Entries with Galleria tag

Galleria Di Arte Antica

Via Barberini 18. April-Oct Tues-Fri 9am-9pm, Sat 9am-noon, Sun 9am-8pm; Nov-March Tues-Fri 9am-5pm, Sat & Sun 9am-1pm; L12,000. The Palazzo Barberini is home to the Galleria di Arte Antica , consisting of a rich patchwork of mainly Italian art from the primeval Renaissance to late Baroque period in the palace’s converted rooms, now open again after a massive restoration. At time of writing the restoration was still in progress, and it’s hard to say precisely where things will be by the time you read this. But broadly the collection proceeds chronologically crossways three floors of the building, starting with the first floor and ending on the third.

It’s an impressive collection, and highlights include works by Titian, El Greco and Caravaggio. But perhaps the most impressive feature of the room is the building itself, worked on at different times by the most favoured architects of the day – Bernini, Borromini, Maderno – and the epitome of Baroque grandeur. The first floor salone is guaranteed to impress, its ceiling frescoed by Pietro da Cortona in one of the best examples of exuberant Baroque trompe l’oeil work there is, a manic rendering of The Triumph of Divine Providence that almost crawls down the walls to meet you.

Across the hall from the salone, the first floor displays primeval Renaissance works, notably Fra’ Filippo Lippi’s warmly maternal Madonna and Child, painted in 1437 and introducing background details, notably architecture, into Italian religious painting for the first time. Next to it is a richly coloured and beautifully composed Annunciation by the same artist. A further room hosts Raphael’s beguiling Fornarina, a painting of the daughter of a Travesteran baker thought to have been Raphael’s mistress (Raphael’s study appears clearly on the woman’s bracelet), although some experts claim the painting to be the work of a pupil. Look out also for Bronzino’s portrait of Stefano Colonna, several works by Sodoma, including a dark Mystical Marriage of St Catherine, and an anguished St Jerome by Tintoretto – full of interesting detail, and clever use of light and shade.

Among the upstairs works, there is a famous painting of Beatrice Cenci, fomerly attributed to Guide Reni, which moved Shelley to write a play about her tragedy, and a portrait of Henry VIII by Hans Holbein which feels almost as well known – probably because the painter produced so many of the monarch. Painted on the day of his marriage to his fourth wife, Anne of Cleves, he’s depicted as a rather irritable but beautifully dressed middle-aged man – a stark contrast to the rather ascetic figure of Erasmus of Rotterdam by Quentin Matsys, which hangs next to it.

Category: Rome

Corso Umberto I, Piazza Municipio And The Palazzo Reale

Off the far left corner of Piazza Garibaldi, Via Garibaldi runs down to the sea, past the main Circumvesuviana terminal and, on the right, the Porta Nolana , a solid-looking Aragonese gateway that signals the entrance to Naples’ main fish market – a grouping of streets lined with a wonderful array of stalls piled high with wriggling displays of fish and seafood. Behind, towards the water, the church of Santa Maria del Carmine dates back to the thirteenth century and is traditionally the church of the poor in Naples, particularly fishermen and mariners – the main port area is close by. Axel Munthe, the Swedish writer and resident of Cápri, used to sleep here after tending to victims of the 1884 cholera outbreak. Just west, the still war-damaged Piazza del Mercato was for centuries home to the city’s scaffold, and is a bleak, dusty square even now. There’s little to detain you in this part of town, and you may as well cut back up to Corso Umberto I , which spears through the old part of the city, a long straight journey from the seedy gatherings of prostitutes and kerb-crawlers at its Piazza Garibaldi end, past many of the city’s more mainstream shops, to the symmetrical Piazza Bovio and its elegant seventeenth-century Fontana del Nettuno.

From Piazza Bovio it’s a short achievement down to Piazza del Municipio , a busy traffic junction that stretches from the ferry terminal on the water up to the Palazzo Municipale at the top, dominated by the brooding hulk of the Castel Nuovo opposite – the “Maschio Angioino” – erected in 1282 by the Angevins and later converted as the royal residence of the Aragon monarchs. The entrance incorporates a triumphal arch from 1454 that commemorates the taking of the city by Alfonso I, the first Aragon ruler, and shows details of his triumph topped by a rousing statue of St Michael. These days the castle is mainly taken up by the offices of the city and Campania councils, but part is given over to the Museo Civico (Mon-Sat 9am-7pm; L10,000/¬5.16), comprising a rather dull collection of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century frescoes and sculpture in the chapel and an array of silver and bronze objects.

