Culture Week

Museums Museums Museums!

We were lucky enough to be in Rome during the annual Culture Week, which meant that for a whole week all the State Museums and many attractions were free!  So we took advantage of it and went museum hopping for the week.  Many of the museums were photo-free but here are some highlights of the pics I could snap at some of our favorite museums of Rome! 

Trajan's Market from the forum

We went to the museum at Trajan's market and got to see it from the other side. So in these two pictures (right and below) we're standing in the Trajan's Market building from the picture on the left.

They also have some nice artifacts there and we were also able to see the middle Eastern art exhibit with some very cool typographic artwork.

  

Towards the end of culture week it was Rome's birthday!  2765!  There were several events celebrating this including a parade and gladiator fighting (look for pics of the gladiator fights at the end of this post), but one of the coolest was a light show projected onto Trajan's Market.

 We also wondered around the forum area during culture week, mostly going from one museum to another, and of course seized opportunities to refill our water bottles from the fountains (and apparently every chance we could to pose like a statue we saw)!

Another famous sight we saw during culture week was the Pantheon. 

 The first time we went by it was raining and since the Pantheon has an open ceiling (there's an open hole in the dome) the rain fell right through to the floor! (I attempted to capture it on video)

 It actually looked really pretty falling through the building and provided some (though probably frowned upon) fun for some kiddos that passed the ropes and splashed in the puddles on the floor for a while.  

The Pantheon is home to some famous tombs and monuments, including the tomb of artist Raphael.

We also visited the State Museums, the first one we went to was Palazzo Altemps.  It had some wonderful sculptures in it, but half the appeal was just being in the building itself.  These museums are built into old Roman buildings and the rooms and ceilings are as impressive as the art inside them.

We particularly enjoyed this statue of a, we'll go with sleeping (and not decapitated), head named Erinni, as sleeping is one of Erin's favorite activities.

      

Demeter has been my favorite since I was her in 6th grade in Mrs. Scholtz's class!

  

  

Although it's hard to tell in the picture, this Hera statue is huge! It almost touched the ceiling! And we also found another elephant for you mom!  Rome loves elephants apparently!


We also went to the Capitol Museums, where these huge statue pieces are in the courtyard.  Apparently, there was a museum workers strike going on so part of it was closed, but as we walked through we never ran into a part we couldn't go into (or maybe we went places we weren't actually supposed to go but hey, no one stopped us) and so it all worked out.

They also had an exhibit there of recently released Vatican archives.  They were really cool to see and ranged from the transcripts of the trial of Galileo, to letters to the Pope asking for the King of England's marriage to be dissolved, complete with dozens of signatures and official seals.  There were also letters from Leonardo DaVinci, Marie Antoinette and Bernini that had their clear signatures on them which were really awesome to see.  The display format was also extraordinary, with elaborate screens and high tech displays everywhere telling about the history of each artifact, which was a departure from Rome's other museums (sorry we couldn't take pictures).

The Capitol Museum is also where some notable things are, like the Capitoline Wolf and the sculpture of Marcus Aurelius.

Another place we visited was the Crypta Babli, a (relatively) recently discovered ruin in the city, which is still being excavated.  In fact they told us that a new section was discovered just six months ago. Our tour was interesting as there was a group of high school kids there in training to be translators or possibly for a project concerning the area because the tour was translated to English for us by a probably 16 year old guy who, though he knew more English than the official tour guide, struggled to explain everything.  But we got the main points.  It was a pretty cool tour actually, we walked through basically an old city street, and saw where there used to be houses, shops and even an ancient pub!

Yet another museum we visited was the Etruscan museum, full of artifacts pre-dating the Roman times.  The museum itself was pretty cool but we really enjoyed the palazzo it was in and the garden areas behind it, which is where all the pictures we have of it are from :)

We also took the chance to go see a contemporary art museum while we were in Rome, and it was nice to be in something completely different from the old buildings and exhibits of ancient art we'd been seeing so far.  The Maxxi Art museum was very cool.  It had several sections designed around the RE-cycle RE-use etc theme, even one with city planning showing re-purposed and revitalized buildings all over the world.  Needless to say Erin enjoyed this exhibit being a Sustainability major!

