I decided to walk from St. John’s to the Palazzo Altemps—I wanted some peace and quiet after going out the night before, and the place was only twenty minutes away. To my surprise, the Republic Day parade really had drawn in what seemed like most of the city; the streets were relatively empty. It was also warm already, and later in the day it would definitely become hot. When I passed over the Tiber, I saw three seagulls bathing in the silty yellow-brown river, bobbing in the current and splashing water over their backs. I watched them for a few moments until they drifted under the bridge, and reappeared to fly away. 

The museum entrance did not face the street I was on when I reached it, and I could not tell at first which door to go in. Even after I got a ticket (it was free admission because of the holiday, which was the main reason I went on this day) it was hard to locate the entrance itself between the confusingly connected ticket office, coatroom, and gift shop. Once I finally found my way inside, though, it was a beautiful building. Most of the structure, including the open courtyard and many still-frescoed rooms on the second floor, had been retained from its Renaissance-era use as a small palace. It was significantly less overwhelming than the other museums we had been visiting recently: most of the rooms were small and (particularly on the more modern first floor) simple enough that they only contained a few large marble statues. These statues were almost entirely ancient, with a focus on religious images. I found myself drawing on my knowledge of classical mythology, and made it a subconscious game of trying to figure out with deity had been depicted before looking at the wall text. My favorite part of the wall texts was the fact that most of the panels included a diagram showing which parts of the relevant statue were reconstructions and which were original—a bit of important pedagogy that is missing from many museums, even some science ones.

On the second floor, what the curators evidently thought of as the prize of their collection was centered in a large room: an over-life-sized sculpture of a man stabbing himself in the throat, supporting a slumped woman, called The Gaul Killing Himself and His Wife. According to the wall text, every half hour, the statue was lit with “dynamic lighting” that mimicked the changes of sunlight over the course of a day. I could see instruments on tracks between the wooden beams on the ceiling above the piece, but in spite of my attempts to catch this exciting display, either I just missed it or it was no longer happening. A single room on each floor with a dense row of display cases was dedicated to smaller, more commonplace ancient Roman objects, including, to my delight, toys, tesserae, and fragments of wall paintings. One gallery contained a huge amount of etchings and engravings in the style of the ones that we looked at in class, including some of the original ones by Piranesi. I particularly enjoyed looking at the eighteenth-century maps and projecting my recent studies and experiences onto them. There were relatively few people there, and even when more visitors started showing up later in the morning, it never reached the suffocating saturation of crowds in the Vatican Musuems.

The crowning surprise was the excavations sections. With five minutes left in my self-imposed time there, I entered the last room I had yet to see—and there was no floor. The walkways bordering the pit of dirt and bricks told me that the Palazzo had originally been built on top of a twelfth-century castle, which in turn had the remains of a fourth-century Roman domus in its foundations. Looking down into the hole, I could see the dense layers of the city in the form of a few still-standing walls, with the oldest right at the base of the current building’s foundations.

I spent a few minutes longer than I meant to in the gift shop. To my regret, there was no way I could’ve managed to fit the coffee table books that interested me in my suitcase. I found out from flipping through one of them that the artist who made the acacia thorn sculpture I loved was the same person who created a tree-like installation I’d seen at the start of the trip when I was passing through a piazza near the Via del Corso. Thanks to my weakness for modern home goods design, I was tempted by a few other things as well: a slick retro lamp (well beyond my price point) and a set of glasses with art on the bases (which would have been particularly nice for my future apartments).

When I finally left, the weather was growing uncomfortably hot. To stay in the shade, I went around the north side of the Palace of Justice, and there saw Emily Gunter also headed back to St. John’s with a shopping bag in hand. At first unsure of my facial recognition capability and how to correctly greet someone on the street, I didn’t say hello until we both reached a stoplight and noticed each other properly. We walked back through Prati together and talked about what we’d been doing in the morning. Neither of us had gone to the military parade, but as we walked, the planes roared overheard, and we got a glimpse of the tricolored smoke behind the buildings above us. Once we reached the block St. John’s was on, I peeled off to get coffee from the café on the corner. The morning barista seemed to smile at me a little larger than before this time, and I found myself disappointed that I only had a few more days here.

