My last night in Roma

My last night in Roma was rather magical. Kikka and I spent the early part of the evening looking at her portfolio which is really, really good. Next, we did the Fendi shoe still life photo shoot. We then made arrangements to meet Barbara, Luca, and their new son, Mattia at Kikka's favorite gelato shop near her school by the Via Cavour.

Kikka drove and approached Via Cavour by way of the Via di San Gregorio. Now I had never been down this street before, but at the end of it was the Arch of Constantine, all lit up in the night sky. It was such a sight that it crossed my mind that the Rome Center should arrange for a night tour of Rome's axes. Of course, that costs money, but a person can dream. As a side note, my night tour would include the perspectival trompe l'oeil of St. Peter's dome and this view of the Arch. The approach she took to reach the Colosseum, maybe it was the Via Celio Vibenna (I'm looking at a map of Roma as I type) made the Colosseum seem so much larger to me than it had ever seemed before. When she parked we had the view above. This is a horrible picture, but the amazing thing is that the moon was shining through one of the openings in the Colosseum. Look at how much brighter the moon is compared with the artificial lights!

Next, we went to the ice cream shop. We hadn't had dinner beforehand. I chose a cone filled with pink grapefruit and lemon with basil gelati. Oh, that combination was sooooooo goooooood. We walked around for a while until Barbara, et. al., appeared. They got some gelato, too, and I got my second serving, this time in a cup! I could have eaten a bucket of both flavors. I should reiterate that during my entire stay in Roma that it was hot as Hades, so the cold gelato was a most welcome refreshment.

Barbara and Luca are quite thrilled with their new addition. Early on Mattia had colic, but that has now subsided and he was sleeping peacefully in his crib despite the hot temperature and high humidity. Barbara and he had just returned from the sea. I now understand why everyone leaves Roma during August for the seashore. Even if the temperature is warm, at least there is a breeze that blows onto the shore.

After our little visit with Barbara and her family (which includes their adorable dog, Balu), we met Riccardo and some friends, one of whom had graduated that day. Earlier in the day I had seen a young woman graduate who must have just come from graduation because she was wearing a laurel wreath on her head and was carrying a bouquet of flowers. None of this cap and gown stuff for the laureates of Roma Tre or La Sapienza. Afterwards, we headed home. It was still hot at 12:30 am.

So that was my last night in Roma. Kikka and her family had made it such a special week for me, and I was very happy to have touched base with our other friends in Roma, too. We missed seeing Emilio and Carolina and their two children, as well as Samia, Michele, and Kwame. I guess the only remedy is to visit Roma again, but next time hopefully it will include my best friend, Bill, and preferably not when it is nearly 100 degrees Farenheit in the city!

Ikea

Rachel gave me an Ikea catalog that she had found in her apartment in 2005. Not having a clue as to the metric dimensions of things like sofas, chairs, and tables, it proved to be a most treasured resource that fall as I had to put FF&E (fixtures, furniture, and equipment) into my plans. Now I have never in my life been to an Ikea store. We don't have them in NW Arkansas. So it was a thrill to visit one with Alessandra after we had seen the MAXXI.

While in the U.S. we pronounce the store eye-key-ya, in Italy they say ee-kay-ya. There is no telling how I will end up saying it.

By the way, if you have never been to an Ikea, it's a little like Sam's Club meets Home Depot meets Bed, Bath, & Beyond meets Kroger's meets a furniture store.

A gazillion cornetti

So, here's the word gazillion again. Sometimes I wish my blog could come with scents. This bakery is directly across the street from the Comellini's favorite restaurant. Cornetti are basically croissants with a sweet glaze on top. They are great with capuccino in the morning.



The doors to the bakery are open and I can see all of these wonderful pastries. One ends up as my breakfast the next morning.

Here is my still life in orange.



Yummmm......

Changes to come at King's Cross

As I headed back to Central London to meet Bill at the British Library, I passed King's Cross train station. I was very happy to see that it is under renovation just like its neighbor St. Pancras. Below is a view from the east side of St. Pancras looking over to King's Cross. Beyond the new construction is the old station.



When you enter King's Cross you pass under an ugly green sheet metal marquee that obscures the two main arched windows that suggest the train shed beyond. Once inside, the glass windows of the train shed are horribly dingy and hide most of the sunlight.

Below is the new concourse that will be added to the St. Pancras side of the station, the structure of which is visible in the picture above.



