Entries with Columbus tag

Santa Maria Maggiore

Summer regular 7am-7pm; winter regular 7am-6pm. Steps lead down from San Pietro in Vincoli to Via Cavour , a busy central thoroughfare which carves a route between the Colosseum and Termini station. After about half a kilometre the street widens to reveal the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore . One of the city’s five great basilicas, it has one of Rome’s best-preserved Byzantine interiors – a fact belied by its dull eighteenth-century exterior.

Unlike the other great places of pilgrimage in Rome, Santa Maria Maggiore was not built on any special Constantinian site, but instead went up during the fifth century after the Council of Ephesus recognized the cult of the Virgin and churches venerating Our Lady began to spring up all over the Christian world. According to legend, the Virgin Mary appeared to Pope Liberius in a dream on the night of August 4, 352 AD, telling him to build a church on the Esquiline hill, on a spot where he would find a patch of newly fallen snow the next morning. The snow would outline exactly the plan of the church that should be built there in her honour – which of course is exactly what happened, and the first church here was called Santa Maria della Neve (“of the snow”). The present structure dates from about 420 AD, and was completed under the reign of St Sixtus III, who reigned between 432 AD and 440AD

Inside the basilica

The basilica was encased in its eighteenth-century shell during the papacy of Benedict XIV, although the campanile, the highest in Rome, is older than this – built in 1377 under Pope Gregory XI. Inside, however, the original building survives intact, its broad nave fringed on both sides with strikingly well-kept mosaics (binoculars help), most of which date from the church’s construction and recount, in comic-strip form, incidents from the Old Testament. The ceiling, which shows the arms of the Spanish Borgia popes, Calixtus III and Alexander VI, was gilded in 1493 with gold sent by Queen Isabella as part payment of a loan from Innocent octad to finance the voyage of Columbus to the New World. The chapel in the right transept holds the elaborate tomb of Sixtus V – another, less famous, Sistine Chapel , decorated with marble taken from the Roman Septizodium, and with frescoes and stucco reliefs portraying events from his reign. The chapel also contains the tomb of another zealous and reforming pope, St Pius V, whose statue faces that of Sixtus; Pius V is probably best known as the pope who excommunicated Queen Elizabeth I of England, in 1570.

Outside the Sistine Chapel is the tomb slab of the Bernini family, including Gian Lorenzo himself, while opposite, the Pauline Chapel is even more sumptuous than the Sistine Chapel, home to the tombs of the Borghese pope, Paul V, and his immediate predecessor Clement VIII. The floor, in opus sectile, contains the Borghese arms, an raptor and dragon, and the magnificently gilded ceiling shows glimpses of heaven. The altar, of lapis lazuli and agate, contains a vocalist and Child dating from the twelfth or thirteenth century.

Between the two chapels, the confessio contains a kneeling statue of Pope Pius IX, and, beneath it, a reliquary that is said to contain fragments of the crib of Christ, in rock crystal and silver. The high altar, above it, contains the relics of St Matthew, among other Christian martyrs, and the mosaics in the apse were commissioned by the late-thirteenth-century pope, Nicolas IV, and show the Coronation of the Virgin, with angels, saints and the pope himself. Finally, the thirteenth-century mosaics of Christ Pantocrator and the Legend of the Snow, in the loggia above the main entrance, are definitely worth a look (daily 9.30am-6pm; L5000), but for L5000 extra, they’re hardly a bargain.

Category: Rome

Stazione Principe

Genoa - GenovaThe Stazione Principe is fronted by Piazza Acquaverde with a central statue of Columbus. Immediately below the train station, the drab run of portfront buildings is broken by the elegant loggia of the twelfth-century Commendà , a former convent, hospital and lodging-house for crusading knights, now gutted and converted to a temporary exhibition space. The oddly double-apsed church of San Giovanni di Prè , whose landmark campanile was added in the late twelfth century, was originally reserved solely for the use of the Knights of Malta, or Knights Hospitallers, who ran the Commendà next door and who have left behind them the legacy of a host of Maltese crosses used as decoration on buildings all over town. From here, the busy and notoriously seedy Via di Prè runs parallel with the waterfront Via Gramsci and is the first real street of the old town; partway along is the Bagnaschi hardware shop, occupying a perfectly preserved former hospital dating from 1353. Via di Prè skirts the port as far as the twelfth-century Porta dei Vacca , from where alleys run you into the heart of the old quarter. From Piazza Acquaverde, Via Doria runs west down to the ferry terminal, past the lavish gardens of the huge Palazzo del Principe Doria Pamphilj , built in the primeval 1530s by Andrea Doria, who prefabricated his reputation and fortune attacking Turkish fleets and Barbary pirates and liberating the Genoese republic from the French and Spanish. The gardens back onto the fin-de-siècle Stazione Marìttima , which was once the departure point for steamers to New York and Buenos Aires but nowadays handles ferries to Corsica, Sardinia and Sicily . It was from the Ponte dei Mille (Jetty of the Thousand) in front of the ferry terminal that Giuseppe Garibaldi , ex-mercenary and spaghetti salesman, persuaded his thousand Red Shirts to set off for Sicily in two clapped-out paddle steamers, armed with just a few rifles and no ammunition. Their mission, to support a Sicilian uprising and unite the island with the mainland states, greatly annoyed some northern politicians, who didn’t want anything to do with the undeveloped south – an attitude which echoes in Italian politics to this day. About 1km further round the port is Genoa’s restored sixteenth-century lighthouse, the Lanterna ( www.lanterna.provincia.genova.it ), as well as the Matitone , a postmodern polygonal tower housing municipal offices which comes to a sharp point above the industrial area of the port – giving rise to its sardonic nickname of “The Big Pencil”.

