Rome and onwards into Lazio

I always think I know Rome quite well, at least as to what extraordinary church, palazzo or ancient ruin is where and which of those I want to see.  Gaps in time, however, play havoc with middle aged memories and streets or Roman hills are not always at all in the direction remembered resulting in much harrumphing from ageing husband when the long road taken is not the right one and the tourist map doesn't have its name.  As for the Italian I once spoke quite well after a year living in Florence, well, I can manage a menu usually, most directions, just, but conversation beyond the 'ancora un altra bottiglia di vino per mio vecchio marito' is completely out of the question.  So far so depressing but being in the eternal city is far from that, especially, notwithstanding three spectacular thunderstorms and accompanying downpours, in June when it is hot but there is still air to breathe, the trees are bright green and flowering and there is the scent of jasmine on the breeze.

We stayed in the former convent, the Casa di San Giuseppe, in Vicolo Moroni in Trastevere, hard by the Piazza Trilussa with its useful taxi stand; all the restaurants and bars of Trastevere including the one where we suffered through the England/Uruguay World Cup debacle, and the glories of the mosaics of Santa Maria in Trastevere with its splendid cosmatesque pavement.  On this occasion we ran out of time for other adjacent pleasures such as the church of Santa Cecilia with its extraordinarily touching, true to death, sculpture of Cecilia, martyred in the 3rd century and recorded as her body was found when her tomb was opened in 1599; and San Pietro in Montorio with its austerely remarkable Bramante Tempietto.  We did manage to find time to eat well; in Osteria La Gensola for perfect fish and Paris for old fashioned atmosphere and a lot of prosperous priests enjoying the good things of life.  Elsewhere,  a simple lunch in the dolce vita interior of Dal Bolognese in the Piazza del Popolo was a disappointment with surprisingly leaden pasta including tortellini in brodo which, when properly home made, is my absolutely favourite melting moment but maybe we let the side down by not ordering more seriously, not booking so as to sit on the fashionable terrace and not dressing the more glamorous part.

My son who has escaped too much forced sightseeing in recent years at the hands of his mother, in Europe at least, by living in South America, showed remarkable tolerance for flogging round as many churches, palaces, fountains or anything else springing back to mind, in the day or two available.  Of course as is well known to be the case in Rome, everything is always shut at exactly the moment chosen for a visit and only the more obscure sites are not stuffed beyond bearing with other horrid people. St Peter's, O lord, I have never previously had even to think of queuing to get in to extent that it was completely out of the question. The Vatican I could have left out perhaps but said son was keen and with advance online booking, even as it turned out for the wrong date, we made it to the Sistine Chapel and the Raphael rooms with room to breathe and space enough to pause and take in.  Actually there is never really long enough for that, it is always just a promise for another visit and as it seems to be restore a fountain year and the Trevi is wrapped in canvas and scaffolding as tight as a Christo sculpture, the worry is where to throw the coin to ensure the return.   Once upon a time I remember, although are these memories accurate I wonder,  one could lie on the floor in the Sistine Chapel, without fear of furious guards or crowding, trampling feet, and gaze but those days will not return until at least one of the 4 horsemen gallops clean across the earth.

Over-populated or not, the Chapel remains remarkable in real sight, great 3 dimensional painted limbs bursting out into space from the arch of the ceiling, appearing almost as solid and muscular as their artist's massive marble figures elsewhere and equally lacking the whiff of sanctity.  There is a Michelangelo exhbition currently in the Capitoline Museum 450 years after his death which I found oddly unsympathetic, perhaps it is just difficult to enjoy his works massed together out of  its expected contexts even if they have never been those originally intended, most of all by his patrons.  We failed, time again, to get to San Pietro in Vincoli for the famous horned Moses on Pope Julius II, Michelangelo's greatest patron's tomb - it is an image of terrifying power and did at least end up in the right place albeit other sculptures made or partly made for the tomb are exhibited far from here and their substitutes are not at all the same thing.by lesser artists in every way. The permanent Capitoline exhibitions are fascinating, fine and educative as to the Roman image and life. They need to be taken in bite sized pieces really to appreciate them properly, as ever a flying visit is by no means enough for understanding or longer term enjoyment of mind. One can always enjoy the perfection of Michelangelo's Campidoglio, a snap of the eye takes in the wonder where Marcus Aurelius rules this astonishingly wonderful space in all his magnificence. Spectacular even in copy, the original of the statue is to be enjoyed these days in its rather hideous special pavilion inside the museum.

