Via Baccina, Rome

We are staying a few metres off Via Baccina, here [will open map]

This is a few photos from a short walk right to left in the street running in the centre of the above  image from google maps, 3 November 2018. It's a quieter section of Via Baccina. Off to the right from the photo Via Baccina runs to busier Via dei Serpenti and the Piazza di Santa Maria dei Monti and busy streets to the Cavour Metro station, where there are many places to eat and shops from trinkets to classy artisanal items. Here there are artisans, editors, a piano shop with Labrador, grand entrances, simple entrances, colour, plants, angles, corners... and down the end a couple of young tourists who miss it all, it's not on the must see list.

The Arco dei Pantani was, 2000 years ago, the access from the forum area to the Suburra (or Subura).

The buildings along the street are all several stories high. I think our apartment building, renovated a number of times, dates at least from the 1400s. The habit of living in highrise here was established well over 2000 years ago, people living in insulae. There were 4 to 5 million people in Rome 100BC. Similar to now, but in those times more densely in the centre. In 100AD there were eleven aqueducts serving the city. And a great drainage and sewage system, the Cloaca Maxima. By some estimates, the modern city's water supply caught up with the ancient city's water supply around 1972.

The street seen in these photos is tranquil. If visitor numbers double with imagined doubling of civil aviation flights in fifteen years, it will cease to be tranquil, difficult for Romans to afford at all.

Beneath us are ruins from those times two millennia ago and beyond when here would have been hustle and muscle. Around us within these walls and adjacent are hundreds of years of life and deaths. For a sense of the history of upheaval, start with the Wikipedia disambiguation page for "sack of Rome". That does not tell of other times of plague and misery and human everything. If these walls contain ghosts or molecules of the deceased, we can be sure that the greatest number are of children.

But now to what's here.

The small district market 20 metres from home. Butcher, fish shop, fresh pasta maker, fruit and veg, alimentari [food],
organic [bio] specialties, household needs. Nice people, nice food!
[Helen's photo]

Helen's photo. Arco di Pantano at the end of the street.

A Labrador in the atelier of a piano repairer
(down low on the right, under the piano). 

Garbage goes out in different coloured bags, for differentiated recyclables and non-recyclables, collected daily

Service access hatches to buildings make fine picture frames, though not everyone sees the need for a frame

We both enjoy capturing images. One might ask if it distracts from seeing but our experience
is of sharpened vision, alert to images.
Taking pictures often with a camera I begin to see things in the format of the photo,
in which details acquire more meaning, more whimsy, more knockout beauty.
Harder to see this at home in spacious suburban life.

I agree with something I found years ago, written by James Lomax, a photographer, in counterpoint to Susan Sontag's argument that photography is inherently aggressive. Lomax wrote:

"Sometimes, the photographic gaze is gentle, poetic, and creates beauty where it doesn’t obviously exist... This power to observe into life, with miniaturised paper or pixel images, is an extension of human capacity in the McLuhan sense, technology being an extension of the cerebral or nervous system. Photography is embedded within life, qualitatively different from other arts because you ‘take snapshots’ of it – take parts of it – for an ambiguous subsequent reflection, either in a book or on a VDU.

Lomax's essay is here.  I present here a link to something entirely different about composition of images and sensations, the art of Wes Anderson. Though fearful that you may never return.

There are so many options in the photo above for portraits of small parts of the wall, fascinating details, forms, colours.
Along the street in the last several days, after stormy days, people have been lovingly restoring their little green comb-overs.
And, um, oh gosh, the cobblestones are not blue, they are basalt, the camera has done something delicious.

A book editor who may have opinions on these imposed writings.

A life... let's blame the wind and rain for the mat being out of alignment with everything else.

This is the Monti [hills] district, it's uphill that way

My street, I can smell it. It's my street,
and Bruno's and Ricky's and Monica's and Angelina's and and oh yes! — Violetta's street too!!

And if I can draw you away from the dog for a moment... Look carefully at the pattern of cobblestones,
the placing of cobblestones is an extraordinary art, found everywhere.

-----

And here, very briefly, is how to walk down the street and not see it at all...

the impact of Rome and the language of colour, the strength of film

It disturbs me that many people who flow through Rome run between famous things and do not see the city, do not allow the colour of the city to impact upon them. They seem to want to filter through the colours of home. What's the point of that then?


....Rome is full of colour. As is much of Italy, except where things are made of stone or carved of stone or made from baked clay.


The colours of Tuscany and Umbria also reflect the historically available palette of earthy colours. Look in a child's paint box and see Burnt Sienna and Light Umber. The paints are traditionally applied without the fixatives that would make them permanent, that prevent fading and streaking. That inhibit beauty evolving, that prevent ageing such as is normal in organic life.

You see on those walls, photo at left or left above on your browser, the street where we are in Rome, with diverse messages, some angry, some about football teams, some with bad words... and the very cute figures in the right foreground of the photo, by a graffitist whose works bring us to a halt here and there as we wander.

That scene comes into our minds now with sounds: the sound of the metal worker in the first door down there on the right, the sounds of coming and going from the market in the door behind the camera, and the crash-bang-screech-squeeze of the garbage truck at 3 in the afternoon or 6.30 in the evening. The sounds of the wheels of travellers' suitcases on the cobblestones before dawn, hastening for far away places at the end of time here... reminding us sometimes of frogs in the ponds at home when it rains, planes leaving...reminding us other times of the sounds of, of...of suitcases of travellers.

