You may not find this terribly rewarding unless you're included here, so this is a good time for casual and random browsers to turn back before they get too caught up in the sweep and majesty of the proceedings and can't let go.
Off we go, from our little nest on the stairs of the Via di Sant'Onofrio, with no particular purpose in mind for a change. Just walking round a bit, trying to stay out of trouble, taking some photos if convenient. Kristin's been off with her friends Ewa and Malgosha for lunch, and we feel that we older tourists deserve a break from time to time.
Across the bridge and passing the Giovanni Battista church in the Piazza dell'Oro and the head of Via Giulia of fond memory
Walking over to have a peek at the Castel Sant'Angelo (though we're bypassing the venerable hulk on this trip), and then turning right . . .
. . . to pass the Torre dell'Orologio (clock tower), one block north of the Corso Vittorio Emanuele II.
We've gone round the back of the Chiesa Nuova di Santa Maria in Vallicella,
along the Via del Governo Vecchio.
The Via del Governo Vecchio is described on Google Maps as a 'Lane with vintage stores &
cafes' (like nearly all the streets round here, then).
We are entering now the Piazza di Pasquino, but . . .
. . . stepping aside for a parade of young religious gentlemen filing up in the opposite direction.
But here, its own good self, is the Pasquino. What a history! The statue now called 'Pasquino' was a Hellenistic statue, probably of 'Menelaus with the body of Patroclus', dating from about the 3rd century BC, that was dug up here in the 15th century. It was set up here and soon became the vehicle for people criticizing and lampooning the papal autocracy in the city with anonymous satirical poems pasted on or near the statue, which came to be called 'pasquinades' and still are. He was thus the first of the 'talking statues' of Rome, and the various contributions to the tradition were published regularly as early as 1509. The name Pasquino was stuck on him in the 16th century but the source is obscure.
Now we've popped out onto the Corso Vittorio Emanuele II main street at the Piazza di San Pantaleo, with its monument to Marco Minghetti (1818-1886), who served as Prime Minister for two brief terms in the 1860s and '70s.
The central Museo di Roma, an art museum founded in 1930 but moved here in 1952 to this early 19th century Palazzo Braschi.
The adjacent church is the San Pantaleo, an apparently early 12th century establishment, revised in the 15th and 17th centuries, and with a neoclassical façade added in 1807 or 1808. Saint Pantaleon was allegedly a Christian physician, ca.275-305, in Nicomedia, who is said to have perished in the Diocletian round of martyr-making and is included in the west amongst the '14 Holy Helpers', known in eastern Christianity as the 'Holy Unmercenary Healers'. He was venerated at least as early as the 6th century, but the idea of the Holy Helpers really took off during the plagues of the mid-14th century.
We visited St Pantaleon's church in Ravello, the Duomo there from 1086, where his blood liquifies from time to time, though we weren't there to see that. He’s a patron saint of physicians, having been one, and his head is apparently in Lyon, France. In Italy, he also gives out favorable lottery numbers, and he may be the origin of the word 'pantaloons' from the Venetian commedia dell'arte character.
The stunning building across the Corso, behind the statue, is the Museo di Scultura Antica Giovanni Barracco.
Farther along the Corso, we're aiming for the Basilica of Sant'Andrea della Valle there. But first, a look back at . . .
. . . those six columns in the Palazzo Massimo alle Colonne, built in 1532-1536 on the site of buildings destroyed during the Sack of Rome in 1527. St Philip Neri briefly resurrected a young son of the Massimo family in 1583, and 'there were other notable events in the palace of the 16th century including various intrafamilial murders' (Wikipedia).
The Basilica of Sant'Andrea della Valle (St Andrew of the Valley). Work on the church was begun in about 1590, then restarted in 1608 and basically finished by 1650, though the façade was added in 1655-1663 by Carlo Rainaldi. The site was gifted in 1582 to the Theatine Order, which is still in charge of the church, by a descendant of the Piccolomini family of Siena, the Duchess of Amalfi (Costanza Piccolomini d'Aragona), who signed over her palace and a next-door church; it was understood that the new basilica would be dedicated to St Andrew, the patron saint of Siena, and would honor the two earlier Piccolomini popes, the great Pius II and his nephew Pius III, both of Siena.