Of course, in the evening, as the huge wedding cake edifice of the monument to Vittorio Emanuele shines above the Piazza Venezia in the glow of the sun and the ruins of the forum take on earlier form in the lowering light, it is too late to drop in on the Bambinello sleeping in Santa Maria in Aracoeli - one for another day. The Aracoeli is usually high on the itinerary in Rome beside the Pantheon and Santa Maria sopra Minerva, both reached as soaked cobbles dried in the sun after a storm. The former as ever, stunning but bursting full, the latter quiet enough to enjoy the frescoes once the relevant coins were scraped out of pockets for the slot of the lighting machine.  We failed to eat ice creams in any of the old shops in the area or drink coffee in Piazza Sant Eustachio - there is a lot more competition for the crown of best of either than was once the case - but we did buy numerous pairs of red or purple cardinal's socks, now incredibly good value, in one of the several clerical outfitters. On any walking tour in this vicinity and en route perhaps to the Piazza Navona one would likely, as we did on another day, take in San Luigi dei Francesi with the marvels of the Contarelli Chapel, the Caravaggio paintings of the life of St Matthew, which, for the moment of looking, throw every other painter into the shade.
 

We went in the morning cool all the way up the Via Nomentana, fuori le mura, to the church of Sant Agnese and the next door blessed peace of Santa Costanza's high domed mausoleum with its glorious 4th century decorative mosaics of everyday life and nature.  Transport can be an issue when getting to or from more distant oases that leave the mega crowds behind although there is usually a bus to some recognisable destination and the Via Nomentana is a straight thoroughfare out from the centre of Rome.  As it was we took the Metro and walked from the Policlinico station through the university area to San Lorenzo fuori le Mura, the ancient site of pilgrimage that stands above the tomb of poor overcooked St Lawrence, now doomed for all time in art to carry about the gridiron that was the instrument of his torture and martyrdom. Better perhaps than St Agatha with her cut off breasts carried  by her on a tray like slightly bizarre blancmanges, she popped up in the church in Piediluco which we visited while staying in nearby Labro, beside St Apollonia with the tongs holding just one of her full set of pulled teeth.  The enormous Campo de Verano cemetery behind San Lorenzo ensures continual funerals to an almost crematorium-like level of queuing hearses and we naturally encountered one going on in the basilica as we tiptoed, eyes lowered, down the side aisles to view the mosaics in the apse and the catacombs beneath.

A rush back to Trastevere for a splendidly typical Roman lunch of suppli and carciofi alla giudia followed by variations on a theme of ossobucco or offal with friends while the rain deluged around our umbrella covered table and rivers ran down the street, then back to our tracks at the vast edifice of San Giovanni in Laterano. The Scala Santa was well attended both by pilgrims and by those carefully recording the painful upward progress on one or other digital device.  These chroniclers were often monks, priests and nuns who one presumes use such uncomfortable images further to propagate the mysteries of faith.  We of course sprang up the side stairs but I did once go up on my knees many years ago just to see what it was like.  I can't say I found it either temporally or spiritually uplifting although I have a great fondness for St Helena or at least the idea of her, this indomitable matron packing up her relics in the Holy Land and heading for home.The True Cross has certainly proved to be miraculous, multiplying endlessly down the years and making plenty of money for determined entrepreneurs on the way.  The basilica itself is magnificent, the sheer scale of the thing, the baroque, including enormous statues, overlaying centuries earlier and earlier still, mind blowing.  Then the delightful leavening of a beautiful apse mosaic that includes in its border, the river Jordan running under the feet of several saints and the Virgin patting a rather small pope, a Nicholas I think, on the head like a faithful dog. In or on the water there are putti having fun, riding a swan here and quite obviously wind surfing there while a pair of fine headed deer stand guard by the cross above. The cloisters of San Giovanni vie for the title of most beautiful with those of San Paolo fuori le mura and are masterpieces of the cosmatesque.

