I’ve always been fascinated by buildings; one of the first careers I was aware of – at the age of 10 – was ‘architect’ and I spent entire months at that age and for a couple more designing houses and indeed entire estates on graph paper. And as anyone who has read my blog posts knows, I often write about buildings. Other times I write about ‘historically important places,’ which can include buildings. And, I not infrequently write about the ruins of… yes you guessed it, buildings.

So when I decided just a few months ago to enter a Graduate Certification Program in Historic Preservation in pursuit of a Grad Certificate, no one who knows me was surprised.

One thing that came as a shock as I began the program and dutifully did my first readings was the realization that the intrinsic value of, and importance in, preserving buildings wasn’t an external, absolute truth that people and societies work toward upholding. (As if the current destruction of ancient monuments, cities and more in Syria wasn’t enough of a clue.)

In other words, apparently what I have all my life understood to be an underlying principle of how one looks at the world is not a natural perspective. It was only in the last few hundred years that people began to look around and see that the built – and natural – environment was important. For whatever reasons, ranging from the rate of change to the power of the individual in various societies to the normative belief structure in any given moment in time, the idea of keeping ‘old stuff’ from disappearing, deteriorating, falling down, or being demolished was simply non-existent.

In a way, I knew this already though its import hadn’t struck me to this extent. For instance, it is common knowledge to anyone who’s been on a guided tour of the Coliseum in Rome, or simply looked it up online or read a book about it, that the original structure was covered in marble which was ‘repurposed’ by later builders for new buildings. Or that the ancient site of Villa Adriana (Hadrian’s Villa) in Tivoli, outside Rome, was a kind of feeder site for the nearby Villa d’Este as it was built in the 16th century. Or that pretty much the entire country of Italy is built quite literally on forgotten structures that emerge like ghosts of long-forgotten cities when somebody digs a hole in a basement.

What makes this all so fascinating to me – the non-normative, culturally-based concept of preservation as a value, I mean – is trying to figure out where I learned it. Was it my mother’s fascination with Native American pot shards, arrow and axe heads, and hand-woven blankets? Was it an extension of my perhaps compulsive need to document in writing the ups and downs of my life… if it’s not in stone, it didn’t happen? (Even that impulse though is secondary; one has to believe, first, that past events matter at all to the present, or the future, in order to make sense of documenting them.) Is it something having to do with identity, the idea that we are, as are cities and countries, made up of, identifiable by, the sum of all events, ideas, concepts, and cultural artifacts – buildings among them – that we create?

Or was my belief that there is intrinsic value in the past, and in objects, places, structures that somehow represent that past, sparked by some event? I don’t remember a time when I didn’t think ancient Roman ruins or abandoned Southwestern ghost towns or the battlefield of Culloden in Scotland or the Acropolis in Athens were important in their own right. But perhaps somewhere, hidden in the shadows that make up my childhood, was a moment… something said in passing… a word whispered to me at night… a disembodied voice from the past that told me that history and time and moments within both can be read through the blocks and beams and burial sites of people who have come and gone. And that someday, we too will be gone, leaving our own versions of ourselves for others to preserve… to read our lives in what we leave behind.

I like that thought.

(Each exhibit will be different, and like any museum it will shift and change throughout the years. No matter the displays, this is one museum you should make it a point to visit. For more information about the above-mentioned exhibit, see here.) (Address: Palazzo Mocenigo, Santa Croce 1992, 30135 Venezia)

I’d visited the Roman Forum a number of times before, starting before the city of Rome fenced it in and began charging visitors to walk the same stones that Cleopatra and Marc Antony walked, to gaze on the steps of the Senate where Julius Caesar died, to stand beneath the ruins of the Temple of Saturn and marvel at its unimaginable former splendor. When they started charging, I visited less, but who needs to walk those ancient stones every morning on the way to coffee anyway? Once or twice a week was enough.


So while I can’t say I knew the Forum inside and out, I knew it well enough to know that the mosaic I glimpsed on the ceiling of a church I had barely noticed before, was new. Well, not new new. Nothing in Rome really is, and especially not in the very heart of it. But new to my eyes.

My heart stopped as my feet did, and I searched frantically for a way in to the church, or temple, before me. It’s bronze doors did not yield, it’s hexagonal design defied my attempts at finding another entrance, and finally I had to conclude that there was no way in. At least, not from the ground level. (I later learned that these doors are kept locked, they can be opened with a key – the original key that locked those doors for the first time in the 4th century. A 1700 year old key in a 1700 year old lock.)

I left, determined to find my way in. I didn’t – not that year. But the following summer I returned, knowing some things. For instance, that it’s the oldest church in the Roman Forum, originally created in 527 by Pope Felix. I say created, not built, because the structure was there and Pope Felix added an apse mosaic – the one that had caught my eye, in fact – and some basic church-ey furnishings. And that this act of changing a temple into a church signaled the fact that the Church was finally more powerful than the pagan beliefs that had until then dominated. I learned that its name is the Basilica of Santi Cosma e Damiano, and that these two men were twin brothers, physicians both, and that for centuries sick people came to the church to sleep within its walls in the belief that so doing would cure them of whatever they suffered from. And I learned that the entrance is outside of the Forum, from the Via dei Fori Imeperiali – the street that runs beside the Coliseum.