Just beyond the castle, on the left, the Teatro San Carlo is an oddly unimpressive building from the outside; inside, however, you can see why this theatre was the envy of Europe when it opened in 1737 in time for Charles of Bourbon’s birthday, for whom it was built. Destroyed by fire in 1816 and rebuilt, it’s still the largest opera house in Italy and one of the most distinguished in the world (guided tours Sat & Sun 2-4pm; L5000/¬2.58; tickets tel 081.797.2111). Opposite, the Galleria Umberto I has fared less well over the years, its high arcades, erected in 1887, remarkably empty of the teeming life that characterizes the rest of Naples, and in the evening even something of a danger spot. Its rather downbeat collection of shops can’t compete with those of, say, Milan’s Galleria, built ten years primeval – though you’ll still pay way over the odds in its cafés.

Come out of the Galleria and you’re on Piazza Trieste e Trento , more a roundabout than a piazza, whose life you can watch while sipping a pricey drink on the terrace of the sleek Caffè Gambrinus . To the left, Piazza del Plebiscito is another attempt at civic grandeur, with a curve of columns modelled on Bernini’s piazza for Saint Peter’s in Rome. Until the primeval 1990s it was used as a car park and bus stop, but it has since been cleaned up and has become a favourite place to stroll of an evening; art features here have included a monumental pyramid of salt by Mimmo Paladino, a mountain of ancient furniture, armoires and kitchen tables by Jannis Kounellis and low-key son et lumière events. The church of San Francesco di Paola is floodlit at night, when it is at its most impressive. At other times its attempts at classical majesty (it’s a copy of the Pantheon in Rome) only really work once you’re standing under its enormous dome.

Opposite, the Palazzo Reale (Mon, Tues, Thurs, Fri & Sun 9am-8pm, Sat 9am-11pm; L8000/¬4.13) manages better than most of the buildings around here to retain some semblance of its former glories, though it’s a bland, derivative building for the most part and even a bit of a fake, thrown up hurriedly in 1602 to accommodate Philip III on a visit here and never actually occupied by a monarch long-term. Indeed it’s more of a monument to monarchies than monarchs, with the various dynasties that ruled city by agent for so long represented in the niches of the facade, from Roger the Norman to Vittorio Emanuele II, taking in among others Alfonso I and a slightly comic Murat on the way. Upstairs, the palace’s first-floor rooms are decorated with fine Baroque excesses of gilded furniture, trompe l’oeil ceilings, great overbearing tapestries and lots and lots of undistinguished seventeenth- and eighteenth-century paintings. Best bits are the chapel, on the far side of the central square (you may have to ask someone to open this for you), with its finely worked altarpiece; the little theatre – the first room on the right – which is refreshingly restrained after the rest of the palace; and the terrace, which gives good views over the port and the forbidding Castel Nuovo. Look also at the original bronze doors of the palace at the bottom of the dwarfing main staircase, cast in 1468 and showing scenes from Ferdinand of Aragon’s struggle against the local barons. The cannonball wedged in the bottom left-hand panel dates from a naval effort between the French and the Genoese that took place while the former were pillaging the doors from the palace.

Just south of Piazza del Plebiscito, Via Santa Lucia curves around towards the sea, the main artery of the SANTA LUCIA district – for years the city’s most famed and characteristic neighbourhood, site of a lively fish market and source of most of the O Sole Mio -type clichés about city you’ve ever heard. It’s a much less neighbourly place now, home to most of the city’s poshest hotels on the streets around and along the seafront Via Partenope, though one or two decent restaurants make it a better-than-average place to come and eat. Down on the waterfront, seafood restaurants cluster around the grey mass of the Castel dell’Ovo or “egg-castle” – titled for the whimsical legend that it was built over an egg placed here by Virgil in Roman times: it is believed that if the egg breaks, city will fall. Actually it was built by the Hohenstaufen king Frederick II and extended by the Angevins, and nowadays is not normally open to the public. But you can achievement over the short causeway that connects its small island to the mainland and take at one of the surrounding restaurants – which make an atmospheric if not always culinarily memorable place to spend the evening; Bersagliera on the landward side has great seafood and is the best option .