We were caught again by opening or closing hours at both Santa Maria Maggiore and lovely Santa Prassede nearby with its delicious mosaiced chapel of St Zenone.  Bother.  We made it to San Clemente, the basilica at least if not its several further layers of history down to the temple of Mithras.  Luckily the Irish Dominicans in charge here were holding a convenient mass in their church, so just a taster for us before trudging in some state of dehydration to a friendly gay bar in the close vicinity of the Colosseum for a much needed refresher of ice cold beer and then home to bath and change in anticipation first of a short baroque concert under the weight of marble and gilt of Sant'Agnese in Agone in Piazza Navona - interesting but a bit of a mixed blessing as to composers, followed by the England World Cup game against Uruguay where a hoped for English victory was snatched from us by the twinkling boots of Luis Suarez. At least he didn't bite anyone on this occasion.

On then towards Labro in Lazio, Umbria, for a wedding in that mediaeval hilltop village with its gloriou views across the deciduous woods and down to the lake at Piediluco just below in the valley.  First negotiating the route out of Rome, up the Via Nomentana again, easy I said although my Rome maps gave up before the tangenziale, the Grande Raccordo Anulare, which, like all unfamiliar ring roads is almost impossible either to get onto or off in the right place and direction. We did worse on our return and might be there still had we not finally spotted signs to the airport.  Once on the right motorway, heading more or less north, we fairly sped along and thoughts of lunch and sights to see meant Montelibretti simply because it appeared at the edge of yet another map before it ran out and seemed to have the Palazzo Barberini, a very shut up castello we discovered, and the church of San Nicola de Bari, likewise.  Lunchtime of course and where should we find it?

Looking over a parapet at the top of the hill we spotted the Vecchio Mulino which proved to be a cavernous pizzeria with a large terrace looking out over the valley.  It was discouragingly empty apart from one large table of elderly men on the terrace.  As it turned out the restaurant was hiding its light under an unpromising bushel; irritable waitress, elderly patron dozing fatly by the till, too many pizzas for him and none for us as the oven isn't lit until evening.  Set menus were thrown onto the table, take it or leave it but the elderly men were feasting on excellent looking mussels so we said yes once the beer, no Peroni, something unheard of, had taken the dust out of our mouths.  Well, apart from ending up eating a 7 course lunch and waddling out of the place feeling of like size with its owner, we struck lucky indeed.  Mussels were followed by rice with cream of scampi and the whole delicious beasts in there to prove it was real, a fritto misto di pesce, salad, and then the wheels fell off.  We struck up with what turned out to be a retirement party and they were making an afternoon of it with local scrumpy style wine in 2 litre plastic coke bottles, something rather better out of glass and, if we didn't watch out, god knows what in the grappa type line.  They followed up their set menu with cries for spaghetti and, by now, their best friends, we had that too, perfection and followed by a retirement cake of exterior garishness that belied melting sponge stuffed with fresh strawberries.  The espresso was good too and essential.  Many photographs and best wishes later, embraces for the cook and the waitress, the patron was back dozing again leaving his hard working daughters in charge, we escaped for Labro and a perfect wedding weekend..