So in I went, and like a pilgrim I walked straight to the part of the interior from which it is possible to stare open-mouthed, and I’m sure I did, at the mosaics that had by then haunted my dreams for a year. Masterpieces of 6th- and 7th-century Byzantine-style art, these mosaics show Christ’s second coming. Christ himself is in the center, with Saint Peter presenting Saint Cosmas and Saint Theodorus (right), and Saint Paul presenting Saint Damian and Pope Felix IV. The entire is brilliantly colored; blue and gold predominate, with reds and whites and greens as secondary hues.

We are not so well versed in how to read the stories told to us on Church ceilings as people of the past have been. Sheep and the temples in Jerusalem and the four rivers of Paradise and clouds and scrolls and crowns and golden water and palm trees and phoenixes and thrones seem jumbled, and to my eyes become less about a perfect story than about sublime beauty. It’s hard to believe, and yet so perfectly apt – we’re in Rome, after all – that these vivid colors have survived 1400 + years, that the story they tell is one that still gets told, and that the dome and the heavens are somehow not actually the same thing.

I first became aware of Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid when my not-yet-husband and I visited New York in 2006. We went to the Guggenheim Museum, and halfway down the spiral we ran smack into an exhibit that halted me in my tracks. Made up of drawings and paintings and furniture and models and objects that defied classification, each piece of Hadid’s work seemed to shift from building design to creature to art to fantasy, and I was entranced. It was like walking into someone else’s dream of the future.

I became slightly obsessed with Hadid and her work, did a lot of research online, followed her career – a most amazing career that includes being the first woman to be awarded the distinguished Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2004, founding Zaha Hadid Architects in London (currently working on 950 projects in 44 countries), and designing some of the world’s most unusual structures – and was delighted when I found out that it was she and her firm that was brought in to design the MAXXI in Rome.

MAXXI – the Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, or National Museum of the 21st Century Arts  - was completed in 2010, and consists of two museums, one for art and one for architecture, an auditorium, a library and media library, a bookstore, cafeteria, bar, galleries for traveling exhibits, performances and educational activities, and a large outdoor square for art works and live events.

Details like the above are nice and all, but what really makes Hadid’s MAXXI the “masterpiece fit to sit alongside Rome’s ancient wonders” is more than its function. As all her work is, the museum is a breathtaking structure designed specifically for its context – a looping, swooping, light-filled series of halls and slopes that feels both solid and ethereal. It is filled with bronze creatures and series of flowers in oils or acrylics, architectural models and fashion exhibits, posters and photos, documents and journals… truly the list is endless. Around each new sweep of white corridor lies another wonder, and you cannot help but be drawn onward, upward, and into some kind of otherworldly sensation.

The entire experience echoes and almost feels like a journey to the original ancient city might have, despite or maybe because of the museum’s futuristic design and contemporary art. The MAXXI has become part of what Rome has always been: a world of wonders created by people who are larger than life, who put their stamp on history with a structure that endures for ages and engenders wonder and amazement in us all.

Don’t miss it on your next trip to Rome!

#1) Palazzo Doria Pamphilj – in the Featured Museums series.

I love museums. Even so, I avoided them in Rome for a long time, preferring to spend my days wandering through the open air, many square mile museum that is the city’s Centro Storico (historical center). Then one day instead of walking past the entrance do the Galleria Doria Pamphilj which really looks more like an entry to a courtyard, I went inside. And my world expanded.

Museums can be daunting; this one is not. It is enchantingly small – for a museum… for a palace. The entrance leads you into a courtyard through hallways, up stairs, and finally into the museum proper – which is actually just a section of the home that has been opened to the public.

The palazzo itself was built in the fifteenth century and was home to a number of famous Italian families before falling, by marriage, into the hands of the Pamphilj family who own it today. Through the centuries it was expanded, with each family adding rooms and entire wings in the style of the day; it is now the largest private residence in the center of Rome.

In the early 1600s, Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini began collecting paintings and from this relatively small endeavor grew what has become quite a stupendous collection that includes original works of Caravaggio, Velazquez, Filippo Lippi, Annibale Carracci, and many more.

Ceilings are 20 feet high, walls are deep, blood red, or gold or blue, some covered so thoroughly with paintings that they look like wallpaper themselves. Each room features a different kind of art: landscape painting, biblical figures, portraits, a mixture… there are brocade wall hangings, 16th century armchairs, and an original wooden floor. The hall of mirrors, I am told, is just like a mini Versailles, and lined with sculpture from ancient to Renaissance. Just off the main area is another, dedicated room for sculptures, and a marble bath set on a marble floor… and it goes on and on. But, not forever.

