Day 4 - Friday 27th of Sept - 4 days in one day

It is 5:45 on Saturday the 28th of September, and i am supposed to go and join a bocci ball game in the gardens behind the AAR, but first I have to complete yeserday's blog entry, because Craig Purcell is worried that I may have been abducted.  So here goes.

Yesterday, Friday the 27th of September was 4 days, wasn't it?  Didn't time fracture into a series of days within one day, each with their own vibrations and colors?  Wasn't it strange how there could be totally distinct yet related things that could happen on these different time continuoums all within the supposed same calendar day?
It all started with an invitation to go on one of the Friday morning walks w AAR rockstar Kimberly Bowes, FAAR'06 Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the School of Classical Studies at the American Academy in Rome, took us on the following walk

The Origins of Rome: The Palatine, Forum and Capitoline Museums

The walk is open to Fellows, Affiliated Fellows, and Residents. The walk will be limited to 30 people. Please meet at the front gate at 9:00am.  You will be back in time for lunch.
We’ll look at the earliest remains from Rome – huts and graves and one great temple  and discuss the controversies of joining a mythic history of Rome with the archaeology.
We’ll discuss the importance of landscape – hills and water – for the Rome’s earliest history, and examine a series of excavations on the Palatine – some done by the Romans themselves as they tried to understand – and invent – their past. We’ll end at the Capitoline Museums where the greatest Roman temple to Jupiter Optimus Maximus is the centerpiece of a new exhibition – and a great opportunity to think about how Rome today presents its own past.

The walk and Kimberly's talk were stupendous.  I learned more about founding of historical Rome in 3 1/2 hours than in hundreds of hours of reading Robert Hugh's book ROME.

Then at 12:45 I taxied it back up the hill to meet my friend Giovanna who runs the Tulane in Rome architecture program.  We met to have lunch at the AAR and to together attend a lecture by Michael Graves, who attended the AAR as a young architecture student, right before he started teaching at Princeton in the late 1960's.  It was a very strange talk, and not because Michael G is now sadly in a wheelchair.  He made ties back to Rome, but mostly in what typed of arrwork he has in his little house in Princeton.  Not any discussion of his architecture per se, more about his housewares.  I found it to be a bit sad, and not very inspirational regarding his architecture.  His paintings however are beautiful - somewhere between Corot and Hockney.


Then I ran into Adele and John Guarre's friend Bill, who is a real estate agent in Manhattan visiting Adelle before she steps down from her Chair of the AAR position.  It turns out that Bill, like me, had a timed ticket to the Vatican at 7:15 for a night tour.  I had reserved  this on the recomendation of several guidebooks and NY Times article as the best way to avoid the crushing crowds at the Vatican.  So off Bill and I went on foot through a rather gritty part of Rome along the ridge line from the AAR to St Peters.  When we got to the Vatican gate it was all locked up, with a big line of tired looking people.  The doors opened at 7:00 into a beautiful, modern and efficient ticketing area.  I had a paid for a private tour and assumed that I would be with a small group of 15 - 20 people.  A young man from Africa helped me at the ticket window w big smiles and excellent english.  I told him about Mathias and we chatted for a while.  He told me to go to stand under the B line against a wall.  Many people began to mill around the B line who I assumed were my tour group (Bill had left on his own self guided tour).  Suddenly the African young man walks up to me with a dimunitive striking blond with a beautiful smile.  This was Mikela, my Italian guide.  My PRIVATE guide.  Just her and me in the Vatican Museums.  My African friend seems to have swung this somehow, and off I happily went for 3 1/2 hours in the Vatican museums with my PRIVATE guide Mikela - a phd art historian who has worked at the Vatican museums for 18 years.  Did I mention that she was very smart and beautiful?

 We started with her taking me to an outdoor courtyard where the Sistine chapel paintings have been set up on metal plates, so she could walk me though the stories of each painting in great detail, since you are not supposed to talk once you are in the Sistine Chapel.  This completed, we began our walk.  Amazingly, there were times in some galleries when Mikela and I were the only people in the space.  This, in contrast to what I have heard from others who visitied the Vatican museums during normal hours when it is wall to wall people all day.  The whole tour was indescibly wonderful, with Mikela telling me everthing imaginable about art, and I could not stump her with my typically obscure questions about particular artists, years of when art was made, or how it was made.  We covered the whole museum, culminating in the Rafael rooms and of course the Sistine Chapel.