We stayed in the light, bright and charming Albergo Diffuso Crispolti, part of a small group of establishments in Labro owned by the same family with rooms in a variety of houses around the village.  We had the junior suite at the top of the Albergo with two double rooms, one granite covered bathroom in the middle, all the rooms whiter than white with their decorative features correctly relying more on what was outside the windows than any over embellishment of their simple, elegant interiors.  The Albergo provided brunch of stupendous quantity and variety on the morning of the wedding for any number staying in its various houses including bridegroom, best man and most of the ushers who shortly followed up with an ushers lunch.  Those who had dragged themselves slightly earlier out of bed having not partied in the gardens of the castle at the village's highest point until dawn, explored the countryside - in our case Piediluco on the lake with its church of San Francesco, St Francis of course came from these parts, and he is portrayed in the apse of the church where other frescoes include St Agatha with her tray.

The church of Sta Maria Maggiore in Labro is itself a delight, the gentle faded blue painted ceiling arches just added to by wedding clothes and beautiful posies of white roses and oak leaves at the ends of the pews.  The service itself was taken, uniquely perhaps and with papal dispensation, by a female Scottish Episcopalian vicar from Edinburgh.  It seems the local bishop has a sense of humour. My only regret about Labro, on its apparently truffle studded hill, is that we mistakenly failed to take advantage of that rich harvest, early as it seems, since there were apparently a small hill of their own of fresh truffles on sale in the local bar as we left.

We returned to normal life and the airport for a late Sunday night flight via a soothing visit to the fountains and unfortunately Sunday crowds of the Villa D'Este in Tivoli after burning off some of the weekend's excesses with a storming walk round Hadrian's Villa. The ruins here astonishing as always for size and only spoilt like every major tourist destination by the barriers and fences and all the paraphernalia of health and safety that save us from ourselves by ruining every space and vista and destroying any real sense of what might once have been. There are still plenty of places, plenty of wonder and unique pleasures to see in the world and I continue to seek those most recently emptied by some drama or other, but, in the best known, one would sometimes happily welcome the four horsemen and be hanging on to the horses tails to see what has been before it disappears for good under weight of numbers and numberless edicts for our better touristic organisation.

Budapest weekend

What is the perfect city for a weekend? The infinite range of ages, interests, wealth and tastes can all be catered for within an hour or three's flight time from London or from most European cities to another courtesy of one or other cut price airline or, in the case of last weekend's trip to Budapest, less than inspiring British Airways.  Do free plastic sandwiches and  enough free drink to float a flight of stag and hen parties make make up for usually surly service and the feeling that yet another British brand is flying a very limp flag?  Maybe or maybe any airline where your own nationality is on view in its worst let it all hang out holiday mode is unlikely to appeal. That having said, 'Grandpa's stag party' accompanying our sleep deprived early morning travel group to Budapest last Friday hadn't managed to pour enough brandy down their gullets in a couple of hours to be either incredibly loud or incredibly sick so all was well even if the chilled stuffed breakfast croissants were less than tempting.

Arriving in Budapest in the late morning meant smiling passport officers and relatively short immigration queues, check in luggage arriving with reasonable despatch other than one bag cleverly left behind somewhere between desk and aeroplane at Heathrow - astonishingly it did arrive later as promised.  The sun was shining, practicing for Saturday's National Holiday celebrating the notably unsuccessful 1848 Revolution with passionate recitations of the National Song, marching hussars, flag waving, and the almost mandatory wearing of a rosette in the national colours - the Hungarians did after all get there eventually and such straightforward patriotism accompanied by generally smiling faces and the inclination to be both friendly and helpful to metro or map bemused tourists is extremely attractive.