(Palazzo Altemps, 6/2/2019.)

I still felt like didn’t know Tom Cane particularly well, so our going to Santa Maria in Trastevere together was mostly born out of sheer practicality: he was behind on his solo excursions, and for my part, it was just a little comforting to be in the presence of the most physically imposing man in the seminar instead of alone.

            We took the 280 bus, which I realized on the way was probably the bus we all took on the very first day here. We rounded the corner onto the Via della Conciliazone, and I was suddenly flooded with the memory of that first afternoon—through my jetlag, I thought I recognized Castel Sant’Angelo, and then just seconds later I found myself looking straight up the street at the towering dome of St. Peter’s. That moment, almost exactly two weeks ago, was the moment that I fully processed that I was in Rome, that I was finally in the city that we’d been building up to all semester. Aside from those fond memories, I spent the bus ride reading about our destination.

            After getting off the bus at Piazza Trilussa (busy but navigable), I had to follow the map on my phone to lead me in the direction of the church. Eventually I recognized a little largo as the one we had stood in while waiting to be seated at Tonarello’s on the second night, and from there it was a short walk to the piazza in front of the basilica. I stopped outside briefly to tell Tom what I remembered about the pediment mosaic—something about the twelve virgins waiting for the return of Christ—and then we entered.

            As I’d expected, there was a Mass going on while we got there, and a surprisingly full one. The aisles were roped off, so I could not go and see the art in the side chapels, but I had a good view of the gorgeous gold mosaics in the apse. I could see, too, that the columns are all different colors and styles, as they have been in so many Roman basilicas—a few were even identifiable as pinkish-grey Aswan granite. After a few moments where we both milled around awkwardly while other groups of tourists steadily flowed in and out, I picked out one of the benches before the front doors and sit down to write.

            I had hoped to hear the choir, and have the same transcendental experience that I’d had in St. Peter’s with that morning Mass, but they are mostly silent, to my slight disappointment. There was at least one moment where I heard everyone start to speak in unison while I was looking up at the beautifully coffered and painted ceiling, to impressive effect. The service was all in Italian or ecclesiastical Latin, so almost wholly incomprehensible to me on several levels. (I kept thinking about the conversation a few weeks ago with my partner when they, not incorrectly, pointed out to me that I had “no understanding of religion that’s not academic.”) I still made an attempt to follow what was going on, but the only recognizable ritual moment was when everyone stood and filed up to the altar for the sacraments.

            Most of the nave was lit with electric lights, which was a feature that I didn’t notice until the lighting changed. As the Mass was ending, the sun must have come out from behind a cloud, and I looked up to see the windows in the apse turning a brilliant gold, and the mosaics were shining. It transformed the look of the interior of the basilica completely and sent chills down my spine. Even as I appreciated the beauty of the place, I felt particularly alien there. The benefit of being a tourist, even a studious one, is that any of the unwritten social rules I happen to break are excusable and can be blamed on my being American and non-Christian, just one of many people coming in to gape at the space. It still depressed me a little bit to be in yet another awe-inspiring building but to only sit at the edge of the community it shelters—but that feeling could have just been my hunger and tiredness catching up to me.

            After the sacraments, the priest took the last sip from the big silver goblet of communion wine, and then cleaned both the cup and plate with a white cloth in a practicedly serious way. Someone had unobtrusively removed the ropes closing off the aisles, and as the congregation left, the small crowd of tourists began to extend tendrils of people up into the rest of the basilica. Excited to get a closer look at the mosaics in the apse, I joined them, and Tom and I spent a few more minutes quietly perusing the side chapels. One of these had a mysterious coat of arms that we were both entertained by: a pair of eyes isolated on a black field. Tom wanted to go into the church gift shop, so I accompanied him. It was a small room, formerly a side chapel, now full of glass shelves containing fascinatingly kitschy statues of various saints and religious figures.

            The basilica comprehensively explored, we left, and made our way across the Tiber back to the bus stop, serenaded by funk cover bands on the Ponte Sisto.

