Street Art: Naples

Naples is full of graffiti scratched, painted, marked, sprayed, pasted, and stenciled onto any available vertical surface. Most of it is just inane scrawling that disfigures buildings and assaults the senses (although nothing that we saw in Naples was as brutally insulting to one's civilized instincts as the many names we saw inked onto the ivory panels of a beautiful Renaissance bapistry in the nave of the cathedral at Arezzo).

Still, despite all the visual clutter left by gangs of urban vandals, there are many images that strike me as being interesting, provocative, amusing, inventive, and even beautiful. The line between vulgarity and art in public spaces can be a very fine and indistinct line indeed. All of these pictures were taken in a stroll through the city center lasting less than an hour. Crimes or artworks? What do you think?https://picasaweb.google.com/SteveDC505/NaplesWallArt?authkey=Gv1sRgCNquuain0YXJpQE##

Streets of Naples

Naples is an ancient port city that was founded by the Greeks and later ruled by the Romans, Norman French, Hohenstaufen Germans, Napoleonic French, and Spanish. With a population of 1.3 million and a bustling harbor, it is the unofficial capital of southern Italy. It is the birthplace of St Gennaro, the camorra (Neapolitan mafia), and pizza.

In many ways, Naples reminds us of Dalian (China): crowded, noisy, dirty, rude, chaotic, energetic, criminal, materialistic, and full of a spirit of anarchic fun and vitality. Tall apartments tower over the narrow Roman streets that still crisscross the compact city center. During our two brief visits to the city, we visited churches, an art museum, subterranean Roman ruins, a 19th-century luxury shopping mall, crowded narrow shopping streets, and the harbor.

https://picasaweb.google.com/SteveDC505/NaplesStreets?authkey=Gv1sRgCJTlx5nj47GZjQE#

Dinner in Sorrento

Here are the smiling faces of our CUA and Loyola students. What a pure pleasure to meet these young people in the classroom every week, and then to enjoy their company and their friendship on our road trips.
https://picasaweb.google.com/SteveDC505/Dinner?authkey=Gv1sRgCLfQhvHNms6ajAE#

Pompeii

In the year 79 AD, Pompeii was buried under 4-6 meters of ash and pumice during a catastrophic eruption of nearby Mount Vesuvius. Over the centuries, several more meters of soil accumulated over the lost city. As a result, the once thriving city of Pompeii and its inhabitants were lost to memory until they were accidentally discovered in 1599.

The area has now been partially excavated and gives a vivid and poignant insight into daily life in a city of 20,000 people during the first century of the Roman empire. One can wander down paved streets lined with raised sidewalks, water pipes, and stepping stones to cross wet or messy streets. There is a huge amphitheatre, a forum with numerous temples, marketplaces for food and other goods, workshops, fountains, baths, gymnasiums, stores, residences, gardens, and even streetside snack bars for "fast food" and wine to go.

Many buildings retain their floor mosaics and wall decorations. There are even plaster casts of some of the bodies of the unfortunate victims who were unable to flee the city in time. Many of the most important artistic treasures have been removed to the Archeological Museum in Naples, which will be described in a future blog entry. Here are some pictures from our day in Pompeii.
https://picasaweb.google.com/SteveDC505/Pompeii?authkey=Gv1sRgCKuBus26h-nJdw#

Trip to Capri

Last weekend (April 16-18), we took a three-day bus trip with the students and faculty from the CUA Rome Program. This time, we headed south to the seaside region around the Bay of Naples, about a three-hour trip from Rome. We stayed in a very nice hotel in the fashionable seaside resort town of Sorrento, enjoying tasty meals and watching the full moon rise from the balcony.

One of our favorite experiences was a day-long excursion to the Island of Capri. Susie and I took a jet-powered ferry out to the island, which rises high above the sea on spectacular sheer cliffs. There are only two small villages on the island, but it has become something of a vacation paradise because of its scenic views, year-round beautiful climate, and expensive shops and restaurants.

We rode the funicular (cable car) to the village of Capri high above the harbor. From there, we strolled through the village, window-shopping at luxury goods and sampling tasty gelato. We also took a hike to the cliffs at the far northeast corner of the island to see the ruins of Villa Jovis, a massive palace built by the Emperor Tiberius in the 1st-century AD. The palace complex was supplied with water captured in massive cisterns. The emperor lived there for the final decade of his life, communicating his orders to the mainland via a lighthouse at night and a huge signal mirror by day. The Italian word "capri" means "goats," and we saw a few wild specimens in the woods.
https://picasaweb.google.com/SteveDC505/Capri?authkey=Gv1sRgCPSsn__As5LWvQE#

Roman Antiquities

On Tuesday, I took my Latin Literature class on a "site visit" to the Palazzo Massimo alle Terme, the main branch of the National Museum of Rome. Susie and I had been there before (see blog entry "Museum of Ancient Roman Art" from March 19), but we had only had time to visit one of the museum's four floors at that time.

A former Jesuit seminary, the building now houses four floors of art from republican, imperial, and late imperial Rome. The top floor includes numerous mosaics and wall paintings from ancient Roman villas, including all four walls of the the summer triclinium (dining area) from the villa of Livia, the wife Emperor Augustus. These walls (1st century BC) are masterpieces of painting, featuring lifelike images of plants, flowers, and birds. The ground floor and second floor house a fantastic collection of marble and bronze statuary. The basement has a collection of coins, jewelry, and everyday household objects. Here are a few pictures of things that caught my attention. (For the mosaics and wall paintings of the Villa of Livia, see the earlier blog entry.)

https://picasaweb.google.com/SteveDC505/PalazzoMassimo02?authkey=Gv1sRgCMu-jrKdyZzfPw#

"Culture Week"

Last weekend began the splendid nine-day long "Semitana della Cultura." During this annual event, all of Italy's state and municipal museums, parks, galleries, ruins, etc., are open to the public for FREE! This set of pictures comes from some of our first trips to sites that we hadn't seen yet. More to come later this week!

First, a walk through the Piazza del Popolo (which is always free and open). It is a huge open space about 10 minutes from our flat, perfect site for the best people-watching in Rome. The entrance is the huge 16th-century arch that marks the Via Flaminia, the 3rd-century BC road from Rome to the Adriatic coast. The piazza is flanked by churches on two sides and by the green, tree-covered Pincio Hill on the east. The fountain at the center of the piazza features a 3000 year-old Egyptian obelisk. The piazza is a also a favorite site for street performers and political rallies. It's where we saw the horse show during Carnevale.

The first museum I checked out is the Crypta Balbi in the old historic city center. The building sits atop an archeological dig that uncovered the gardens, recreatonal area, baths, and spas that were behind the scenes of the ancient Theater of Balbus (1st century BC), now about three stories below the current street level. The above-ground museum houses artifacts recovered from the site and explains the history of the area.

On Tuesday, we took the tram out to the Villa Giulia, an estate with a beautiful garden built as a summertime get-away for Pope Julius III (1550-1555). It now houses the National Etruscan Museum, a fantastic collection ancient pre-Roman artifacts from central Italy. The mysterious Etruscan civilization flourished in what is now Tuscany (the name derives from "Etruscan") and Umbria from ca. 700 BCE until it was conquered and absorbed by Rome in the 1st century BCE. We are now more eager than ever to visit the vast Etruscan necropolises in nearby Cerveteri and Tarquinia.
https://picasaweb.google.com/SteveDC505/Etruscan#