ROMAN CHRISTMAS TAT CAN BE FUN!!

I have a confession to make - despite a professional life which has focussed in recent years on teaching students the arts of connoisseurship in the decorative arts - I've always had a penchant for tourist junk. I find it fascinating. At home we have a huge collection of fridge magnets I've collected on our recent cruise ship travels (we need to get a bigger fridge to put them on) and whenever we go to a place where there's a thriving souvenir trade - you can bet your life I'll be attracted to the shops and stalls like a moth to a light bulb! So it was in Rome last night. On our walk back from the Piazza Venezia to the Barberini hotel we came a cross a whole street full of brightly lit stalls with vendors hawking souvenirs to the Christmas tourists. Highlights (which I didn't incidentally buy) included miniature badly crafted painted plaster models of Romulus and Remus feeding from the she -wolf (loosely based on the wonderful Etruscan bronze sculpture of the same in the Palazzo dei Conservatori on the Capitolone Hill) the Colosseum and every other famous Roman monument you can think of, figures of Papa Francesco with and without glasses, T shirts with unprintable slogans on them and horror of horrors Roman plastic helmets complete with plumes - perfect for those wishing to have their photo taken in front of the Colosseum.

ROMAN TOURIST SOUVENIRS

Maybe these objects are an antidote to the high quality stuff I've been used to dealing with in my professional life. The fact they are an affront to good taste I find a source of amusement and they tell us a lot about the places we all love to visit when on holiday.

What I did buy from one of the stalls was a bookmark calendar for 2015. There were lots to choose from and I picked out one with views of tourist attractions in the city centre. At a price of 1 euro (about 80 pence in sterling) this was an excellent value object with a practical use - a bookmark for every month of the year with a good quality image and a monthly calendar to boot. It's interesting to list the images for each of the 12 months of 2015 - they are as follows:

January                Saint Peter's from the Tiber

February              The Trevi Fountain

March                  The Spanish Steps

April                     The Colosseum

May                      Roman Forum

June                      Piazza Navona

July                       Pantheon

August                  Castel Sant Angelo               

September            The Colosseum

October                 Piazza Venezia

November             The Old Appian Way

December             Saint Peter's Basilica

Of the famous monuments listed - 6 of them are of Roman origin (one gets two photographs - guess which), 5 date from the  Renaissance/ Baroque periods from the 16th to the 18th centuries and only one building is from the late 19th, early 20th century. There is nothing from the modern period at all! If this selection of images has been carefully put together so it appeals as a souvenir what it appears to be saying is that tourists don't especially come to Rome for the legacy of the last two centuries. I have actually seen this point of view expressed in some popular guide books about the city. Rome maybe the capital city of modern Italy but tourists and visitors are drawn to it at all times of year because of its amazing cultural history. We all studied the Romans at school (do children still do that today?) and we are all aware that the city was at the centre of a vast Empire which covered just about all of the Mediterranean area and extended northwards as far as Britain; we know that many aspects of European language, its legal systems, architectural styles and art can be traced back to this period of imperial brutality and exploitation in the city's history. Likewise, although only about 3% of the city's current inhabitants regularly attend mass in its 600 plus churches, we all know Rome as the epicentre of one of the world's great religions. The faithful still flock to Rome and the independent Vatican state to pay homage to its significance as a major symbol of their catholic faith and the curious still want to see where the Pope lives or see the amazing art within its walls. In some ways the city is a huge disneyland - a theme park for culture junkies like me. There is visual evidence of all these great chapters in the city's history round every street corner and down every alley and its all there to be discovered, either by making pilgrimages to the big set piece attractions, or often when you are taking it easy wandering about and thus least expect it. The latter was the case on one of our morning walks this Christmas.

THE GHETTO 

We'd decided to visit the area marked on the city maps as 'The Ghetto', an area of narrow streets on the eastern bank of the Tiber opposite Trastevere. South of the Via del Portico d' Ottavia its an atmospheric district of narrow streets and alleys and traditionally associated with the city's Jewish community, so even today there are lots of kosher restaurants and Jewish bakeries, workshops and wholesalers of ready to wear clothing. Its been a significant Jewish community since the medieval period, but it was Pope Paul IV, father of the Inquisition, who decreed that the city's Jews should be forcibly contained at night in a walled ghetto in 1555. In the tenements abutting the narrow streets Jewish families lived in overcrowded conditions, the only advantage being that at least they enjoyed a degree of safety and security at night. In 1870 one of the first decisions of the newly formed Italian government, after the liberation of Rome, was to tear down the walls of the Jewish ghetto. Today most Roman Jews live elsewhere, but the area still has a great atmosphere and we were glad we'd visited. The big surprise came when we headed back towards the river and turned a corner to suddenly be confronted by a huge structure which turned out to be the remains of a vast Roman theatre complex. Begun by Julius Caesar and completed by Emperor Augustus it was dedicated to the latter's son Marcellus and it remained in use until 235AD when it fell in to disrepair after events were transferred to the amphitheatre. In the middle ages its advantageous position near the river determined it's future as a fortress but later, with many changes of ownership, parts of it were converted to domestic use. It was Mussolini who first secured it as  an important monument of the city's Roman past by removing adjoining buildings giving it the more detached appearance it has today. Another nearby vista from the Jewish quarter showed, close to the theatre, three picturesque classical corinthian columns once part of the Temple of Apollo rebuilt by the Romans following the demise of an earlier structure in 33BC. All of this then was revealed to us in just a short 45 minute walk - made all the more interesting by us not having read the area up before visiting. In this instance doing the research and follow up afterwards was fun.

OUTER WALL OF THE ROMAN THEATRE OF MARCELLUS
& ONE COLUMN FROM THE TEMPLE OF APOLLO

I remember last year being taken by surprise when we first visited the Piazza Navona to discover it's strange shape - its long and thin with a semi-circular end. This is the result it's Roman origins for it's in the shape of a classical athletics stadium of a type that originated in Greece - 900 feet long. The original stadium was built by Emperor Domitian in AD85 for the annual games he intended to hold in honour of Capitoline Jove. By the middle ages it was being used to cultivate vineyards and for storage barns which were built amongst the classical ruins. It was during Rome's resurgence as a city from the 14th century and especially later during the reign of Pope Innocent X that it was developed into the iconic Baroque piazza seen by visitors today and at Christmas its the location of the Christmas toy fair which specialises in the sale of nativity figures - it's a joy to visit it at this time of year.

PLAN OF ROMAN STADIUM OF DOMITIAN

PIAZZA NAVONA AND THE CHRISTMAS TOY FAIR

And now that I've finished this posting it's time to reflect on Christmas Eve and to look forward to telling you about our special visit to St Peter's basilica later that day.

TRAVELLER'S TIPS
Many sites, especially the more popular ones, have information boards - often in Italian and English.
Use your mobile phone to google sites round Rome as you visit them. You will find lots of maps, images and short articles to help decipher what you can see. If you have one of those apps to photograph those black and white square patterns that yield information that will come in useful too.

If you are interested in reading novels with a Roman theme try the Inspector Zen novels by English author Michael Dibden. The first one - Ratking - was published in 1988 and the last in 2007 was entitled Endgames. They are mostly set in Rome and highlight a side of the city not usually apparent to visitors. Inspector Zen is an interesting middle aged anti-hero character who seeks to manage his job and private life within the framework of a challenging set of police cases. It's attractive to read about sites in the city you may well have visited. Three of the novels were televised for the BBC and filmed in Rome and shown on TV in 2011.