You can easily see everything in the museum in less than two hours – more quickly if you hurry. But you won’t want to. Each piece of art, hand chosen by a family member to adorn the walls, to be part of lived space, is meaningful in a way that most museums never manage. For this is not just a museum, a place for random strangers to wander and become lost; this is a space of family, of memory, of beauty chosen for the way it made someone feel. Sharing its wonders is, for those of us who take two hours to look more deeply, just a little bit like touching that beauty for ourselves, and feeling the echoes of centuries.

Don’t miss the experience.

by Teresa Cutler-Broyles

            On my first visit to Rome, just off the plane, I spent an hour taking pictures of the Coliseum. I walked the Roman Forum in awe that my feet were treading the very same ground that Caesar had walked, and stood inside the Senate building where he met his death; I imagined the screams, the blood, the import of that moment, and I could not shrug off the feeling that somehow even the ground held memories of both. I stood under the Triumphal Arches of Septimius Severus, Titus, and Augustus and – because the iron fences had not yet been erected – touched the marble that I imagined had been touched by hundreds of thousands of people in the years since they were new and glittery in the sun. This entire area was just as I had always imagined it would be – serene despite the crowds, quiet and respectful, as it should be.

            Soon, I left the Forum area, determined to see Piazza Navona, a place that had existed as a beacon in my mind for years. I set off through the streets. It was close, according to the map. My anticipation grew. Any moment, I’d be there where I’d see fountains by Bernini… a church that holds the bones of a 4th century saint… an Egyptian obelisk from even more ancient Egypt… echoes of chariot races and boat exhibitions… the Pamphili palace…. In essence it was, in my mind, as much hallowed ground as the Roman Forum. I got closer – just around the next building and I’d be surrounded by another space filled with past glories….

            Perhaps it was because I had by then been up for more than 24 hours. Perhaps it was because I had forgotten to eat and so was likely quite low in blood sugar. Or perhaps it was that finally reality hit. In any case, this was the revelatory moment:

            I rounded the corner and was assaulted by noise, then chaotic movement. I felt outrage first, then fear, and then a sinking sensation akin to betrayal. Children ran and screamed, chasing balloons and bubbles. They climbed on benches and iron fences erected to keep people off the statues, and they shrieked as they ducked away from parents who, in truth, seemed more interested in taking photos or looking at the hundreds of street vendors’ products. My heart sank even more as I walked in a terrible haze across the cobbled street onto the main open piazza and through the lines of oil paints, water colors, photographs, caricatures, trinkets, cheap souvenirs. What right did they have to be there? Why did the city allow this – a flea market in an ancient site? And what of the restaurants lining the edges of the piazza with chairs and canopies that extended almost halfway into the streets on all sides? Tourists sat and talked loudly in a variety of languages. They ate and took photos and laughed at each other. Waiters accosted me, everyone, telling us why their place was better than all the others. People on bicycles wove through the masses, ringing their bells, stopping and starting to miss the people who couldn’t seem to pay attention to anything other than their own wonder.

            Everything was too loud, too noisy, too colorful. Too disrespectful.             

             I sat down abruptly on a wide concrete post, almost in tears. I had learned in my three years of archaeology classes that ancient sites should be protected, that they shouldn’t be desecrated by such crass endeavors as bubbles blown from plastic bubble guns, shouldn’t be subjected to screaming children who didn’t even notice the 400 year old fountains, the thousands of years-old obelisk. And they certainly shouldn’t have a flea market going on right in the middle of them. I sat there for a long time, miserable. Illusions shattered. Rome was nothing more than a carnival, a circus where people came to buy and sell, scream and yell. It was a pretender, an imposter, not an ancient, venerable site at all but a modern day mess.

            I ate a breakfast bar, dejected, ready to return to my hotel, and then slowly – perhaps nutrition hitting my bloodstream? – had what I have come to believe is one of the most important realizations a traveler to Rome must have, one that certainly seems to go without saying. Except I hadn’t known it until that moment. 

            Rome is a living city. It is not frozen in time, to be viewed and marveled at. It is ancient, yes, and it is also modern. It is filled with first century buildings and original tile, and 21st century people living lives that involve smart phones and Manolo Blahnik shoes and plastic bubble guns. In any given skyline of the Centro Storico (Historical Center) one can see 2000 or more years of churches, temples, spires and sculpture. And at any given time a visitor can move from the present to the past in an easy couple of steps. 

            For most of its life Rome has been what it is today: a city upon which people from all corners of the globe have descended; a city that merges its history with its present, almost seamlessly creating a site of wonder and grit; a city filled with the ghosts of the past and the realities of the present; a city in which flea markets have peppered the piazzas for centuries and generations of people have bartered for a trinket, a souvenir, a picture; a city in which present-day artists chose as their subjects the intrusions of its past. It is loud and dirty, and filled with glittery marble and crumbling walls. And finally, it is a city in which screaming children become the voice of the future. 

            Humbled, I found my way back to my hotel that day, slept for 10 hours, and the next morning I entered the Rome that is, instead of the Rome I was expecting. And it is, as it will be a hundred years from now, more than can be dreamt of. 

(Photo credits to tripomatic, online.)