We stayed in the delightful Brody House in Brody Sandor Ut just behind the flag and flower decked Hungarian National Museum; within walking distance of most of the major Budapest sites even as far as Buda Castle, a stiffish walk, relieved at the last uphill drag by a ride on the splendid funicular railway with its views over the Chain Bridge to the glorious secession facade of the Gresham Palace Four Seasons Hotel. In the other direction, Heroes' Square, with the National Museum of Fine Arts and the assorted pleasures of the Varosliget Park. We did walk to all those place too although we achieved enough understanding of the happily straightforward 3 lines of the metro not to walk through our socks and taxis are readily available in most areas.  Brody House is a treasure among boutique hotels; its rooms decorated by individual artists, painted baths in most of them, deliciously comfortable beds, with separate top class sparkling showers and loos. Some rooms it must be said, are designed for the more athletic guest with terrifyingly exposed boxy stairs to bathrooms on different levels.I would definitely have fallen down any similar obstacle given the quantity of alcohol consumed by us all, not even trying I doubt compared with Grandpa's stag, but our weekend was a 50th birthday celebration and middle age has either to be staved off or forgotten in the bottom of any number of glasses. We had the whole Brody house to ourselves which meant a relaxed help yourself atmosphere and everything laid on by friendly and relatively invisible staff to add to that effect. 

We dined and partied at a second Brody House establishment complete with live music on Saturday night post a Budapest city bus and boat trip, drinks on the boat in case of momentary dehydration of course.  The Brody bar offered an interesting line in killer cocktails which, like all the most dangerous drinks, tasted of the freshest, pure and delicious fruit juice and made your lips go numb halfway through the second glass.  I notice, from my range of blurred photographs of the weekend, taken with an unfamiliar point and shoot camera that clearly still requires some level of sober mental capacity, that aside from the odd entirely typical view of the city, the main point of focus in the foreground of every one is a row of glasses, grinning out of focus faces behind. Whether or not 50 is really the new 30......

Well we did walk a lot so we deserved it - lunch in the astonishing baroque/rococo New York Bar and Grill included.  It is a bit like eating among the angelic furbelows of der Wies church, that extraordinary rococo confection in Bavaria whose proper name is the the Church of the Scourged Saviour; not a perfect fit somehow with an explosion of gold, pink and pastel blue.  The New York Bar has plenty of added red plush, gilt and ormolu to match its painted ceilings and marbled pillars but there is substance as well as style in good straightforward Hungarian food; goulash, cured meats like mangalica ham, the product of a boar with a fluffy sheep-like coat, schnitzels, a New York burger, cured salmon, a variety of fishy soups of the perch and pike mittel European variety and lots of enormous cakes and ice creams.  Many of these are rather unnecessarily pictured in the menu and there is plenty of good red wine, white too I am sure,  or a spicy bloody mary if needed and it was. The coffee, as always in this part of the world, is excellent - the Turks are not forgotten.

As for sights and sounds to fill more than a weekend, they can nevertheless be more than tasted in a couple of determined days. The National Museum of Fine Arts has the most staggering European collection with odds and ends of Egyptian and other art gleaned from various private collectors over the years. The Italian collection opens with one of the most beautiful and moving Ghirlandaios of all; a St Stephen , once part of a polyptych in Santa Maria Novella in Florence and fitting for the patronal country of St Stephen although that one was a Hungarian king rather than Ghirlandaio's richly robed first Christian martyr with the stoning wounds bloody on his head. There is a vast Dutch collection that includes several glorious Brueghels with all contemporary life on show whether at a village market or Golgotha and a Noah pair of every animal or bird from every bestiary or menagerie available at the time.  I never remember which Brueghel is which so don't ask.

The neo-classical Museum of Fine Arts stands at one side of the great statue complex of Heroes Square opposite the Palace of Art where temporary exhibitions are held and at the end of the wide boulevard of Andrassy Ut. Any reader of old cold war thrillers will know Andrassy Ut as the address of the torture chambers of the secret police, before that the same house served the Gestapo similarly.  Now it is the House of Terror Museum, a remarkable contemporary exhibition space dedicated to the worst that can and did happen under the extreme regimes of left and right in Hungary.  It is compellingly horrifying to watch video after video of testament from those who suffered but survived, those who did not are memorialised in numberless black and white photographs.  For non-Hungarian speakers, and Magyar is hard to fathom, there are racks of copies of exhaustive notes in English covering the exhibits in every room.  Tourists from countries that have not suffered in similar ways may hardly comprehend the awfulness of those terrible times or of the lives destroyed by past contact with this place and everything it stood for.  We are left, however, with a sense of deep unease exacerbated by daily updates on Russia's present adventures in Ukraine. 