It is not all travellers here. There was, just along the street, a combined unions festival two weeks ago, three nights, about the role of women, focused on three of the women from here: Anna Magnani, Monica Vitti and Gabriella Ferri. The sounds of which floated to us, here my camera out the window. See again the colour, colour in the night, inseparable from mood.

To understand a little about colour, 

attend to the great master of colour in cinema of the twentieth century, 

Vittorio Storaro.
Do continue through to where he speaks of discovering who you are.
And speaks of his discovery of his own ignorance and self-discovery
as a path to maturity.

This week we ventured into the crowds at Piazza di Spagna. A place of great beauty, though it's so easy to be swept up in the mood of the crowd, see only the crowd, my crowd or the crowd of others.
This occasion very happy, not too crowded.
Colour shapes the crowd and mood, shaped by the sky, whatever mood. See what I mean.

This next embedded movie is set a tiny bit in Africa, a lot next to the Spanish Steps,
and very very deeply in the heart. There is a lack of special effects and Hollywood:
It goes mysteriously and gently: a magic of light and colour and two special actors.
Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci

Storaro as a gift to the world

and
Moravia + Bertollucci + Storaro
taking the anti-fascist novel Il Conformista of Alberto Moravia, 

the major Roman writer of the twentieth century

to show how people can slide graciously into fascism.

WARNING, THIS IS NOT FOR ALL

The insidious process of that story – the violent outcome of a refined man's pursuit of "fitting in" with power – has lessons for us now. 

Norman Mailer said, in a speech to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, February 2003, just before the invasion of Iraq:

Fascism is more of a natural state than democracy. To assume blithely that we can export democracy into any country we choose can serve paradoxically to encourage more fascism at home and abroad. Democracy is a state of grace that is attained only by those countries who have a host of individuals not only ready to enjoy freedom but to undergo the heavy labor of maintaining it.

The Museo Atelier Canova Tadolini

Alongside Babuino himself (earlier blog entry, see "smiles on the Spanish Steps"), in Via del Babuino, between the Piazza di Spagna and Piazza del Popolo, there appeared a curious eating place.

We have generally avoided, unless legs defeated, eating in the centre of tourist things. Legs were nearing defeat and curiosity overwhelmed. At the entry it seems improbable. One says to oneself, well it may be fake but whoever suggested that Margaret Thatcher at Madame Tussaud's is not a fake. So we were walking into a jumble, a bigger jumble than that mess in the Roman Forum.

One is not aware immediately
that the massive figure on horseback one is approaching is Simon Bolivar, the 'real' figure being in Lima, Peru. Apart from the one in Caracas and the other in San Francisco.

We sat and ate, as did others, under the watchful gaze of Pope Leo XIII

and an unknown (to us) watcher of table manners

The menu says we are in the Museo Atelier Canova Tadolini

and here up on a shelf out of the way is a smaller version of that in the Borghese Gallery—

 Pauline Borghese née Bonaparte, who appears to be rubbing noses with... could it be V.I. Lenin?

He looks happy, but they lived in different times. Otherwise, maybe, maybe. 

click on images to enlarge

The menu assisted understanding that this had been the Tadolini atelier, used also by Canova.

Here on the web I learned that in his Roman Walks, 1829, Stendhal set out a ten day walking program for Rome and suggested this place on day 4. 

I also learned from the first link in the previous paragraph that in 1805 in Bologna Napoleon came upon Adamo Tadolini sculpting and asked "who was your teacher". Tadolini said Canova and Nap said then we must go to see this Canova in Rome. This was Canova's atelier until 1818 when he passed it to Tadolini and it remained in the Tadolini family as workshop until 1967.  Photos below show the way in which there are bits of this and that scattered. 

But we remain with an interesting question. 

Canova's famous nude figure of Napoleon's sister in the Borghese Gallery was done by Canova between 1805 and 1808. Did Napoleon, hastening from Bologna to Rome in 1805 make a recommendation of sculptor or did he, rushing in on artist and model, have to say "Oh I see you two have already met."

If you know the answer, please comment below!

I think the date on the newspaper is 1953,
it says that in a few days, as long awaited by Romans,
there will be a declaration of this atelier of four generations of Tadolini, with the ghost of Canova
as a national monument. Perhaps someone reading this will find out and comment below.

The food was better than museum cafe standard, 

and I've never been in a museum cafe up close to art, like this.

Prices modest, especially if you build in a bit for the location!

-------

With all those bits of work on the wall I'm reminded of the Casa dell'Architetto

in Mantova we hoped to stay in once, but have failed to do so.  

It is the former arcitectural studio of the father of the present apartment host.

Breakfast's dog

Everything hoped

caffe per me?

howdy schnauzer, see you later... maybe

Sorry, I can't text now, I'm having a conversation with my dog

"The heart of a dog is a bottomless thing"  Tilda Swinton

The exhibition "Je suis l'autre" part 3.

click on images to enlarge

sorry about the fuzziness, this is label for work just below

from here to part 4—next blog entry