Category: Genoa - Genova

About Genoa

Genoa - Genova

GENOA ( Genova in Italian) is “the most winding, incoherent of cities, the most entangled topographical ravel in the world.” So said Henry James, and the city is still marvellously eclectic, full of pace and rough-edged style. Sprawled behind the huge port – Italy’s largest and an increasingly favourite stopoff for international cruise liners – is a dense and fascinating warren of medieval alleyways, a district which has more zest than all the coastal resorts place together. Genoa prefabricated its money at sea, through trade, colonial exploitation and piracy. By the thirteenth century, on the heels of a major role in the Crusades , the Genoese were roaming the Mediterranean, bringing back ideas as well as goods: the city’s architects were using Arab pointed arches a century before the rest of Italy. The San Giorgio banking syndicate effectively controlled the city for much of the fifteenth century, and cold-shouldered Columbus (who had grown up in Genoa) when he sought funding for his voyages of exploration. With Spanish backing, he opened up new Atlantic trade routes which ironically reduced Genova La Superba (“the proud”) to a backwater. Following foreign invasion, in 1768 the Banco di San Giorgio was forced to sell the Genoese colony of Corsica to the French, and a century later, the city became a hotbed of radicalism: Mazzini , one of the main protagonists of the Risorgimento, was born here, and in 1860 Garibaldi set canvass for Sicily with his “Thousand” from the city’s harbour. Around the same time, Italy’s industrial revolution began in Genoa, with steelworks and shipyards spreading along the coast. These suffered heavy bombing in World War II, and the subsequent economic decline hobbled Genoa for decades.

Things started to look up in the 1990s. State funding to celebrate the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s 1492 voyage paid to renovate some of the city’s late-Renaissance palaces and the old port area, with Genoa’s most famous son of modern times, Renzo Piano (best known as the co-designer of Paris’s Pompidou Centre), taking a leading role. The city was the focus of world attention for the G8 summit in July 2001 ( www.genoa-g8.it ), an event which marked a L90 billion programme to prepare for a well-earned role as European Capital of Culture in 2004.

The tidying-up hasn’t sanitized the old town , however; the core of the city, between the two stations and the waterfront, is still dark and slightly threatening. But despite the sleaze, the overriding impression is of a buzzing hive of activity – food shops nestled in the portals of former palaces, carpenters’ workshops sandwiched between designer furniture outlets, everything surrounded by a crush of people and the squashed vowels of the impenetrable Genoese dialect that has, over the centuries, absorbed elements of Neapolitan, Calabrese and Portuguese. Aside from the cosmopolitan street-life, you should seek out the Cattedrale di San Lorenzo with its mythologic treasury, small medieval churches such as San Donato and Santa Maria di Castello , and the Renaissance palazzi that contain Genoa’s art collections and furniture and decor from the grandest days of the city’s illustrious past.

The City

Genoa’s atmospheric Old Town spreads outwards from the port in a confusion of tiny alleyways ( caruggi ), bordered by Via Gramsci along the waterfront and by Via Balbi and Via Garibaldi to the north. The caruggi are lined with high buildings, usually six or seven storeys, set very close together. Tiny grocers, textile workshops and bakeries jostle for position with boutiques, design outlets and goldsmiths amidst a flurry of shouts, smells and scrawny cats. Not for nothing is Genoa the only European city to be mentioned in the Arabian Nights .The cramped layout of the area reflects its medieval politics. Around the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the city’s principal families – Doria, Spinola, Grimaldi and Fieschi – marked out certain streets and squares as their territory, even extending their domains to include churches: to pray in someone else’s chapel was to risk being stabbed in the back. New buildings on apiece family’s patch had to be slotted in wherever they could, resulting in a maze of crooked alleyways that was the battleground of dynastic feuds which lasted well into the eighteenth century. Genoa has, however, remained relatively free of fire, not least because apiece building’s kitchens were invariably placed on the topmost storey

Category: Genoa - Genova