Also inside the museum were some of the weirdest yet interesting exhibitions I've ever seen, including one using clothes to make huge wheels and tents (complete with a video of people slowly rolling this huge clothes wheel around), a mini red velvet curtained theater showing a movie of a guy walking through Ruins talking about the "cycle of life" set to Opera music, an entire room filled with nothing but tables stacked on top of on another with tiny shoots of grass poking out of them in places, and a dark room filled with colored eggs hung from strings and nets around the room with one whole wall playing a movie projection of the eggs being smashed by rube-goldberg like machines.  It was definitely different from the other Museums of Rome!

Outside Maxxi was this little house made from recycled materials, everything from wine bottles to car doors!  It was pretty great and we had fun looking through it.

The Musical Instrument museum was just a couple blocks down from our apartment so we decided to go see it as well.  It was small but they had some amazing instruments, traditional and unique.  There were instruments made from armadillos and the smallest little, i'm not sure what to call them, hand violins? as well as some enormous harpsicord pianos (though we were both disappointed that the MIM didn't have any music playing).

It reminded us of the small musical instrument museum housed at the Accedemia in Florence (where the famous David by Michelangelo is), though not as well kept and without the cool bowl of water that sings when you touch it.  Did I mention this before?  It was very cool.  It made sounds similar to how the rim of a glass will "sing" if you run your finger along it with some water.  Very entertaining.  The Rome Musical Instrument Museum should get their hands on one of those :)


Here'as another one of the State museums we went to, the Palazzo Braschi. 

The table reminded us of the Medici
Tables we saw in Florence 

We loved this painting of
the Colosseum

This statue was huge! One of the biggest in tact statues we saw anywhere

Temple of Minerva

The Palazzo Braschi also had a secondary exhibit of really beautiful drawings and while we were looking through them we noticed one was of the Temple of Minerva, the ruins we can see from the window in our apartment!

  

One of the last museums we visited was the Palazzo Massimo, and it had some of  our favorite things in it.  There was this really cool exhibit called "Imaginary Realms" about the Wild Swans fairy tale by Hans Christian Anderson and featured pieces from the movie they made.  In the movie they used green screens a lot, and the backgrounds they put in were these collages that were on display there.  They were so unique!  They kind of took many different pictures of a theme, like forest or ocean, and put them together to make the scene that was not realistic and kind of jumbled.  Somehow it worked to make a unified picture though.  I really loved them.

They had costumes from the movie production 

  

and collages used as backgrounds in the movie.


There was also more traditional things at the museum, including tons of sculptures, and they were beautiful to look at there, I think this museum had the best lighting and displays of the sculptures.

  

One floor of the museum was dedicated to the recreation of an old palace, and had tons of frescoes and mosaic artwork, and was set up in a way like you were walking through how the actual rooms were laid out with plaques to tell you what each room used to be.

Owl mosaic! Love it!

going into the vault

Always love AZ!

And finally there was a "vault" room that displayed coins from Roman history.

We also went through the Monument of Victor Emmanuel, who was the first King of unified Italy.  This monument also houses the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Italy, and always has guards stationed there.  We happened to be walking up as the guards were changing, and I got it on video.

The building is much newer than the rest of the buildings around it and it's bright white structure definitely stands out in the city.  I actually read however, that many Italians don't like it and it has many nicknames, including the "Wedding Cake" the "Typewriter" or "Rome's False Teeth."

It does have some great views from the top, and when we went up there was a seagull hanging out posing for pictures with many entertained tourists.

The inside has the museum of Italian unification, with tons of military artifacts.

One more stop on the way out to pose with the soldiers :)

Here's a view of the Monument all lit up as we walked by it one night.

The final weekend of culture week was also Rome's birthday celebration (remember the video of Trajan's Market at the beginning of this post?) and they had historical reenactments on Circo Massimo as part of the celebration.

  It was very entertaining, people were decked out in Gladiator gear and ancient Roman wear, and they had dancing, gladiator battles, parades and an ancient Roman rugby like game match.  

Roman Rugby

If you happen to be in Rome around Easter definitely check out if it's culture week, they do it every year and we saw many events and museums we probably never would have gone to otherwise! Ciao!