Lighter enjoyment is offered by the Art Nouveau whimsy on show in the Museum of Applied Arts, designed in 1896 by Lechner, an important exponent of the Hungarian Secession movement who also designed the Postal Savings Bank building in Budapest. The outside of the Museum is traffic stoppingly surprising with its green and yellow Zsolnay tiled oriental dome and roofs. Inside there is a remarkable sense of space and light.  The white painted girders of the great glass glazed and iron atrium are surrounded by cloister like galleries divided by indo-saracenic arches and filled with arts and crafts and art nouveau work including the most covetable Lalique and Tiffany pieces.  Only recently rediscovered in a store, the architectural ceramics of Alexandre Bigot, bought by the Museum's director at the Paris Exhibition of 1900, are astonishingly powerful. Art Nouveau and secession architecture  is everywhere in Budapest, grabbing the eye and the attention from the standard neo-classicism and neo-gothicism of formal 19th century institutional expectations and later reconstructions even if the Parliament Building and the endlessly rebuilt buildings of Buda Castle dominate the river views on either bank of the Danube as it runs through the city.

Exercise or relaxation means a bath or a swim in one of many spa water pools some of which, like the Gellert are part of huge complexes of hotels, saunas, hot and cold pools, massage and steam rooms.  Turkish influence hangs on in several old and beautiful Turkish baths and the yellow and white painted walls of the Szechenyi Baths surround baths from the hottest and deepest thermal springs in the city.  On Sunday morning the cafe there was the only place in the city over the weekend where I found pogacsa, the delicious buns flavoured with cheese, bacon, sour cream or paprika and probably a whole host of other possibilities. I couldn't buy one, no one serving on Sundays perhaps but these buns stick deliciously in my mind since another, teenage, Sunday morning decades ago when I drove into Budapest with a friend from Ceasescu's starving Romania.  Budapest may have been communist too but it didn't show in cafes and restaurants where gypsy violinists played and there was food, good food even then. Romania was nothing but the smell of cabbage and cheap petrol in the air; illness, deformity and misery to match the sound of carts on cobbles haunting dark power cut nights in Vlad Dracul's Sighisoara; and, as for food, nasty tinned fish and, strangely, chocolate easter bunnies in the food shops.  Could that possibly be a real memory? The first cafe we found open in Budapest had a basket of bacon filled pogacsa in the middle of the table and I think we ate the whole lot.

This Sunday, pogacsa- less but lunch in view, we strolled from the baths, past the turquoise tiled dome of the elephant house in the Budapest zoo, a large grey bottom just visible over the wall in the enclosure below. The zoo gate must be the most unusual anywhere in the world, a hindu inspired arched confection, complete with rampant tigers,  resting on large stylised stone elephants.  On past the Sunday model yacht enthusiasts at the Varosliget park boating pool, past the unfrozen ice rink and the misleadingly mediaeval turrets of the late 19th century Vajdahunyad Castle, back to the metro at Andrassy Ut and, bloody marys hoving into view, to Octogon and a short hungry walk to the sparkling haven of the New York Bar. 

After that, floating to the airport on a cloud of wellbeing that survived even British Airways and delays. Memories and souvenirs of Budapest come in worth its weight in gold Herend porcelain, also available worldwide at no extra cost. Less costly is something edible from the wide range of Hungarian salamis on show in the neo-gothic Central Market - worth seeing with or without such purchases.  Then there are all those fruity delicious alcohols in seductively elegant bottles in duty free and, for posterity, the indecipherable photographs.

So, a perfect weekend? All this and good company too? It will certainly do.....