I had been hoping to go to a contemporary art museum in Boston the week before I left for Rome, but since that had fallen through, I’d jumped at the chance to have a reason to visit one in Rome. Unfortunately, due to a combination of exhaustion and poor timing, it took me a few attempts before I finally started out on an excursion to the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna.

After we returned from the Forum, Shelby and I took the metro one stop down to the Flaminio station; by Saturday, we had enough confidence in the relative reliability of the Metro to use it as our primary means of transportation. Our confidence may have been misplaced, however, since navigating out of the crowds in the station and around Piazza de Popolo to get to the park seemed to take almost as long as the metro ride itself. It still was (mostly) a pleasant trek up the Pincian Hill.  We were flanked by an unending line of parked tour buses on one side and the trees of the park on the other. The hill’s peak, when we reached it, was marked by a beautiful mossy fountain and a roundabout surveyed by the statues of poets.

On the other side of the hill, the approach to the museum was a surprise. I expected that we were coming to it from the rear, but upon cresting the hill, we looked down onto the ornate white façade of a massive Neoclassical building across the street. A broad flight of marble steps led up to the doorways, across which a scattered collection of apparently naturalistic dark lions prowled amid the huge words “TIME IS OUT OF JOINT” written onto the stairs.

We both took a moment to be amazed by the architecture and by the installation that spilled out of the museum. Up close, the lions were bronze, with a patina that was so dark it was almost black. Despite their lifelike poses, they had a lovely rawness of texture that made the work of the artist’s hand visible. I was thrilled by the displays already (its scale, its intertextuality, its interactivity), and we hadn’t even entered the building. I was no less excited by the design choices inside—everything about the soaring, brightly lit interiors was captivating. Every sign and desk inside the atrium was untreated wood with hand-painted text, in sharp contrast to the pristinely elaborate interior. Our St. John’s ID cards got us tickets for two euros each, which put us in an even better mood about the trip.

The installation outside, as well as the combination of modern and classical design elements inside, was just a foretaste of the exhibition I’d read about on the museum’s website beforehand. Time Is Out Of Joint was an ongoing exhibition that juxtaposes art from very different areas throughout the museum. In nearly every gallery, there was at least one piece that was more contemporary—abstract or conceptual pieces that complemented the older works on display. The main gallery, a huge room directly after the entryway and the first place we went in, amazed us with these juxtapositions. Some nineteenth-century cityscapes were displayed next to photographs of New York City from 2017, and I spent several minutes standing between two traditionally Neoclassical statues of nude women watching a video piece that played from a screen lying on the floor.

Once I got out of the main gallery and started exploring the side wings, I realized immediately that the museum was arranged not chronologically or by movement, but by aesthetic themes. The first room I entered had two huge Romantic paintings of scenes of eroticized violence from classical mythology on facing walls: the first a beautiful Gorgon standing over the corpses of three nude men, and a tangle of naked bodies and animal sacrifices around an oversized Artemis of Ephesus on the other wall. Also in this gallery was a sculpture of a crucified woman, a winged Psyche, and a set of Hans Bellmer’s photographs from the La Poupée series, depicting a misarticulated doll with its limbs in all the wrong places. There was no wall text explaining the connections, but the combination of imagery snapped the concept of distorted/suffering/fragmented beautiful figures into my head almost wordlessly. Almost every room seemed to have its theme; the immediately successive gallery contained sketches next to big diagrammatic sculpture, and several others exhibited landscapes with varying degrees of abstraction. I’d never seen this sort of curation done so effectively, and I loved almost everything about it. 

