A quick note about food: I usually write these updates before dinner (since after dinner it’s time to pass out and then wake up at 3:30 AM because my earache is acting up), so much isn’t said about dinner. Last night, I had a fried artichoke, which is way better than it sounds. They take a frying pan, put olive oil in it, put the artichoke on it leaves down, and fry it up. The result is half delicious crispy leaves that taste like really good fresh potato chips, and half the part the leaves are attached to – I think this is the “choke” itself – that’s great with some salt on it. We were debating if you could put the fried leaves in a bag and sell them; since they’re fried in olive oil, I imagine they’re healthier than potato chips, but I guess then you’d have to throw the choke away, which is just as good. Also, I’m not sure what you’d call this product; Nothing with “choke” in it sounds too appealing, and You can’t combine “fried” and “artichoke” because you get “Fartichoke,” which is about the worst name I can imagine. Maybe “artifried”. Nobody steal my idea.
Anyway, today we went to the Capitoline Museum. Remember yesterday when I said the Capitoline Museum will probably have less Germans in it? It didn’t. The Museum is up on the capital hill, which isn’t that bad to climb up. It’s split into two buildings with a tunnel underneath (there’s a third buiding on the hill, the Roman town hall). We started in the christian art gallery. There were a couple weird things I noticed here. One very popular saint to paint is Saint Sebastian.
Saint Sebastian was a matyr who got shot by the Romans; According to Wikipedia, he is “commonly depicted in art and literature tied to a post and shot with arrows”. What they don’t mention is that for some reason in all the paintings we saw of him, he’s striking a pinup pose. As an aside, here’s something I don’t get about martyrs: Sebastian got shot by arrows and lived, then went off for a little while before the Romans found him again and beat him to death. Why did God save him from getting shot by arrows, but not getting beaten to death? Admittedly, being saved from the arrows is more impressive (apparently he was filled with them until he “looked like a hedgehog” – where’s the painting of THAT?) but why was he saved once and not twice? Maybe God is like Spider-Man – you only get one?
Also popular is Judith, from the old testament, who chopped an Assyrian general’s head off. I don’t know if artists really want to paint Judith or really want to paint a cool decapitated head, but she’s in a ton of paintings. The museum’s notes claim that she’s popular because she represents the triumph of virtue over sin, but virtue normally doesn’t go around lopping sin’s head off, right? I’m going with the theory that there aren’t many chances to paint biblically chopped off heads.
Other than that, I wasn’t too terribly interested in some of the paintings; I sat through about a bazillion paintings of Madonna and Christ Super-Baby in Art History I and II, and this wasn’t the really weird looking early-period stuff before human measurements were figured out and the Virgin Mary had six-inch long claw-fingers and Jesus looked like a weird midget. One of the odd paintings I did like actually showed God, the Father, holding up Jesus’ cross – how often do you see THAT guy painted? Jesus is all over the place, of course, and the Holy Ghost appears as a dove all the time, but I guess the big guy’s really good at dodging paparazzi.
After that we looked through an exhibit of ancient statues dug up in someone’s garden. This was pretty interesting, but the cumultive effect could be creepy because most of the statues were missing heads and/or arms. Arms isn’t so bad, but heads and arms kind of makes it look like you’re going through a serial killer’s torso shed. One of the intact ones I like was of Marsyas, a dumbass who challenged Apollo to a music contest, and got his skin flayed off after losing (Apollo’s kind of a dick); the artist had tinted some of the statue purple to replicate the effect. There’s also a famous statue of Marcus Arelius on this floor, which supposedly only survived because it was mistaken for Constantine. (You can kinda see the resemblance.) Actually, there’s even more stuff on this floor – the hilltop that the museum is on used to house the roman Temple of Jupiter, and in fact the musem has been built around what survives of it – part of the massive stone pediment (the base the temple was built on). There’s a really neat clear plastic model showing how big the Temple was, as well as the remaining parts, which are filled in; hopefully the photograph of it came out.
That’s it for that half of the museum, so we took the underground tunnel over to the second half. The tunnel itself is decorated with some neat roman stuff – grave markers, lists of names of Praetorian Guards, even weird stuff that’s been preserved like explicit rental agreements. Roman writing looks weird to me here because the text starts out huge and gets smaller and smaller, which makes sense sometimes, but is also used in the rental agreement we read. It would be like if you read a contract that looked like this:
If rent is not paid
within five (5) days after due date, the Renter agrees to pay a charge of
(not more than one day’s rent) for late rent and/or each dishonored bank check,
unless waived by written agreement. If the Renter is unable to pay rent when due, the
Owner has the legal right to serve notice to pay rent or vacate within three (3) days, as provided by California Code of Civil Procedures Section 1161.
Weird shit. The second area of the museum holds a bunch of realistic Roman busts and sculptures. The Greeks liked idealized busts, so everyone both looks like a model and like everyone else; the romans did busts warts and all, which is far more interesting. Also, some of the Romans had really dumb-looking neckbeards. I was very surprised by a larger than life statue of Augustus nude, complete with non-broken-off stone weiner (making him one of the luckier statues); Supposedly Ceaser, when he was killed, pulled his toga over his face to maintain his dignity as his last act, and here’s a larger than life pantsless Augustus getting photographed. Go figure. Anyways, this wing of the musem is basically 100% sculpture, but it manages to avoid the usual “Oh boy, more masterpieces” malaise that sometimes set in; I attriute this to the realistic busts and super size of some of the statues. Also, jarringly, in the courtyard next to the Poseidon statue, there’s two twisted burnt girders from the World Trade Center (WTF??)
That’s all for the Museum; We were going to go see the Bambino – a carved wooden baby held for some reason in a church you have to go up a bunch of steps to see – but, unforchies, the church was closed until 3 PM, and my feet hurt, so we called it a day. It’s too bad, because the Bambino is one of the goofier Catholic things, so I would have had a chance both to point out that it’s not the real Bambino (that one was stolen), and that if I’m remembering correctly, the original was supposted to be carved out of an olive tree from the Garden of Gethesmane, which is almost as likely as the supposed Creche of Crist the catholics also have. Maybe next time.
Tomorrow: Villa Borgaise, which I’m too lazy to look up how to spell correctly; and hopefully less foot pain (curse these high arches!)
ITALIAN LESSON FOR IGNORANT AMERICANS
Vietato Fumare = No Smoking
Aeroporto = Airport
Leonardo da Vinci = Leonardo da Vinci
No Smoking in Lenoardo da Vinci Airport = Vietato Fumare Aeroporto Lenoardo da Vinci
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