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rushthatspeaksI went to the Pantheon.
The Pantheon was built by Marcus Agrippa the third year he was consul and says so right there on the facade, M. Agrippa the people's general, the military genius of common birth who was such a stunning success that he is loved by everyone to this very moment. Much of the current building is late Empire, though, including the dome, the dome that should not be possible, that incredible coffer-built gracefulness ascending to the perfectly round hole in the middle. (I'm told that at Easter they drop rose petals through it.) It is a miracle of engineering, produced by the varying of the weight of the concrete so that it is actually lighter at the top than at the bottom. Here lie buried the Kings of Italy, if anybody cares, and the building survives because Christianity did try to put a foot in and it is a church, but again this hasn't really stuck. It is the Pantheon, the shrine to all the gods (including the deified emperors) and the shape of the space produces sheer spiritual awe regardless of the current or past contents. It is the first and the last place to go on a Rome visit, the summation of the City's glory.
Afterward of course I went to Giolitti's, and met Thrud there, fresh from her art history. Giolitti's is attainable by walking as far north from the Pantheon as you can go until you hit an apse and then turning right, when you will see it. The new upstart gelato chain Grom has built an outlet on the corner where you turn right, and an act of more stunning hubris and chutzpah it is difficult for me to imagine, for Giolitti's has since the early years of the last century been serving, without exaggeration or arrogance, the best gelato in the world, which means therefore the best ice cream of any kind. It is true that there are places that do individual flavors better than Giolitti's does, such as Per che non's fruiti di bosco. It is also true that there are flavors Giolitti's does not serve, for they have only sixty flavors. But the aggregate is the best ice cream in the world. You cannot get better. Each flavor is the epitome of whatever thing it is meant to be, but made more interesting by being ice cream. The champagne flavor will get you drunk, and has bubbles that break in your mouth, for somehow they've preserved the carbonation. The caramel is the envy of any candy store. The dark chocolate is at least eighty percent dark and has chunks of chocolate in it for textural variation. The grapefruit, the Marsala, the mandarin orange... but I must reserve a special mention to the visciole, the sour cherry, because there was a sour cherry tree in my yard when I was growing up and Giolitti's visciole gelato is better than the fruit off the tree was and more perfectly flavored of cherry, and sour cherry is my favorite fruit and I seek it out whenever I can find it. This is the best of it. About half the flavors have no dairy, if that's a problem; if you get a medium cone the cone comes dipped in dark chocolate. You can ask them to put whipped cream in the bottom, and you get three flavors per cone, plus another scoop of whipped cream, and it's amazing whipped cream, too, it comes from the country and I think it's unpasteurized.
Giolitti's also has a very large pastry counter, which everyone ignores although it looks fine, and a cafe room decorated in the perfect style of the Mauve Decade. You can't sit in the cafe if you are only having gelato, which means there is always a mob of people hovering around the nearby doorways and curbs and perching uncomfortably on traffic barriers while eating ice cream, and the cafe is basically empty. I have never eaten there, though I do want to try it, because that is where they will bring you parfaits and sundaes and ice cream with toppings, hot chocolate and monts blanc. You can get a thing that is one scoop of every flavor that they make; a good idea for a person turning sixty. It is, however, a damn sight more expensive, and for a medium cone of gelato (remember, three flavors, dipped cone, whipped cream) it is only three-fifty. If you don't go to Giolitti's at least once a day while in Rome you are Doing It Wrong. Once is the minimum. Thrud does this thing where she will find tourists and take them around parts of Rome, and then end the tour at Giolitti's, and they will buy her a gelato as a slight token of their esteem, so sometimes she'll go there four times in a day, which is entirely sensible.