When all is completed you will be able to see the lovely windows of the front of the station again.



St. Pancras is located in the bottom left of both of these pictures.



And look, the plaza will open up once again!



Once the soot is cleaned away, I'm not sure this will be an ideal station from which to depart for Hogwarts!

Hashimoto: Silence Still Governs Our Consciousness

I really enjoyed this room at the MACRO, and I almost missed it, too. Perhaps you could tell from the pictures in the preceding blog that the museum space is split in two by the courtyard in the center. Unlike the MAXXI, the spaces don't flow from one room to the next; it's more like being in a house. You enter the room and then you must turn around to exit it by the same door. So that's how I almost missed this room. Fortunately, I stopped in the bookstore to look at the books. I really wanted one on Moretti, but there was none. Instead I found the Guide to Modern Rome from 1870 to today. Actually, I had picked up the Italian version on top and made the wrong assumption that all of the copies beneath would be Italian, as well. My default settings as a uni-lingual American surfaced. So here I am, blissfully thinking that all of the books would be in Italian, combing through the stack for the book that had the nicest looking binding. Not only am I grossly American, I'm pretty anal, too. I didn't know until the next day on the train that I had selected an English version. Well, that's OK. At least I didn't choose a German one!

Beyond the bookstore was this room. I just love the exhibit. It is so happy, and a welcome relief from the S&M pictures, too.



So I bring you lots and lots of pictures from this room.



I will not bore you with the text that accompanied the visual art. Briefly stated, we're back at our artificial vs. natural. That seems to be a pretty constant theme.

OK, so here I'm beginning to get artsy myself. Instead of a head-on view, I've aligned my camera with a side shot. It reminds me of rain.

In the picture below I am looking up. There must be a gazillion threads. (I like the word gazillion, don't you?)

So next time you're in Roma, check out the MAXXI and the MACRO. It's a good way to spend a summer's day. Did I mention both have air conditioning? That's a plus.

Not the MAXXI but the MACRO

I asked Kikka the evening I had seen the MAXXI with her mother if she had any other recommendations along the lines of something modern to see while in Roma. Kikka suggested the MACRO or the Museo d'Arte Contemporanea di Roma. (I'm getting pretty good at changing the colors of my letters, huh?)

Kikka researched not only the bus to take, but the stop to exit the bus, as well. I was there in no time. Like the MAXXI, the MACRO blends old and new in its architecture, and its architect, Odile Decq, is a woman. Below is a picture facing the main entrance of the "glass pagoda." While the street signs appear to be part of the exhibit, I'm not sure about the presence of the small truck.

Here is another view of the pagoda from the bridge that spans the two buildings. This is looking towards the back of the museum.

Part of the museum was closed off; it was located in the basement. Here I am standing in the courtyard on reinforced glass taking a picture of the exhibit space below grade. In the photo you not only see a reflection of my hands holding the camera but also a shadow of me taking the picture.

This museum has a library that was in use when I visited. Not sure if I was allowed to take pictures, I snapped these pictures of subway wall designs. (Yes, if there is anything ever remotely related to trains in any form, I'm going to take a picture.)

Take a look at the first picture below before you scroll to the second one. What do you see?

Now look at what it is!

The next image is of an entire room. Modern art is experiential. At times, loud noises or music accompanied the visual presentations.

The next exhibit involved plankton and salt. A little odd, yes, especially the plankton. I've noticed that modern art is often accompanied by rather lengthy texts that explain the artists' intentions. Call me old fashioned, but it seems to me that visual artists should not appropriate text to explain their art. Let's leave words to writers or at least to art critics. I don't recall the Mona Lisa needing anything more than the name of the artist, year and place of the work, and the medium used.

Here are the salt crystals. I guess the guard was concerned that I was in this room for so long. Didn't he know that I had to set up my own artsy photograph?

There were some sado-masochistic photos I didn't care for. They were really quite gross. However, there was one splendid, happy exhibit which you will see in my next blog.

The MAXXI, Girls' Day Out, or Day & Night

This blog really has three titles, the MAXXI, Girls' Day Out, and Day & Night. Let me explain. The name of the museum you are about to see is called the MAXXI as in Museo Nationale delle Arte del XXI Secolo or 21st Century National Art Museum. It's called the Girls' Day Out because Alessandra and I were the two girls who had a day out. And finally, this is called Day & Night because this blog consists of my daytime pictures, as well as those night shots taken by Kikka prior to the opening of the museum proper. Alessandra and I were prohibited of taking any pictures of the exhibits, but Kikka, on the other hand, was able to take photos throughout the museum because none of the exhibits had been installed at that point. The architect for the project was Zaha Hadid.