The 'of the valley' part comes from the presence then of a Roman-era canal called the Euripus that passed from the Baths of Agrippa down to drain into the Tiber.
The basic design of the church by Giacomo della Porta, as revised and enlarged by Carlo Maderno, is a Latin cross with a dome over the crossing, a single nave with eight high chapels along the sides. Especially notable are the two enormous monuments, to Pius II and Pius III, transferred here from the old Vatican basilica.
The dome, designed by Maderno and finished by 1622, was the second highest dome after St Peter's and was frescoed by Giovanni Lanfranco and Domenichino (in competition), and it's thought that Borromini made its lantern on top.
The frescoes on the apse walls represent the Crucifixion, Martyrdom and burial of Sant'Andrea, by Mattia Preti (1650–1651). In early texts, Andrew the Apostle was described as having been martyred by crucifixion in Patras, Achaea in northern Greece in AD 60, supposedly bound to a Latin cross. A later medieval tradition evolved to the effect that he was crucified on an X-shaped cross, or 'saltire', now known as a St Andrew's Cross, as in this painting.
The pictures up in the half-dome above are by Domenichino.
The Ginetti chapel, designed by Carlo Fontana in 1670, features Antonio Raggi's 'Angel Urges the Holy Family to Flee to Egypt' (1675).
The chapel of the Crucifix (1647) displays an antique wooden crucifix above a painting of the Madonna.
All of the eight chapels in the nave have identical rectangular spaces, and each has its own small dome.
It appears that the four paintings in the vault of the nave were intended to illustrate the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, and were done in the period 1865-1919.
One of the most impressive popes ever was Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (1405-1464) of Siena, an internationally well-known Renaissance humanist, diplomat, poet, and author who served as Pope Pius II from 1458 to his death. His sister's son, Francesco Todeschini, was granted use of the Piccolomini surname and appointed Archbishop of Siena at the age of 21; in 1503, he was elected to the papacy as a compromise candidate, understood given his age to be a short-term resolution to the post-Borgia factional disputes, but he died in less than a month afterwards (shortest pope term ever).
Both were entombed next to one another in the old St Peter's Basilica, and moved to the crypt when that was demolished. In 1612, when the St Andrew's church was commissioned, they were both moved here and re-entombed in 1614. These two nearly matching funerary monuments are facing each other across the nave near the crossing, but it's not entirely clear whether these are their tombs or merely cenotaphs, with their remains interred somewhere else on the premises.
This is the monument to Pius III (my bad), meant to be similar to its predecessor for Pius II across the nave, which is attributed to Paolo Romano. Pius II's head has remained in Ancona, where he died whilst trying frantically, unsuccessfully, to put together a huge international crusade against the threatening Ottoman Turks.
The wonderful cathedral in Siena houses, in its Piccolomini Library, a set of 10 wall-size frescoes on the events of Pius II's life, painted by Pinturicchio in the years 1502-1508.
The Chapel of St. Cajetan of Thiene is dedicated to the founder of the Theatines, who was born in the Veneto in 1480, became a lawyer and diplomat for Pope Julius II, founded the Theatine Order in 1524, later founded a bank to help the poor avoid usurers (which eventually became the Banco di Napoli), and died in 1547. The altarpiece depicting St Cajetan adoring the Madonna and Child dates from 1770, but the altar is from 1912.
The 19th century organ over the entrance, apparently with a choir loft
-- Thanks for stopping by! See you again soon.
That's the spiral tower of Sant'Ivo alla Sapienza in the courtyard of the Palazzo della Sapienza, until 1935 the seat of the University of Rome, presently housing the Italian State Archives. It's by Borromini, 1660.
And just turning the corner, we're in the Piazza di Sant'Eustachio, with its . . .
. . . deer's head stuck up on the façade of the eponymous basilica.
So we're a block east of the Sant'Ivo and a block west of the Pantheon, and going in to have a peek.
There was a church on the site by the 8th century, restored and with a new campanile in the 1190s, when the then-Pope deposited the relics of Eustace and his family in the church. It was almost completely rebuilt in the 17th and 18th centuries in a Baroque style. The plan is of a Latin Cross with a single nave, with three pilasters on either side, and a dome over the crossing.