In fact, Thrud wound up doing the find-a-tourist thing this time, because we decided that after Giolitti's we might as well have a sit-down dinner, so we went to Cul de Sac off the Piazza Navona. Cul de Sac is a tiny, noisy, crowded, unthinkably narrow restaurant which started out as a wineshop and consequently has a wine list the size of a phone book; they keep it all down in the catacombs in the basement (most of Rome has catacombs in the basement). They do a nice line in things that go with wine, pates and cheeses and salumi (cold cuts), light pastas. We had venison pate with black pepper, which was the best pate I've ever had, and a burrata, like mozzarella but looser, made that morning. Also raviolini alla Siciliana, which is ravioli filled with house ricotta in a very light sauce of orange peel, lemon peel, and pistachio; and, separately, we had some ferociously spicy salami. We sat outside, because inside barely has oxygen and the street hustlers are only a little annoying, and because the tables are tiny and shoved together, Thrud made friends with the man sitting next to us, a TV host and science writer I shall call M. M, being of a very science-focused background, has in middle life realized that he is also very interested in history although he knows little about it, and wants to know the stories of everything in the entire City. This is a good thing to come to Thrud about. She is able, for instance, to point out the exact place on the tram tracks next to Largo Argentina where Julius Caesar was stabbed. (The difference between Rome and Athens is that, in Athens, there is a tiny plaque among the tram tracks on the place where Socrates gave his final speech, whereas in Rome there is not, because if you don't know it's your own fault.) Thrud also remembers dates-- if she were writing this she'd have said 'Marcus Agrippa built the Pantheon in the year he was consul for the third time, which was x according to our calendar', and that is not what I do-- I remember sequences, not dates, because I don't care very much about exact date except under very specific circumstances. And she enjoys teaching and talking to strangers. This is an introvert/extrovert thing, I think, because I come home nights and write it up, instead, which she only does occasionally.
So we took M around, to the Pantheon to point out all the little things, the mismatched columns and the stories of where they were stolen from, discussion of what statues would have been in the front niches and what might have been the subject of the centuries-lost frieze. And arranged to meet the next morning in front of St. Peter's, so Thrud could tell him about it.
Which we did and she did. St. Peter's is not one of my favorite churches, though I do like it. It's so over-the-top that it leaves out any concept of top. It's the insignia of papal princeliness and you walk into the door directly over the porphyry slab on which Charlemagne was crowned Holy Roman Emperor. (Of course it isn't labeled. This is Rome.) I do think the gold markings down the center which give the lengths of other famous churches so that you can visually see how much larger St. Peter's is are a bit déclassé. But seriously, this is a church in which there are barely any paintings because mosaics are so much more expensive, so they did everything in mosaic. It's really good mosaic. They went and finished and copied the painting Raphael was working on when he died in mosaic, that will tell you. All concepts of taste fade before the sheer naked hubris. I can't not like it, it's too damn large. And full of Popes, of course, and full of relics, they have the Lance of Longinus and St. Andrew's Cross and infinite minor saints-- you have to be a saint or at least beatified to be in the main church in the first place, and the popes who aren't saints or beatified yet have to wait in hopeful little tombs in the basement. Also full of Bernini, and frightening giant cherubs taller than a person, and more gold and yet more of it. You can go down into the crypt, which we did, although you need to book six months in advance to take the tour where you see St. Peter, in his special reliquary designed by NASA to withstand even a direct nuclear strike. The crypt has Roman ruins and ruins from the original basilica by Constantine and many of the popes nobody likes, such as Boniface VIII, who has a tactful modern note explaining that he is mentioned by Dante without going into detail about the way Dante spent giant chunks of the Inferno ranting about how he was the Antichrist. Boniface is buried with his nephew the Cardinal, the nephew labeled in Latin, nepos, the man who gave us the word nepotism. (We don't know whether nephew means illegitimate son, as it did so often in the medieval papacy.)
If you want to get down into the crypts the stairway is under St. Andrew's Cross and is pretty well hidden. We had to ask five separate ushers and got a lot of conflicting answers; for one thing different stairways are open on different days. But check the main altar and the four side niches with the most impressive relics and it should be one of those.
Oh and we saw the Pietà by Michelangelo, the one that is the one you're thinking of. I do like the Pietà, always have. It handily solves the proportions problems offered by a woman having to cradle in her arms a full-grown man, and Mary's cloak and hood and posture obscure the usual Michelangelo issue where his women look like men because he never used female models. It is one of my favorite Michelangelos.