Wherever possible, I've tried to juxtapose one of my pictures with Kikka's.

This skeleton was on exhibit in the outside courtyard. It pretty much looked like any skeleton you might expect to find on Brobdingnag in Gulliver's Travels until you notice the nose is a beak!

Inside the main lobby, the beak idea resurfaces in the painting that hangs along the staircase. I don't get the point. (Yes, the pun is intended.)

Kikka didn't see the red poles on her visit. These are actually light tubes.

I like how the underside of the grand staircase is turned into a light source.

Below is a picture looking up.

Next is a picture that Kikka took. I would have loved to have been on a little tricycle coasting down the ramp!

Another great view of the different layers in the space.

Below is the main entrance.

Directly to the left is the existing building to which the above entry was added. In one exhibit room there happened to be an exhibit called "Artificial and Natural." When I looked out a sliver of a window, the wall to the left had no cornice, while the opposite wall had the traditional Roman cornice you see below. I thought it might have been the intention of the curator to place that particular exhibit in that space, thinking that the traditional cornice represented the artificial and that the plain wall represented the natural. Obviously, I was over-reading both the exhibit and the space. Turns out that I didn't become aware that some of the museum was housed in an older building until I had left the Museum!

Below is a picture of the campanile that belongs to the church where Kikka, her sister, and her father were baptized!

I think that is Riccardo walking below.

Kikka, her mom, and I liked the handrails in the following picture.

Alessandra and I saw an interesting exhibit near here (picture below). There were plywood boxes about the size of old hi-fi speakers that lined the hallway on the far left. On top of each speaker was a cut-out of one of the provinces of Italy. From each box came music from that particular region. The result was a cacaphony.

One of our favorite exhibits consisted of a room where dozens of large, textured leather hides were hung. The floor, white marble, was routed to simulate the texture of the leather. It doesn't sound very pretty, but when we saw the room for the first time we both said, "oh."

I also really liked the Moretti exhibit. Among other things, he designed the Watergate (where my mother and I had lunch the week following the break-in) and the G.I.L. It was a really well done exhibit of his sketches, models, and photos of his completed buildings. Along one wall was a time line that included major architectural works by other architects. I know very little Spanish, but what I do know of it is that their "ll" is considered a letter in the alphabet. So it was a little funny to me that when the designer of the time line cited the work of Frank Lloyd Wright his name was listed as "F. Ll. Wright" and not "F. L. Wright," causing me to wonder if that person was also fluent in Spanish. Behind the Moretti room was another devoted to Hadid's construction drawings. The collection of CDs must have been 3 to 4 inches thick!

I love this view of a sliver of sky.

About the arched windows.... While I don't mind the window above too much, in the main lobby there is a large arched window with similar-sized suggessions of windows etched into the wall. The arched windows may have paid homage to the original wall and seeing how Hadid's integration of the old space into the new was so seamless (in fact, so seamless that I was totally oblivious to it until I left the museum), the existence of these arched windows seem a bit more plausible now than when I first entered the lobby. That said, I did find the arched windows out of place and simply a little "flat" compared with the other elements in the lobby.

My favorite photograph of the museum, however, is the one below where Alessandra is taking a picture. This photo tells you a lot about my friend. First, she has an artistic eye, but more important, she always looks beyond herself toward others. Incidentally, I don't speak much Italian and Alessandra doesn't speak much English. Nevertheless, we seemed to convey our reactions to the exhibits to each other (thanks in large part to Alessandra's patience) with very little difficulty. It was so much fun to share this experience with Alessandra on one day and then to share it again with Kikka and her photographs on the next day.

And here we are, like two college girls, on our girls' day out! What a special memory I will always have of this day! Grazie mille, Alessandra!

P.S. I'm not as good as Catherine at taking shots like this! I need more practice!

P.P.S. I'm Googling architects' websites for inspiration on how to do the coffee bar in my Revit Roma project. I started with Hadid's site, and for her opening page she uses the lobby shot looking up at the staircase without the exhibit or tube lighting, so it looks like Kikka's photo of the same.