my fourth and last day in rome. i celebrated it with a big lunch of poscuitto e melone (ham and melone) and pizaa margharita, all with a glass of wine if you please; and i ended with a ball of vanilla icecream wrapped in a layer of chocolate icecream, covered with a layer of rich chcolate powder.
yesterday, the vatican. the walk to and from was long but happy. the vatican is huge. there is too much to see, and i do wish i had two days to spend at the vatican because it gets slightly redundant to try and fit everything into one day. in any case, i did try. the last time i was here we made the mistake of going with a tour group and we were rushed in and out of the vatican in a mere hour. waste of time and money. this time around i spent good time in the vatican. three walls i was very much looking forward to seeing (again) were Michaelangelos fresco on the celing of the sistine chapel, and the last judgement, also done by him, on the wall behind the alter and the school of athens by Raphael.
the first two are as popular as mtv. even if you do not know what they are called, if you have watched enough tv you have seen or heard of them. but pictures do no justice at all. you have to be there to see the grandness of it all, the vibrancy of the color and the outlines, the individuality of each face and the movement represented in the whole. i always have to take a moment to understand, what it must have vicerally and psychologically been like for the artist to establish such great vision, and scandalous at the time, on the walls of the apostilic palace.
what i like the most about the last judgement is the figure of Christ in the upper middle. in pictures of Christ, you usually see him docile and almost without energy, scrawny and maybe even a little unkempt. but this representation of him is powerful, almost greek god like. he is standing in a dramatic fashion, his right hand lifted in a powerful and demanding way, while his left seems to display calmness and patience. His body is large and strong, hes got the eight pack, the broad muscular shoulders, thick arms and coloumns for legs. his represented stance is that of a prince or king. he seems royal, not humble. im pretty sure if people saw just this image of him, they would not guess it were christ until they notice the signs of stigmata on his feet.
the celing frescos have within it the famous creation of adam, which has been ever so meekly played upon in the more recent (but still retro) E.T. but it is just the livelyness with which the celiling has been painted, it is hard to grasp that this was the creation of one singular man. it is so beautiful and detailed to the last curve of every sinew.
the third the school of athens by Raphael, if you look at it with many eyes, you see many different thing. the first thing i love about it is what massive star power it has! 22 figures of famous people, plato, epicurus, pythogaras, hypatia, alexander the great, aristotle, archemides, zoraster and ptolemy to name a few. the central figures are supposed to be plato and aristotle, they both walk together. platos hand gestures above, while aristotles gestures to the earth. this in itsself has interpretations and meanings galore, what i found inspiring was aristotles hand, and the way it provided me with this dramatic impression of true dimensional space him, the rest of the painting and me.
the day peaked a little after i was standing in line at Old Bridge for 20 minutes in the scorching sun, when i finally got my huge 2 euro coconut-mint-black cherry gelato. i have half a mind to walk an hour to the vatican and stand in line again to get more of that goregous gelato . but my laziness is far greater than my love for most things, even gelato. so i shall spend my last evening with perhaps a panini and a cheap old box of wine.
life is good.
Bologna tomorrow.
the ancient greeks and romans had this tradition; they would eat alot, gazillion courses of elaborate meals. and to stomach all that food, they would eat, then throw up, and then eat again, and throw up again and continue until everything had been reduced to digested food or vomit. it shows two things about these people. one is that they were hedonistic, all too consumed by the aesthetic nature of the senses; one did not eat to survive, one survived to eat, to taste, to savour. the second was that they had gross means to live like that.
but, then again,
is it so wrong if im tempted to live just like that?
life is, after all i think, a million times heightened by only two things, absolute sorrow, and complete and utter contentment.
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