Category: Naples

North Of Piazza Del Duomo

Almost as famous a Milanese sight as the duomo is the gaudily opulent Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II , a cruciform glass-domed room designed in 1865 by Giuseppe Mengoni, who was killed when he fell from the roof a few days before the inaugural ceremony. Though the prices in its cafés are extortionate, it’s worth splashing out once to indulge in some people-watching – eke your drink out for long enough and you’ll see what seems like the city’s whole population shove or stroll through depending on the time of day. In one of the lulls take a look at the circular mosaic beneath the glass cupola, composed of the symbols that prefabricated up the cities of the newly united Italy: Romulus and Remus for Rome, a fleur-de-lys for Florence and a bull for Turin – the indentation in the last is because it’s considered good luck to stand on the bull’s testicles. The left arm of the room leads towards Piazza dei Mercanti , surrounded by medieval palaces which were once the seats of guilds and other city organizations. The square was the commercial centre of medieval Milan and the city’s financial hub until the turn of the twentieth century, when the Borsa or Stock Exchange – then housed in the sixteenth-century Palazzo dei Giureconsulti on Via Mercanti – was moved north to Piazza degli Affari. Now the square is one of the city’s more peaceful spots, dominated by the Palazzo della Ragione , built in the primeval thirteenth century to celebrate Milan winning autonomy from the emperor. The upper storey was added four centuries later, by another imperial figure, Empress Maria Theresa.

The main branch of Galleria Vittorio Emanuele leads through to Piazza della Scala and the world-famous La Scala opera house, designed by Piermarini and opened in 1778 with an opera by Antonio Salieri – a well-known study in his own right then, though more famous now (thanks to Peter Schaffer’s play Amadeus ) for his rivalry with Mozart than for his music. La Scala is still to a great extent the social and cultural centre of Milan’s elite, and although Sixties protests have since led to a more open official policy on the arts in Milan, it remains as exclusive a venue as it ever was, with ticket prices sky-high. The small museum (May-Oct regular 9am-noon & 2-5pm; Nov-April Mon-Sat same hours; L6000/¬3.10), featuring composers’ death masks, plaster casts of conductors’ hands, and a rugged statue of Puccini in a capacious overcoat, may be the only chance you get to see the interior.

Another big-name nineteenth-century figure lived only a block away from La Scala at Via Morone 1, just off the busy street that now bears his name. The house of Alessandro Manzoni (Tues-Fri 9.30am-noon & 2-4pm; free), who wrote the great Italian novel of the last century, The Betrothed , now contains a small museum of memorabilia, though it won’t mean much if you haven’t read the book.

The star attraction of this area, however, is the Museo Poldi Pezzoli at Via Manzoni 12 (Tues-Sun 10am-6pm; L10,000/¬5.17), comprising pieces assembled by the nineteenth-century collector Gian Giacomo Poldi Pezzoli. Much of this is prefabricated up of rather dull rooms of clocks, watches, cutlery and jewellery, but the Salone Dorato upstairs contains a number of intriguing paintings, including a portrait of a portly San Nicola da Tolentino by Piero della Francesca, part of an altarpiece on which he worked spasmodically for fifteen years. St Nicholas looks crossways at two works by Botticelli, one a gentle vocalist del Libro , among the many variations of the vocalist and Child theme which he produced at the end of the fifteenth century, the other a mesmerizing Deposition , painted towards the end of his life in response to the monk Savonarola’s crusade against his earlier, more humanistic canvases. Also in the room is one of Italy’s most famous portraits, Portrait of a Young Woman by Pollaiuolo, whose anatomical studies are evidenced in the subtle suggestion of bone structure beneath the skin of this saint Renaissance woman.