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The Pantheon was built by Marcus Agrippa the third year he was consul and says so right there on the facade, M. Agrippa the people's general, the military genius of common birth who was such a stunning success that he is loved by everyone to this very moment. Much of the current building is late Empire, though, including the dome, the dome that should not be possible, that incredible coffer-built gracefulness ascending to the perfectly round hole in the middle. (I'm told that at Easter they drop rose petals through it.) It is a miracle of engineering, produced by the varying of the weight of the concrete so that it is actually lighter at the top than at the bottom. Here lie buried the Kings of Italy, if anybody cares, and the building survives because Christianity did try to put a foot in and it is a church, but again this hasn't really stuck. It is the Pantheon, the shrine to all the gods (including the deified emperors) and the shape of the space produces sheer spiritual awe regardless of the current or past contents. It is the first and the last place to go on a Rome visit, the summation of the City's glory.
Afterward of course I went to Giolitti's, and met Thrud there, fresh from her art history. Giolitti's is attainable by walking as far north from the Pantheon as you can go until you hit an apse and then turning right, when you will see it. The new upstart gelato chain Grom has built an outlet on the corner where you turn right, and an act of more stunning hubris and chutzpah it is difficult for me to imagine, for Giolitti's has since the early years of the last century been serving, without exaggeration or arrogance, the best gelato in the world, which means therefore the best ice cream of any kind. It is true that there are places that do individual flavors better than Giolitti's does, such as Per che non's fruiti di bosco. It is also true that there are flavors Giolitti's does not serve, for they have only sixty flavors. But the aggregate is the best ice cream in the world. You cannot get better. Each flavor is the epitome of whatever thing it is meant to be, but made more interesting by being ice cream. The champagne flavor will get you drunk, and has bubbles that break in your mouth, for somehow they've preserved the carbonation. The caramel is the envy of any candy store. The dark chocolate is at least eighty percent dark and has chunks of chocolate in it for textural variation. The grapefruit, the Marsala, the mandarin orange... but I must reserve a special mention to the visciole, the sour cherry, because there was a sour cherry tree in my yard when I was growing up and Giolitti's visciole gelato is better than the fruit off the tree was and more perfectly flavored of cherry, and sour cherry is my favorite fruit and I seek it out whenever I can find it. This is the best of it. About half the flavors have no dairy, if that's a problem; if you get a medium cone the cone comes dipped in dark chocolate. You can ask them to put whipped cream in the bottom, and you get three flavors per cone, plus another scoop of whipped cream, and it's amazing whipped cream, too, it comes from the country and I think it's unpasteurized.
Giolitti's also has a very large pastry counter, which everyone ignores although it looks fine, and a cafe room decorated in the perfect style of the Mauve Decade. You can't sit in the cafe if you are only having gelato, which means there is always a mob of people hovering around the nearby doorways and curbs and perching uncomfortably on traffic barriers while eating ice cream, and the cafe is basically empty. I have never eaten there, though I do want to try it, because that is where they will bring you parfaits and sundaes and ice cream with toppings, hot chocolate and monts blanc. You can get a thing that is one scoop of every flavor that they make; a good idea for a person turning sixty. It is, however, a damn sight more expensive, and for a medium cone of gelato (remember, three flavors, dipped cone, whipped cream) it is only three-fifty. If you don't go to Giolitti's at least once a day while in Rome you are Doing It Wrong. Once is the minimum. Thrud does this thing where she will find tourists and take them around parts of Rome, and then end the tour at Giolitti's, and they will buy her a gelato as a slight token of their esteem, so sometimes she'll go there four times in a day, which is entirely sensible.
