Night at the Museo

The other evening, feeling a little culturally deprived (and maybe a bit guilty for all the pastries and deep-fried cheese we've been eating), we decided to top up our museum quotient for the year. Palazzo Altemps is one of our favourites. It's a beautiful little collection of all of the best bits of ancient sculpture in the national collection housed in a white-washed palazzo in the centre of town. It's nice in the daytime but even nicer in the dark.

La stampa

What a day we have had today! Screen-printing Stage 1 (and if you're reading Lorenzo, it wasn't at all messy).
Our brand new screen-printing gear arrived the other day and we've been playing around while we build up the courage to crack out the photo emulsion and acetate. Here are some progress photos and some results of a few designs made using hand-cut stencils.







More to follow, both here and on HelloWilson...

Umbria rocks

This Saturday we went to amazing Orvieto, about an hour away by train, an Umbrian town built on a hill - one hell of a hill! Sheer rocky cliffs surround the whole town and you have to ride a funicular up (always a good start to the day).



The town is famous for its cathedral, which looks like it might blow over in a high wind, but its really an ensemble performance. If you ask us, the wild boar that Umbria is famous for is the real star of the show.


We had to fight our way past this grizzly beast at the gateway... But once we did there was plenty of time for posing:




And for exploring the many crazy underground attractions. The rock on which the town is built has been gradually carved out by the inhabitants from the Etruscans onwards. These caverns and tunnels are put to all manner of uses, but lots contain dovecots, the main source of food when the city was besieged (this one also contains a potter's workshop):


The most spectacular of these underground sites, however, has to be the well of San Patrizio, a 53m deep shaft skirted by two ramps arranged as a double helix so that the donkeys carrying water up didn't have to pass those going down for more.

Roma Moderna

Believe it or not there is architectural life after the grand plans of Augustus, Hadrian, and even Mussolini. When you need a break from columns and mosaics, Rome has some beautiful modern buildings to offer. The most famous and (not the least controversial) of these is the building designed to house the Ara Pacis.



The last time we went to the Ara Pacis there was a brilliant exhibition about design in Italy going on in the exhibition space downstairs. You can't help falling for design like this:




Another potentially very interesting building is the Zaha Hadid-designed brand new MAXXI museum, which, like most building projects in Italy, is running about 3 years behind schedule. MAXXI stands for Museo delle Arti (MA) del XXI secolo (21st century). I can't wait to stand up in the huge window, it looks spectacular.

Crazy paving

Largely thanks to Mussolini, there are quite a few very odd places in Rome (see EUR below). But they don't come much odder than the Foro Italico. This sporting complex in north-western Rome was built between 1928 and 1938 and was intended to act as a symbol of Mussolini's new Rome - i.e. a pastiche of ancient Rome. The central piazza of the complex was a grand elongated square - the forum proper - entirely covered in black and white mosaics celebrating the ideals and achievements of the regime. There are a lot of mosaics in Rome but not many depict planes and tanks:





And just to give the whole ensemble a particularly surreal twist, the Foro Italico was the location for most of the 1960 Olympics. All of these mosaics, therefore, coat the main access route to the Olympic stadium and every weekend are walked over by tens of thousands of Roma and Lazio fans; in fact, the whole complex lies inside the ticket-gates for the stadium.

Just throw the key away...

The Ponte Milvio - almost flooded in these pictures! - the oldest bridge still standing in Rome (built in 206 BC), has seen a few sites in its time: it was well-known in ancient Rome as a haunt for prostitutes and was the site of Constantine's great victory over his rival Maxentius; this is the battle, on the eve of which, Constantine is supposed to have had the vision which caused him to convert to Christianity. Nowadays the bridge is famous for an altogether more romantic ritual. From all over Italy young lovers and newlyweds come to symbolically 'lock' themselves to each other by chaining a padlock daubed with their names onto the bridge and flinging the key into the Tiber.



This is something of a recent tradition, popularised by a novel and then a film, but so large were the number of padlocks chained to the bridge that several street lamps actually collapsed under their weight. The authorities - accused of being 'anti-love' by many - have now introduced a series of chain fences along the bridge for a more controlled brand of celebration.


Here's Ben, pondering whether he can just keep hold of the key and fling the Winston into the Tiber...

New Year in Beirut

Piazza del Popolo, 11.55pm, New Year's Eve: oh my. Every Tom, Dick and Peppe had turned up with a sack full of explosives - not fireworks, bombs - and a crate of prosecco. The former for throwing into the piazza, and occasionally the on-looking crowds, and the latter for, well...throwing into the piazza. We stepped up, threw a bottle, dallied with explosives (more below), celebrated when we thought it was midnight, but mainly we hid. Everyone dealt with the stress in their own way:



These are Dave's photos - the only soul brave enough to carry a camera - and they would have been more spectacular if only all of the explosives being thrown around were actual fireworks, with pretty colours and all. In our local, Chinese-owned assorted crap shop there was a scrum for fireworks, but most of the things being thrown around that night were definitely not over-the-counter purchases.


It has to be said, though, that our own attempts at joining in didn't exactly do our street-cred any favours...