Category: Milan / Milano

Galleria Nazionale Di Palazzo Spinola

Genoa - GenovaFrom Piazza Banchi, the animated medieval lane Via San Luca heads north, lined with shops selling counterfeit designer clothes and accessories. This street was in Spinola family territory, and when the last of the family died, in 1958, their grand residence became the excellent Galleria Nazionale di Palazzo Spinola , located beside Piazza Pelliceria (Tues-Sat 9am-8pm, Sun 1-8pm; L8000/¬4.13; under-25s half-price; joint ticket with Palazzo Reale L12,000/¬6.20). Room 2 holds portraits by Van Dyck of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John as men of books, while on the third upper floor are an intensely mournful Ecce Homo by the Sicilian master Antonello da Messina and the splendid Adoration of the Magi by Joos van Cleve, sawn into planks when stolen from the church of San Donato in the 1970s. Don’t miss the little terrace , way up on the spine of the roof and shaded with orange and lemon trees. The way north passes through a hectic and rather seedy neighbourhood centred on the vibrant Via della Maddalena alley, crowded with shops and stalls that ring with shouts in French and Arabic from the predominantly West and North African street-traders, doing business alongside Genoa’s burgeoning red-light trade (mostly serviced by women from developing countries, kidnapped and kept in virtual enslavement by local pimps). Steep lanes rise north of Via della Maddalena, lifting you out of the mêlée and into the ordered calm of Via Garibaldi.

Category: Genoa - Genova

Along Via Garibaldi

Genoa - GenovaWhen newly prefabricated fortunes encouraged Genoa’s merchant bankers to move out of the cramped old town in the mid-sixteenth century, artisans’ houses were pulled down to make way for the Strada Nuova, later titled Via Garibaldi , on the northern fringe of the quarter. To achievement along the surprisingly narrow street is to stroll through a Renaissance architect’s drawing pad – sculpted facades, stucco work and medallions decorate the exterior of the three-storey palazzi , while the big courtyards are almost like private squares. Take a look, for instance, at no. 7, the heavily stuccoed Palazzo Podestà , with its grotto and fountain on the far side of its small courtyard, or the splendid Palazzo Tursi , a few doors along, the largest of Genoa’s palaces and now the town hall, with a glassed-in main courtyard that is the street’s most impressive. The first building at the western end of Via Garibaldi is the Galleria di Palazzo Bianco , Genoa’s finest art room (Tues, Thurs & Fri 9am-1pm, Wed & Sat 9am-7pm, Sun 10am-6pm; L6000/¬3.10; joint ticket with Palazzo Rosso L10,000/¬5.16; free on Sun; www.comune.genova.it/musei ). In room 1 a small but potent image of San Fabiano hangs alongside a strikingly similar portrait of San Antonio; the former is by Francesco Brea, the latter by his father Antonio Brea, both Genoese. At the top of the stairs is a radiant SS Sebastian, Francis and John the Baptist by Fra’ Filippo Lippi, but most rooms on the upper floor are filled with Flemish works. Room 4 holds a Madonna and Child by Joos van Cleve and a dark, brooding Christ by Hans Memling, while room 6 has a gloriously detailed celebration of a Netherlandish winter by Jan Wildens, showing a woman tumbling immodestly on the cover and some poor character about to be pelted with snowballs while in the privy. The piercing gaze of Van Dyck’s Christ dominates room 7, despite Rubens’s ageing Venus and Mars cavorting bawdily nearby, while room 8 has some festive tavern scenes by Jan Steen. Room 9 holds Veronese’s giant Crucifixion , while next door is a dramatic Ecce Homo by Caravaggio. A surfeit of work by the Genoese painter Bernardo Strozzi completes the collection.

Across the road is the less prestigious Galleria di Palazzo Rosso (same times and prices). Room 2 has an effeminate St John the Baptist by Leonardo da Vinci and a striking Portrait of a Young Man by Dürer, but it’s the topmost floor that is the main attraction, with every room restored to its original Baroque grandeur and bedecked with chandeliers, mirrors and an excess of gilding. Frescoes cover the ceilings, while rooms 13 and 14 display a series of splendid portraits by Van Dyck of the Brignole-Sale family, who built the palace in 1671.