In fact, Thrud wound up doing the find-a-tourist thing this time, because we decided that after Giolitti's we might as well have a sit-down dinner, so we went to Cul de Sac off the Piazza Navona. Cul de Sac is a tiny, noisy, crowded, unthinkably narrow restaurant which started out as a wineshop and consequently has a wine list the size of a phone book; they keep it all down in the catacombs in the basement (most of Rome has catacombs in the basement). They do a nice line in things that go with wine, pates and cheeses and salumi (cold cuts), light pastas. We had venison pate with black pepper, which was the best pate I've ever had, and a burrata, like mozzarella but looser, made that morning. Also raviolini alla Siciliana, which is ravioli filled with house ricotta in a very light sauce of orange peel, lemon peel, and pistachio; and, separately, we had some ferociously spicy salami. We sat outside, because inside barely has oxygen and the street hustlers are only a little annoying, and because the tables are tiny and shoved together, Thrud made friends with the man sitting next to us, a TV host and science writer I shall call M. M, being of a very science-focused background, has in middle life realized that he is also very interested in history although he knows little about it, and wants to know the stories of everything in the entire City. This is a good thing to come to Thrud about. She is able, for instance, to point out the exact place on the tram tracks next to Largo Argentina where Julius Caesar was stabbed. (The difference between Rome and Athens is that, in Athens, there is a tiny plaque among the tram tracks on the place where Socrates gave his final speech, whereas in Rome there is not, because if you don't know it's your own fault.) Thrud also remembers dates-- if she were writing this she'd have said 'Marcus Agrippa built the Pantheon in the year he was consul for the third time, which was x according to our calendar', and that is not what I do-- I remember sequences, not dates, because I don't care very much about exact date except under very specific circumstances. And she enjoys teaching and talking to strangers. This is an introvert/extrovert thing, I think, because I come home nights and write it up, instead, which she only does occasionally.
So we took M around, to the Pantheon to point out all the little things, the mismatched columns and the stories of where they were stolen from, discussion of what statues would have been in the front niches and what might have been the subject of the centuries-lost frieze. And arranged to meet the next morning in front of St. Peter's, so Thrud could tell him about it.
Which we did and she did. St. Peter's is not one of my favorite churches, though I do like it. It's so over-the-top that it leaves out any concept of top. It's the insignia of papal princeliness and you walk into the door directly over the porphyry slab on which Charlemagne was crowned Holy Roman Emperor. (Of course it isn't labeled. This is Rome.) I do think the gold markings down the center which give the lengths of other famous churches so that you can visually see how much larger St. Peter's is are a bit déclassé. But seriously, this is a church in which there are barely any paintings because mosaics are so much more expensive, so they did everything in mosaic. It's really good mosaic. They went and finished and copied the painting Raphael was working on when he died in mosaic, that will tell you. All concepts of taste fade before the sheer naked hubris. I can't not like it, it's too damn large. And full of Popes, of course, and full of relics, they have the Lance of Longinus and St. Andrew's Cross and infinite minor saints-- you have to be a saint or at least beatified to be in the main church in the first place, and the popes who aren't saints or beatified yet have to wait in hopeful little tombs in the basement. Also full of Bernini, and frightening giant cherubs taller than a person, and more gold and yet more of it. You can go down into the crypt, which we did, although you need to book six months in advance to take the tour where you see St. Peter, in his special reliquary designed by NASA to withstand even a direct nuclear strike. The crypt has Roman ruins and ruins from the original basilica by Constantine and many of the popes nobody likes, such as Boniface VIII, who has a tactful modern note explaining that he is mentioned by Dante without going into detail about the way Dante spent giant chunks of the Inferno ranting about how he was the Antichrist. Boniface is buried with his nephew the Cardinal, the nephew labeled in Latin, nepos, the man who gave us the word nepotism. (We don't know whether nephew means illegitimate son, as it did so often in the medieval papacy.)
If you want to get down into the crypts the stairway is under St. Andrew's Cross and is pretty well hidden. We had to ask five separate ushers and got a lot of conflicting answers; for one thing different stairways are open on different days. But check the main altar and the four side niches with the most impressive relics and it should be one of those.
Oh and we saw the Pietà by Michelangelo, the one that is the one you're thinking of. I do like the Pietà, always have. It handily solves the proportions problems offered by a woman having to cradle in her arms a full-grown man, and Mary's cloak and hood and posture obscure the usual Michelangelo issue where his women look like men because he never used female models. It is one of my favorite Michelangelos.
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