The ambo or pulpit, in polychrome marble, is from 1937.
That's a gilded wooden baldachin (circa 1746) hanging over the main altar . . .
. . . and we're given to understand that the presumptive relics of St Eustace are there inside the altar.
The altarpiece by Francesco Ferdinandi (1679–1740) was painted in 1727 and recreates the martyrdom of St Eustace and his family, who were roasted to death inside a bronze statue of a bull in AD 118. Eustace was a pagan Roman general, we're told, who led the Roman army successfully under Trajan, but was martyred under Hadrian, with his family, for refusing to sacrifice to the pagan gods. His veneration was cresting in the 12th to 13th centuries.
The deer's head atop the façade is meant to recall the story that when out hunting in the woods he saw a deer. The deer turned towards him and he saw a cross between its antlers and heard the voice of God commanding him to get himself and family baptized asap.
Out on the street, the Via di S Eustachio, we're passing buildings stuck onto the side of the church and the Colonne neroniane, Nero's Columns, part of the Baths of Nero that were dug up during street works near the nearby Church of St Louis of the French, patched up, and set up here, half a block away from the Pantheon.
This by the way, one more block to the west towards the Piazza Navona, is the church of San Luigi dei Francesi, St Louis of the French, designed by Giacomo della Porta and built by Domenico Fontana between 1518 and 1589, aided when the building work stalled by donations from Catherine de' Medici, Queen Mother of France.
One has never been inside before, and the floor plan is ambitious (nave flanked by two aisles, which are flanked by 10 side chapels). Unfortunately, we've picked a bad time, and will postpone our appreciations, partially because . . .
. . . we can't wait to get back to see the Sant'Agnese in Agone. On our left, under that obelisk and all of the year-before-the-Jubilee clean-up scaffolding, is Gian Lorenzo Bernini's stunning Fountain of the Four Rivers (1651). Rather than just skip it entirely, and pretend it doesn't exist, we'll paste on a photo of it from two years ago.
(Some other times we've come to see it, it's been scaffolded just as convincingly as now.)
The Fountain of the Four Rivers (the Nile for Africa, the Danube for Europe, the Ganges for Asia, and the Río de la Plata for the Americas), viewed in November 2022.
|
The Piazza Navona, 250m of hilarious fun. Begun as a stadium for races and staged naval battles in Roman times, it fell into disuse over time, but was revived when in the late 15th century the city market was shifted from Campidoglio to this open space, at which time the architectural grandeur all the way round the perimeter took off.
The Fountain of the Moors is at the far end, behind us in this photo -- the Moor on top (wrestling with a dolphin!) is Bernini's from 1673 but the rest is by Giacomo della Porta (1575). We're passing now to . . .
. . . the northern end, also shrouded for the Jubileo, with its Fountain of Neptune, also by della Porta in 1574.
A look back to the southern end. The Church of Sant'Agnese in Agone has always been a favorite for us since in 2006 we learnt of a 'forthcoming concert by the Romabarocca Ensemble in the acoustically-gifted Sacristy of Borromini inside, featuring the counter-tenor Mario Bassini, and we came back here right after Happy Hour and had a very uplifting counter-tenor experience, and then went for pizza' (2006 caption).
It's dedicated to the early Christian Martyr St Agnes, who was understood to have been executed on this site in the then-stadium. The 'in Agone' part doesn't refer to her considerable agonies; rather 'agone' meant games, competitions, and in olden days the Piazza Navona was the 'piazza in agone' where we come for the races ('in agone' metamorphosed into Navona). The church was begun in 1652 for Pope Innocent X Pamphili, whose family palace is next door, led by the Rainaldi father and son, superseded by Borromini, then back to Carlo Rainaldi, then Borromini again, and completed in 1670.
They've got Agnes' skull in there, or so they say.
And this for us is a gelateria with a history. Our great friends Joe and Teny had come down from Switzerland to join us in 2022 for some unbridled merriment and this was in effect that last time we saw them, as they flew home the next morning.
Dwight Peck's personal website
Feedback
and suggestions are welcome if positive, resented if negative, 
.
All rights reserved, all wrongs avenged. Posted 17 December 2024. 
