TriumphAnt

As this entry was going to press, the sports media were having a field day reporting on the exchange of insults between two of the world’s top women’s tennis players in the run-up to this year’s Wimbledon tournament: Maria Sharapova and Serena Williams. The snarling arose from a convoluted story involving ex-boyfriends, coaches and you-name-it, but it all boiled down to trash talk. And was it ever thus?

In Rome’s Piazza Navona is a remarkable example of pretty much the same thing, with the difference being that the Serena / Maria verbal catfight is probably pretty much already forgotten by the time you read this, but one battle in the war between the sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini and the architect Francesco Borromini is quite literally carved in stone in the Piazza Navona.

One side of the Piazza is marked by a beautiful church, Sant’Agnese in Agone (the Agony of St Agnes), on which the aforementioned Borromini was the lead architect. He and Bernini were frequent rivals for major architectural commissions and Bernini is said to have been somewhat miffed when his rival landed the contract to do the church.

However, Bernini did win the commission to do a magnificent fountain in the Piazza – the Fountain of the Four Rivers – and therein lies the root of the legend. One of the rivers represented in the shape of a man in Bernini’s fountain is the river Nile and Bernini has positioned him looking right at the front of Borromini’s church, but with his arm upraised and protectively shielding his eyes. In effect, according to the story, Bernini is trash-talking his rival with the message, “One day, the front of your church is going to fall right over but my sculpture will be protected and will endure forever.”

Unfortunately, I took a photo of the fountain before I’d heard this story, or I would have grabbed a better shot of Old Man River Nile. But here he is in my shot anyway:

Bernini’s Fountain of the Four Rivers in the Piazza Navona. The representation of the Nile is the figure on the right and you can just make out his left arm raised protectively in front of his face directly across from the façade of the church.

The second photo is someone else’s (From a webpage called mw-panoramio/photos/) and is a much better look at the Nile figure specifically.

In this wonderful church, unfortunately, visitors were barred from taking interior photos, which is too bad because there are some stunning works inside, including a statue of St Agnes somehow going unscathed atop a burning pyre. So if another shameless theft (Uh… “artifact protection”?) might be permitted from someone who obviously wasn’t barred from taking the photo, here is that very statue as it appears on the Wikipedia site.

St Agnes, completely missing the point and the pain of being cast atop a flaming pyre, thanks to a supposed angelic intervention.

(It’s a long story. In a nutshell, Agnes apparently was a stunning young woman with multiple suitors even as a very young girl. At the tender age of 13 she was pledged to the Governor’s son. However, she vowed never to “stain her purity” and refused the marriage, enraging the boy’s father, who accused her of being a Christian and had her condemned to death. She proved harder to kill than the Russian “mad monk” Rasputin, however, because a series of interventions – supposedly by God’s angels – protected her. Eventually, the one that neither she nor a guardian angel could stop was a headsman’s sword and, even then, the stories tell of her smiling “beatifically” as the blade came down.)

Here is a shot I took that shows Borromini’s façade – still a long way from looking like it’s about to fall over onto Bernini’s Fountain. So trash-talk that, Serena and Maria!

As a footnote, serious researchers do not attach much credence to the fountain’s being a statement in the Bernini / Borromini feud, arguing that the timing of the respective works’ completion would have made such a spin on Bernini’s Nile figure impossible. But the story endures and it probably has everything to do with the simple phrase uttered by a journalist at the end of the James Stewart / John Wayne / Lee Marvin movie, “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance”: “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

Speaking of agony, here is Leslie waiting for a pizza at a sidewalk café on a side street linking the Piazza Navona to a second piazza where the Pantheon is located.

She probably looks a little surly. It’s not because of the Carabinieri’s paddy wagon parked right beside our table, although the cigarette smoke wafting over from the heavily armed and armoured tactical policemen standing beside it – just out of sight behind the pillar – was occasionally annoying. However, noting “heavily armed”, we chose not to tell them to butt out. Turns out they were simply standing by in case a demonstration of loudly chanting people with some unknown (to us) cause that developed in front of the nearby Pantheon turned ugly. (It didn’t.)

No, Leslie is looking a little surly because she’s hungry. (So was I, but I’m the one with the camera and it’s pointed the other way.) This is probably a good two hours after we had placed our order and the restaurant so monumentally screwed things up we were convinced for a time we had stumbled into Basil Fawlty’s dining room in the John Cleese British TV series, “Fawlty Towers”, complete with the restaurant’s hilariously inept version of his waiter (“You’ll have to excuse him; he’s from Barcelona”), Manuel. Being Canadian, we did eventually file that most Canadian of poor-service protests… we paid our bill but didn’t leave a tip. (Take THAT, pizza place!)

Incidentally, the pizza – when it finally did arrive – was delicious and the lengthy delay in service allowed us to wait out a pounding cloudburst from the shelter of a comfortably placed table while sipping cold beer and some not-too-bad vino bianco. Never felt a drop.

Another recommendation: Our next stop was actually at the start of our next day in Rome. It’s worth a mention if you have a strong interest in art, and because it’s not a Gallery that gets the same play as a lot of others do in the Italian capital.

There are few major art collections left in the world today that remain entirely in the private hands of a single family but the collection on display in the Palazzo Doria Pamphilj is, and it’s worth a look for a couple reasons.

First, simply because it is in private hands. It is made available to the public – if you believe the family member who narrates the self-guided tour – simply because the family is proud to show it off. And small wonder.

Because the second reason for a visit is the quality of the family collection. Among the works are paintings by Raphael, Titian, Caravaggio and the collection’s “masterpiece”, a painting that is generally considered to be the finest that Diego Velazquez did – a 17thC portrait of Pope Innocent X that is so incredibly realistic (unlike the more stylized and artificially complimentary works that were more common at the time) that there is a legend that the Pope, when he first saw the finished painting, is said to have been greatly taken aback, slamming the result as “Troppo vero!” (“Too true!”)

Not surprisingly, there is no photography allowed in the Gallery but fortunately Wikipedia has an entry all about the painting, which includes an excellent look at it.

It really is an astonishingly lifelike representation, the more so for that contrast to pretty much all the other works in the collection, which although strongly representative of other masters of the period are, well, of the period – when artists were paid to do the 17thC equivalent of photoshopping, shorten overlong noses, and lose the bumps, blemishes and age-related wrinkles, rather than include them. Other periods represented in the collection, including some outstanding mediaeval and Byzantine paintings and sculptures, were added by later family members.

At one point during the self-guided tour, the recorded host, from the present-day English side of the family, points out in a sculpture gallery that the roof over your head calamitously caved in one winter and the sculptures on display are all painstakingly rebuilt from the dozens of pieces of the works when they were broken in the collapse.

That the Velazquez portrait is available for viewing at all today is no doubt due to the fact that the present-day Pamphilj family count among their ancestors – you guessed it – Pope Innocent X.

Up next – a tour so amazing it deserves an entry all on its own – a “Dark Rome” tour, this one, specifically.