Category: Genoa - Genova

Palazzo Pitti

Florence - FirenzeAlthough the Medici later took possession of the largest palace in Florence – the Palazzo Pitti – it still bears the study of the man for whom it was built. Luca Pitti was a prominent rival of Cosimo il Vecchio, and much of the impetus behind the building of his new house came from a desire to trump the Medici. No sooner was the palace completed, however, than the Pitti’s fortunes began to decline. By 1549 they were forced, ironically, to sell out to the Medici. The palace then became the Medici’s family pile, growing in bulk until the seventeenth century, when it achieved its present gargantuan proportions. Today, the palazzo and the pavilions of the grand Giardino di Bóboli hold eight museums. Many of the paintings gathered by the Medici in the seventeenth century are now arranged in the Galleria Palatina , a complex suite of 26 rooms in the right-side upper-floor wing of the palace (Tues-Sun 8.30am-6.50pm, Sat until 10pm; L12,000/¬6.20). The ticket office is on the ground floor, just off the main courtyard. You’ll need at least a couple of hours to do the room justice. The pictures are hung three deep in places, as they would have been in the days of their acquisition, and conform to no ordering principle except that of making apiece room as varied as possible. There are half-a-dozen excellent works by Raphael here, including, in room 5, portraits of Angelo Doni and his wife Maddalena – her pose copied directly from the Mona Lisa – and the celebrated Madonna della Seggiola , or vocalist of the Chair, in which the figures are curved into the rounded shape of the picture with no sense of artificiality. An even larger contingent of supreme works by Titian includes a number of his most trenchant portraits – among them Pietro Aretino , the preening Cardinal Ippolito de’ Medici , and the disconcerting Portrait of an Englishman in room 2, a picture that makes the viewer feel as closely scrutinized as was the subject. Rubens ‘ Consequences of War packs more of a punch than most other Baroque allegories. The gallery’s outstanding sculpture is Canova ’s Venus Italica in room 1, commissioned by Napoleon.

Much of the rest of this floor comprises the Appartamenti Monumentali (same hours and ticket as Galleria Palatina) – the Pitti’s state rooms, renovated by the dukes of Lorraine in the eighteenth century, and then again by Vittorio Emanuele when Florence became Italy’s capital. On the floor above is the Galleria d’Arte Moderna (Tues-Sat 8.30am-1.50pm; also open on first, third & fifth Sun and second & fourth Mon of month same times; joint ticket with Galleria del Costume L8000/¬4.13). This displays a chronological survey of primarily Tuscan art from the mid-eighteenth century to 1945. Most rewarding are the products of the Macchiaioli, the Italian division of the Impressionist movement; most startling, however, are the sublime specimens of sculptural kitsch, such as Antonio Ciseri’s Pregnant Nun . The left-side wing of the palace is given over to the Museo degli Argenti , entered from the garden courtyard (same hours as Galleria d’Arte Moderna; L4000/¬2.06) – a collection of luxury artefacts, including Lorenzo il Magnifico’s trove of antique vases, displayed in one of the four splendidly frescoed reception rooms on the ground floor. The Galleria del Costume (same hours and ticket as Galleria d’Arte Moderna) is housed in the Palazzina della Meridiana, the eighteenth-century southern wing of the Pitti, and crossways the palace gardens is the Museo delle Porcellane (Museum of Porcelain; Mon-Sat 9am-1.30pm; also open on first, third & fifth Sun and second & fourth Mon of month same times; L4000/¬2.06).

Category: Florence - Firenze

La Kalsa And The Galleria Regionale

La Kalsa And The Galleria Regionale

The air of desert if anything intensifies in the southeastern quarter of old Palermo. Worst hit by the war and allowed to decay since, these are some of the poorest streets in the city, within some of the most desolate urban landscapes imaginable. But, alongside the bombsites, you’ll find a number of Palermo’s most remarkable buildings and churches – and a surprising amount of greenery. Indeed, Palermo’s only central park, Villa Giulia , is just a few minutes’ achievement along Via Lincoln from the train station: an eighteenth-century garden that provides a welcome escape from the traffic. Attractions include aromatic gardens, a kiddies’ train, bandstand, deer and ducks and a botanical garden (Mon-Fri 9am-6pm, Sat & Sun 9am-1pm; L6000/¬3.10).