Shelby took more time to take notes in her notebook, so I ended up moving faster through the various galleries. I left her watching another video piece, and came around to one of the big galleries in a side wing and found a collection that left me breathless. The centerpiece was Hercules and Lica, a huge Neoclassical sculpture masterfully combining fine detail and dynamic action, but it was surrounded by incredible minimalist pieces. Behind the statue was a massive canvas, taking up the whole wall, which looked like abstract achromatic texture from a distance, but on closer inspection proved to be made entirely of thorns. On the floor in the center of the gallery, right in front of Hercules and Lica, was an arrangement of large blue tiles that may have held water, but with the guard sitting in the doorway I couldn’t make any efforts to find out. I had to go and fetch Shelby immediately so she could have the same experience of just turning into a doorway and getting the impact of the whole room all at once. This gallery contained a Cy Twombly as well (Second Voyage To Italy, fittingly), and I spent at least five minutes just standing in front of it trying to absorb the marks, trying to understand what he’d done with the paint—where he’d brushed it, where it had dripped, where he’d just smeared it with his fingers. After that, I had to stare at a piece made out of several panels of canvas in neutral colors trying to figure out why I didn’t like it anywhere near as much as everything else in the gallery. The best reason I could ultimately come up with was that it looked like a set of paint swatches you’d find in Home Depot, and didn’t have anywhere near the same aesthetic impact as the glowing Dan Flavin sculpture right next to it.

We had a little over an hour there, and so had agreed to only take twenty minutes per wing, but it was very hard for me to keep to that limit. For pieces that I was particularly drawn to, I would take the time to stare at them and try and figure out how the artist had created them, such as with the Twombly painting, or a gorgeous Warhol in the next wing we went to. This way of looking at art helps me think about my own work, but tends to slow me down, and the exhibition on the second floor of the museum seemed specifically designed to entrap me. It was a collection of both intaglio prints and the copper plates that had been used to make them. When I realized what I was seeing and saw how many plates the museum had, I was so overcome by excitement that I put my hands to my face and whispered “Wow!” The other person in the gallery gave me a look, but I was too excited to care.

After spending this past semester learning about printmaking and getting more and more enthusiastic about the process, being able to so clearly see the objects that the artists had used to make their images was exhilarating. There was work by artists who I didn’t even know made prints, such as some large and incredibly rich Francis Bacon pieces and a few atmospheric plates by Henri Moore. Hardly able to contain myself, I was worried that I was dragging a barely interested Shelby against her will through this last set of rooms. She reassured me that it was interesting to her, too, and informative (certainly more so than the rest of the museum, which was very stingy with wall text). One gallery had multi-colored prints with the several plates each that had been used to make them, and I heard her say “Ohhh!” when she had a crucial realization about the process: each color in the final print is printed from a different plate. I saw things that I learned from, too; one of the upstairs rooms contained prints that had almost no ink and just embossed texture, with one example of a plate with small perforations where the acid had bitten all the way through. For all the experimenting I’d done with open biting last semester, I didn’t realize until seeing that that you could print from a plate that had actual holes through it. The way the exhibition demystified the printmaking process for every viewer was by far my favorite part of the museum.

Sadly, we had to leave after only getting through about half of the museum in order to get to dinner on time, and so after a cursory glance through the gift shop, we headed out to the nearest bus stop. A few days ago, I’d thought to download an app I’d seen Professor Curley use to check bus schedules, Citymapper. This would turn out to be a stroke of genius on my part—the fastest and most direct bus to the Campus Martius area was a completely unfamiliar line, and without it clearly mapping out every part of the directions from the museum to the restaurant I’m sure we would have been lost many times over. To make matters more stressful, we missed the bus by one minute, and the twenty minutes we waited for the next one completely eradicated any cushion we could’ve used to find the restaurant. As it was, the app told me that we would get there right at 6:45, to my extreme anxiety. I was wary at first about using Citymapper for fear of draining my battery and cellular data, but it had an overlay of the bus route with our location, so I kept my phone out the entire trip, regardless of the costs.

We were dropped off at the Via del Corso, right next to the Column of Marcus Aurelius and the shopping mall I remembered from my site presentation. It was a familiar part of the city, familiar enough to wander through comfortably in other contexts, but not familiar enough to easily determine the fastest route without a map. I directed Shelby to the best of my ability, increasingly anxious as Prof. Curley reminded us to hurry up over Whatsapp. We rushed past the Pantheon and down the tightening streets of the old city, and to our relief came across the rest of class just outside the Campo del Fiori. I was ready to eat dinner and happy about the art I’d seen, but at that point, mostly just grateful that I’d downloaded Citymapper.