A brush with Caravaggio's Rome

Sublime city: Ponte Sant’Angelo with St Peter’s Basilica in the background

10 April 2012

A large crowd had gathered outside the Scuderie del Quirinale in Rome (the former papal stables, once used as a garage until the Eighties, now turned into a musuem). People were pushing and there was an air of expectation.

We were here for the opening of a Caravaggio exhibition marking the 400th anniversary of the artist's death in 1610. Even before the opening, 60,000 ticket reservations had been made.
The exhibition features just 24 major works by the artist gathered from museums all over the world including the Borghese in Rome, the Uffizi in Florence, the Metropolitan in New York and the Hermitage in St Petersburg.

Michelangelo Merisi, also known as Caravaggio, who died aged 39, spent 14 years in Rome and reached the height of his career here before fleeing in 1606 after killing a man.

His works, on subjects ranging from gambling to biblical pisodes, illustrating his own turbulent life, can be found all across the city — 15 of his paintings can be seen in Roman churches.
Caravaggio painted many works for the church here — The Deposition is normally kept in the Pinacoteca at the Vatican Museum and other paintings can be found in the Borghese Gallery, which houses David with the head of Goliath, in which Goliath is clearly a self-portrait.

This simple but well-presented exhibition, much of it in semi-darkness — perhaps to echo the Baroque painting technique of contrasting light and dark, chiaroscuro, that Caravaggio pioneered — captured the attention of of us all,
including our five-year-old, despite distractions such as mobile phones ringing and crying babies.

As we left the exhibition, descending a glassed-in staircase, the view across the city was sublime.

The Scuderie is perched on the highest of Rome's seven hills so you see the mammoth, white marble Victor Emmanuel monument and even St Peter's in the distance.

Strict building restrictions preserve the look so you don't get a beautiful dome shoehorned in with a high-rise tower block, for example. We picked out highlights to visit during our stay and made our way back to our hotel.

Rocco Forte's Hotel de Russie, an updated 19th-century palazzo, has a prime site at the end of Via Babuino, a street lined with every conceivable designer store.

Inside, this vast pale pink hotel merges sophisticated modern design by Olga Polizzi and Italian architect Tommaso Ziffer with busts of classic Roman heads and figures.

Rooms are large and light with dark woods, pale walls and fabrics and plenty of black-and-white photos by Robert Mapplethorpe.

The rich and famous from Leonardo DiCaprio (in the city to film Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York) to the Clintons have regularly stayed here.

The gardens, which most of the rooms overlook, are the real find here — elegant statue-strewn terraces rise up the slopes of the Pincio hill backed by long-cultivated palm trees, and there's even a butterfly sanctuary.

The next morning was bright and sunny — perfect for sightseeing.

We stopped, along with the rest of the camera–toting tourists, at the foot of the Spanish Steps on the Piazza di Spagna before turning down Via
Condotti — Rome's answer to Bond Street where MaxMara, Bulgari and of course Dolce & Gabbana all reside — and onto the long stretch of Via del Corso.

We did a double take at a store called Asole e Bottoni and, elsewhere, another named Bastard — avoiding explaining to our daughter why we were sniggering. But the Pantheon beckoned, so we headed to this classic Roman temple converted into a Christian church.

It isn't known exactly how old the Pantheon is but when Michelangelo first saw it in the early 1500s, he proclaimed it to be of "angelic and not human design". You can see why: the central occulus, or eye, in the dome is open to the sky and lets in a shaft of natural light as do the giant bronzed doors. Until the Duomo in Florence was built, this was the largest dome in the world.

We emerged into the crowded Piazza della Rotunda — a piazza being a place where you eat pizza, according to our young daughter. She wasn't wrong, though — trattoria after trattoria vies for attention with ever cheaper deals.

After slices of pizza in a restaurant off the main square we wove our way past the Trevi Fountain, where Anita Ekberg famously frolicked with Marcello Mastroianni in La Dolce Vita, to the Colosseum — still impressive, as a monument to Roman power and cruelty, however many times you see it.

Avoiding offers of photos with burly centurions, we circled it from inside, and having seen the film Gladiator recently we had fighting scenes in mind as we looked down in the pit. Even here we saw the rampant graffiti that marks so much of Rome — despite other restrictions, this underground art form isn't illegal here.

While Rome has so much history in its skyline, one of the real joys is discovering the heart of the city away from the big sights — in neighbourhood parks and trattorias and cobblestone side streets lined with Vespas. This stylish city has a warmth and accessibility all of its own.

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A brush with Caravaggio's Rome

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