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MY EUROPE DIARY - Rome 

TUESDAY 18 AUGUST

Up latish and off to an all-day stint at

The Colosseum

One big motherfucker.
Anne posed for a photo with a few handy centurions, and also with Roman advert for LOSEC -- didn't know big Julie had reflux...

& the Palatine and the Forum

Lots of unexplained brickwork.

It was like landing on the moon: I couldn't see any connection between then and now.  (AM)

WEDNESDAY 19 AUGUST

Up more or less betimes and off to the Vatican Museum, all sorts lovely Roman ten-ton porphry baths (some with drainholes, some where you presumably had to siphon) and the Laocoon and the Apollo Belvedere and the Sistine Chapel, where Chris thought the Michelangelos looked remarkably poorly designed: all these little different boxes of pictures.  Wheelchair advantage -- remove headrest and lean head on top of back to survey ceilings in comfort, unlike everyone else.

Then round to

St. Peters

One big motherfucker.
Front invisible under scaffolding.  The wheelchair entrance involves going under a side archway past the Swiss Guards, heading up a ramp and emerging into the nave under the skeletal foot of Death in the middle of a pope's tomb by Bernini....

Say this for Bernini, if you gave him a church wall the size of an Imax screen he knew what to do with it.  Unlike Michelangelo.
Anne thinks Bernini is a greater sculptor than Michelangelo, but then the only Michelangelo sculpture she's seen is the Pieta, which is his all-time worst.  Home to squabble till bed.

THURSDAY 20 AUGUST

Bernini day.  Off to Villa Borghese to see Bernini exhibition.

Villa Borghese

Anne humming

"Berninis
In bikinis
Are coming down the stairs....."

Anne is going up in the narrowest lift in the world: her wheelchair will not fit, she has to be transferred to a cane chair for the trip up and in to another wheelchair at the top.

Full of magnificent pieces and utter crap. (AM)

Berninis and Botticellis and Titians and a nice Honhurst of Susanna and the Elders, a subject that comes up a remarkably large number of times for what is after all a clerical environment.  Also putti on every flat surface, or, to put it another way, the kind of thing that got the Christian Brothers into such trouble.

Then  a stroll through Rome missing the St. Theresa (closed for August, as were all the shops) but catching several Bernini pallazos, churches, etc. along the way.  Also Bernini's elephant with a too-long trunk and an obelisk on his back, very Discworld.  And

The Pantheon

One big motherfucker.

And a coffee-granita-and-cream at La Tazza d'Oro, mecca of coffeelovers the world over.

Bernini was a prince among popes -- he was responsible for half Rome.

Poor Bernini -- in his time they didn't have illuminated fountains with coloured water.  (AM)  (Oh yes, they did! CB)

Home, too pooped to pop, to find Clinton has bombed Afghanistan.  NB Check ruins for DNA.

Next: Dublin