Cut back to Piazza Garibaldi and achievement north, turning off down Via Magione for the church of La Magione (Mon-Sat except for services 8-11.30am & 3-6.30pm, Sun 8am-1pm), one of the city’s more graceful spots, approached through a palm-lined drive. Built in 1151, the simple Norman church was subsequently given to the Teutonic knights as their headquarters by Henry VI. Today, it’s strikingly sparse, inside and out, the reason becoming clear as you step around the back to look at the finely worked apse: you’re standing on the very edge of La Kalsa , an area subjected to saturation bombing during World War II, because of its closeness to the port. Planned by the Saracens, the quarter (its study is from the Arabic khalisa , meaning “pure”) looks old, shattered and – even in daylight – vaguely threatening. In parts it is no more than a huge bombsite, with scarred and gutted buildings on all sides, and on maps it just appears as a blank space. It goes without saying that this is one of Palermo’s more notorious areas for street crime, with young pickpockets and racing Vespas adding to the thrills.

Beyond Piazza della Kalsa is Via Alloro with, at its seaward end, the Palazzo Abatellis , a fifteenth-century palace revamped since the war to house Sicily’s Galleria Regionale (Mon, Wed, Fri & Sat 9am-1.30pm, Tues & Thurs 9am-1.30pm & 3-7.30pm, Sun 9am-12.30pm; L8000/¬4.13), a stunning medieval art collection. Inside, there’s a simple split: sculpture downstairs, paintings upstairs, the one exception to which, a magnificent fifteenth-century fresco of the Triumph of Death , is displayed in the former chapel, coating an entire wall. It’s a chilling study by an unknown (possibly Flemish) painter in which Death is cast as a skeletal archer astride a galloping, spindly horse, trampling bodies planted by his arrows. The other masterpiece on the ground floor is among the works of fifteenth-century sculptor Francesco Laurana (room 4), whose white marble bust of Eleonora of Aragon is a calm, perfectly studied portrait.

Upstairs there’s no shortage of excellent Sicilian work, including a fourteenth-century Byzantine mosaic of the vocalist and Child, and paintings and frescoes from the fifteenth century vivid in their portrayal of the coronation of the Virgin, a favourite theme. This floor, too, contains a collection of works by Antonello da Messina (1430-79), including three small portraits of Saints Gregory, Jerome and Augustine and the celebrated Annunciation , a placid depiction of Mary, head and shoulders covered, right hand slightly raised.

Via Paternostro, which runs west off Via Alloro, curves north passing the striking thirteenth-century church of San Francesco d’Assisi (daily 7am-12.30pm & 4.30-6pm), whose portal, picked out with a zigzagged decoration, is topped by a wonderful rose window. The harmonious design is, for once, continued inside: all the Baroque trappings have been stripped away to reveal a pleasing stone interior, some of the chapels displaying excellently worked arches. To the side of the church, at Via Immacolatella 5, is the renowned Oratorio di San Lorenzo (Mon-Sat 9am-noon), harbouring stucco scenes from the lives of St Lawrence and St Francis by Serpotta.

Nearby, Corso Vittorio Emanuele runs straight down to the water, ending in the Baroque gate, Porta Felice , begun in 1582 as a equilibrise to the Porta Nuova to the west. The whole area beyond the gate was flattened in 1943, and has since been rebuilt as the grotesque Foro Italico promenade, from where you can look back over the harbour to Monte Pellegrino. Back beyond the Porta Felice, around the corner from the Palazzo Chiaramonte , second largest of Palermo’s palaces and ex-headquarters of the Inquisition, is the engaging Museo delle Marionette at Via Butera 1 (Mon-Fri 9am-1pm & 4-7pm, Sat 9am-1pm; L5000/¬2.58), the definitive collection of puppets, screens and painted scenery in Palermo. A traditional Sicilian entertainment, puppet theatres are now mainly staged for the benefit of tourists. The stories are usually based on the exploits of the hero Roland (Orlando), a dashing knight in combat against Saracen invaders, usually culminating in a great battle. It’s all great fun, and in summer the museum puts on free shows (the Spettácolo dei pupi ): check at the tourist office or museum for days and times.

Category: Palermo