colloquial word in Italian for amphorae or jugs, is "pignatta."  The tower was known as the "tower of the jugs" or "Torpignattara," and so the neighborhood is named today.  That was a new one, even for our Roman friends.

The orange remains of the amphorae in the mausoleum's 'tower' from which Torpignattara gets its name.

Tours of the catacombs are available 5 times/day, every day except Thursday (much online information about the catacombs is woefully out of date), in English and Italian, and also via mp3 players in German, Spanish, and French. The regular price is 8 Euros, children under 7 free, reduced for children 7-18 and some others.  The Web site is sparse but clear and in English as well as Italian.  You can book via email (in English) online, and not much in advance.  We did it the day before we went.

Take the trenino or tram at the far end of via Giolitti next to Termini towards Centocelle, to the Berardi stop.  It's a short ride - about 10-15 minutes.  The catacombs are directly across the street.  A walk back towards the center along via Casalina will give you a feel for the heavily ethnic neighborhood of Torpignattara - and places to eat and drink.  You can catch the trenino back to Termini every few blocks.

Dianne
And thanks to our friend Brian who told us about the recent restorations.

Behind the Wall - the Prisons of San Michele a Ripa

San Michele a Ripa from the side away from the Tevere - a feel for its
length and barrier to whatever is inside.

The long building - perhaps the longest in Rome at a third of a mile (500 meters) - faces the Tevere with no openings, looking like an impenetrable mass that holds nothing of interest.  In fact, the complex of buildings, San Michele a Ripa ("St Michael at the river bank" if you want a tortured English translation) has been used since the 17th century for a variety of purposes, from Catholic medical facilities to prisons to military barracks to arts institutions.  On a recent tour we took of part of this Trastevere block, the focus was on the 18th-19th century use of a substantial part of the complex as a prison/reformatory for women and children.

Carlo Fontana's boys' prison.

The women and girls' prison.

The original prisons - one designated for boys and one for girls - were designed by Papal architects of some fame. Carlo Fontana, a favorite of several Popes and designer of many fountains and chapels in Rome, started the boys' facility in 1701.  He was a rather ordinary practitioner of Baroque architecture and used these techniques, admittedly with severity because of the purpose, in the prison.

Ferdinando Fuga, who designed facades for notable Rome churches such as Santa Maria in Trastevere and Santa Maria Maggiore, added the female prison later in the same century.

The prisons have recently been restored and are open to tours.  At the same time that the prisons were considered modern approaches to incarceration (3 guards could monitor all the cells - not quite a panopticon, but similar), the treatment was harsh.  Boys considered "wayward and disobedient" to their parents ended up there with punishment and moral strictures that included rations akin to starvation.  An attorney who prepared a case for the state's Appellate Court stated in 1851 that the boys who emerged after 2 years were skin and bones, full of diseases and would rather be dead.

From the outside (interior courtyard) one can
see how small and high the windows are; no
one was going to get out of here.

Women in the female section often were those in the sex trade, whom the Church wanted to reform, or perhaps just punish.

The city took over this Papal facility in 1871.  With some interruptions (use as a prison for political prisoners from 1827-1870, for example), the complex's use as a reform prison lasted until the end of the 1960s.  In her biography of the great 20th century Italian writer, Elsa Morante, Lily Tuck mentions that Elsa's legal (though not biological) father "worked as a probation officer...at a boys' reform school located at Porta Portese."  This would've been in the second and third decades of the 20th century, and clearly this was the place.

One can admire the architecture and at the same time be horrified by what transpired within these walls.

Art work being restored in the prison hall.

The large halls of the prison now are being used for restoration work on paintings.  There are some tours of these facilities to admire that work, and part of the space now can be rented for business meetings!

An excellent pamphlet on life in the prisons and on the architecture is available in Italian.

Our tour was part of the extensive Ville di Roma a Porte Aperte series sponsored by turismo culturale italiano.  April's focus was on Trastevere.

This plaque, from 1704 states that Clement IX is responsible
for this institution for lost and incorrigible adolescents,
who here are instructed in becoming more subservient (my
loose Latin translation- anyone is welcome to elaborate on it).

Dianne

Artisans in Rome - perhaps a dying breed

The carefully collected and preserved tools of the restorer.

Rome still hosts true artisans, although lamentations can be heard throughout the city that they are being driven out by tourism (wine bars, international brand stores).

We were delighted one day to be invited to the restoration shop of one of Bill's fellow soccer players, Maurizio (the only name by which we knew him).  "Come visit my shop," Maurizio kept saying to Bill as they left the soccer field time and again.  Being suspicious Americans, we anticipated being in an awkward position of having to buy something we couldn't afford or didn't want.  We were so off the mark.

Maurizio Carletti, not stopping his work even to chat, and his uncle, who
praises his skill.

Maurizio wanted to show us his artisan expertise in restoration. His one-room shop is crammed with tools, some of them over 100 years old.  He learned his trade from his father, who opened the shop in 1966, but, his uncle told us, Maurizio's skills surpass the father's (and the uncle's).

Showing us valuable compounds.

Maurizio also makes his own compounds for restoration, especially gilding.  He thought about expanding his business to, for example, London, but he couldn't figure out a way to bring his special compounds into that country.

Since we were at the shop, we found a Web site Maurizio maintains, in English, and a Facebook page, and an Italian site, devoted to artisans in the province of Lazio (home of Rome).

Before and after pictures of Maurizio's work.

Maurizio too bemoans the decline in his trade; this kind of furniture is not prized as much by the modernist and post-modernist younger generations.  You can only restore so many pieces for the French Embassy or Museo Braschi, it appears.  And, of course, rents are going up in this hot tourist area around Piazza Navona.  But, like other lamenters, we hope Rome will find a way to maintain these artisans, who are such a critical part of Rome life.

Stop by and look - Laboratorio Restauro Carletti, via del Teatro Pace, 26.

Dianne

Tools you can't find anymore.

More tools.

Maurizio took a break after clamping this down.