I walked out on a high at 10:45, got a taxi up the hill, and had a few cold beers and a rocking spaghetti carbonara at a wonderful restaurant about 100 yards from my apartment. 

Then saw my buddy Tom the architects studio light was on and knocked on his door to see it he had any more of his Four Roses bourbon, but alas he was all out.  Then I went to bed.

 

That was my collection of days in one day on 9/27/13.  Here are some pictures of it all. 


Went back over around the corner to the Tiempietto cause i wanted to do a drawing of it.  Amazing that it is steps from my apartment

Kim begins her tour with Adele Chatfield Taylor (w sunglasses and blue frock) at her side

 Lots of examples of archaelogical sites under way - shades of our project at Atturaif in Saudi Arabia

 

 

 Kimberly keeps us all in rapt attention w amazing details

 Hundreds of years before Christ, order, simplicity and geometry rule

 there were tons of earth excavated in the 19th and 29th centuries to unearth these ruins and landscapes - train loads and train loads of earth

 View from the top of the Palentine Hill looking to the Capitoline hill.  Rome is a city of hills with a river that runs through a huge flood plane.  This defined the city, just as it does many campuses we work on like UGA and UNC Chapel hill.  Guy is the orange baseball cap is John Guarre, Adele's husband a famous playwright (and a wonderful guy)

 I kept taking pics of signs for ASG graphic design pals

 That little round builidng with the columns is one of the oldes standing buildings in Rome

 Kim showing us the hut where Romulus and Remus supposedly lived.  The true birthplace of the city

 reconstructed plaster of what the ceilings looked like at one time

 This brick wall in the distance was a piece of a wall of an entire building that was @ 50' high!! 

 One amazing thing about these tours and hanging w the Fellows is that they are all geniuses in their field, and they all chime in along the way

 this arch marks the victory over the Jews and the taking over of Jeruseleum.  Christian Romans marched through it.  Years later in 1947 when Israel was formed, a group of Jews came to this gate and walked through it backwards.........

 Kim has a sharp sense of humor and makes all the content very current

 Kim and my pal Harvey (in the hat) who is a Yale Slovic scholar now working with my Dad on a book

 The Forum.  Like Ohio State Football, it sat more than 100,000 people.  When Italy won the World Cup recently ,  it also had over 100,000 and big screens.....

 at the Campidolio

 Into the Capotoline Museum

 A model of the huge temple that sat where the Campidolio is now.  From the porch of this temple, one could look into the Forum and ancient Rome.  this view is now blocked by the Campidolio buildings, and the Campidolio looks to St Peters.  A narrative for sure in urban design moves.

 a drawing of the Palentine Hill where the round huts were

 1:00 lunch back at AAR w students from the U of Miami, the U of Notre Dame, faculty, and

 Michael Graves talking to architect Fellows Tom Kelley and Catie Newell

 Adele introducing Michael.  That is him on the screen as a student of the AAR

 The walk to St Peters and the Vatican Museums

 The door to the Vatican Museums cracks open at 7:00 pm

 My lovely tourguide Mikela begins our tour by describing the Sistine Chapel since you are not allowed to talk once in there

 The modern entry.  not bad 

 Entry into the Museums.  Shades of the Chicago Art Institute and MICA

 Courtyard between the Bramante wings of galleries

 Early Roman sculptures

 this amazing bronze sculpture, probably 25 ft tall, was unearthed only in the 18th century.  it was under a huge limestone slab.  This is true - Mikela told me so

 The Map galleries BLEW ME AWAY!!! 

 A boat carrying an obelisk from Egypt!! Totally amazing.  Mikela said "we now wonder how many obelisks did not make it and are under the sea"

 Mikela and me at my favorite painting - Rafael's School of Athens.  Thank you Peter.

 That is Rafael in the black hat looking at you. 

The whole magilla.  If you don't know this painting, look it up. 
 This is Rafael's showing Euclid as Michaelangelo.  He is tired from painting the Sistine Chapel next door, which he was painting while Rafael was painting these rooms.

 Sistine ceiling.  Thank you Samsung Galaxy camera!

They put artifical lights outside the windows at night, with no other light inside!

 Just another pretty face next to where I sat for dinner after the Vatican

Tom Kelly (architect) and Ryan Bailey (writer) in Tom's studio around midnight.  No bourbon left for me.