Today is another sunny day and I am finally able to wear my shorts again. We headed down to breakfast to learn that a school group from Holland is in the hotel. What a sense of backlash as we walked into a room with about 30 high school students (and no teachers). Oh well, it was nice to chat with a few of them but honestly they had to restock the food trays a couple of times. I wonder if the hotel had figured on the amount that teenagers can eat?
(Note: The pictures from the Galleries are from the net since we could not take pictures on tour.)
We headed out to find the Borghese Gallery. The Borghese Gallery (Italian: Galleria Borghese) is an art gallery housed in the former Villa Borghese Pinciana, a building that was from the first integral with its gardens, nowadays considered quite separately by tourists as the Villa Borghese gardens. The Galleria Borghese houses a substantial part of the Borghese collection of paintings, sculpture and antiquities, begun by Cardinal Scipione Borghese, the nephew of Pope Paul V (reign 1605–1621). The Villa was built by the architect Flaminio Ponzio, developing sketches by Scipione Borghese himself, who used it as a villa suburbana, a party villa at the edge of Rome.
Scipione Borghese was an early patron of Bernini and an avid collector of works by Caravaggio, who is well represented in the collection by his Boy with a Basket of Fruit, St. Jerome, Sick Bacchus and others. Other paintings of note include Titian's Sacred and Profane Love, Raphael's Entombment of Christ and works by Peter Paul Rubens and Federico Barocci.
Once we located the Gallery in the center of the huge park (and we had a nice chat with a young fellow who was just out for stroll) we headed in. Now this Gallery restricts the number of visitors at any time period to 320. They require pre-booked tickets and advertise that if you do not have a reservation you will not be admitted. We have the Roma Tickets so will get in for free, but we were concerned that we did know about the reservation requirements but decided to go and see when we could visit. Each ticket assigns a 2 hour time slot and so we arrived at 9:15 and the first tickets were from 9-11. We were lucky, they had 2 vacancies so we got tickets (and reservations) immediately. The bad part is that we were not able to take any pictures inside.
The entire villa has been converted to two floors of galleries of incredible sculptures, paintings, carvings, time furniture and other artistic displays. For almost two hours we just walked and gawked. I will not even try to describe what all we saw since it would give justice. We left and walked around the park called the Villa Borghese Gardens.
Villa Borghese Gardens is a large landscape garden in the naturalistic English manner in Rome, containing a number of buildings, museums (see Galleria Borghese) and attractions. It is the second largest public park in Rome (80 hectares or 148 acres) after that of the Villa Doria Pamphili. The gardens were developed for the Villa Borghese Pinciana ("Borghese villa on the Pincian Hill"), built by the architect Flaminio Ponzio, developing sketches by Scipione Borghese, who used it as a villa suburbana, a party villa, at the edge of Rome, and to house his art collection. The gardens as they are now were remade in the early nineteenth century. In the garden is a man-made lake, gardens and monuments and we wandered through on our way to the National Gallery.
The Modern National Gallery houses the most important Italian collection of paintings and sculptures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Works by artists belonging to most of the contemporary art movements are represented as well as neo-classicism, romanticism and Tuscan Macchiaoli impressionism. The gallery's exhibits include works by Goya, Géricault, Delacroix, Blake, Renoir, Rossetti, Courbet, Van Gogh, Degas, Monet, Cezanne, Modigliani, Mondrian, Duchamp, de Chirico, Cara, Miró, Kandinsky and Klimt.
I really enjoyed the late 19th C. paintings and early 20th C. The later 20 c. started to get very abstract for my taste, but everyone had preferences. We again were not allowed to take any pictures but would recommend that any art lovers would find many exhibits to enjoy and spend time.
By the time we finished here it was about 2 pm (we started at 8:30 again) and our feet are really starting to feel the ‘pressure’ of 3 days of walking around mostly on concrete. We feel that even though this is our last day in Rome, we needed to cut today a bit short and head back to the hotel and have a early lunch (3 pm) and take a rest.
After our rest we got up and decided to research and organize the train tickets for our move to Florence (Firenze) tomorrow. Then it was time to get some fresh air and walk around so we ended up at the Republicia Fountain. (This picture is not mine sorry, I did not bring my camera.)
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