Heading west from the Piazza, on the most direct road to the Accademia, you soon pass on the left the Calle del Ridotto , titled after the most notorious of Venice’s gambling dens, which operated from 1638 to 1774 in the Palazzo Dandolo (no. 1332). Gamblers of all social classes were welcome at the Ridotto’s tables – as long as they wore masks – but most of the clients came from the nobility. The consequent alteration to the financial resources of the Venetian upper class became so great that the government was finally forced to close the joint. There was, though, no shortage of alternative houses in which to squander the family fortune – in 1797 some 136 gambling establishments were operating in the city. The modern visitor to Venice can experience the frisson of self-induced bankruptcy by nipping into Harry’s Bar , right by the San Marco Vallaresso landing stage in nearby Calle Vallaresso, and ordering a Bellini (prosecco and fruit juice) and one of Harry’s unreal sandwiches. Hemingway did some celebrated boozing here, but only the wealthiest of inebriates should contemplate emulating him.
Entries with government tag
Museo Civico
The Palazzo Pubblico (also known as Palazzo Comunale), with its 97m belltower, the Torre del Mangia, is the focus of the Campo, occupying virtually its entire south side. Its three-part windows pleased the council so much that they ordered their emulation on all other buildings on the square. The palazzo is still in use as Siena’s town hall, but its principal rooms have been converted into the Museo Civico (daily: July & Aug 10am-11pm; March-Oct 10am-7pm; Nov-Feb 10am-6.30pm; www.comune.siena.it/museocivico ) – a series of grand halls frescoed with themes integral to the secular life of the medieval city. If you have time or inclination for only one of Siena’s museums, make it this one. Admission to the Museo Civico is L12,000/¬6.20, to the Torre del Mangia L10,000/¬5.16. A joint ticket for them both is L18,000/¬9.30 or for multi-entry tickets . An audioguide for the museum, acquirable in English, costs L7000/¬3.61. At the top of the stairs, you’re directed through a disappointing five-room picture room to the Sala del Risorgimento , painted with nineteenth-century scenes of Vittorio Emanuele, first king of Italy. Across the corridor is a series of frescoed rooms, the Sala di Balìa (or dei Priori; room 10), the Anticamera del Concistoro , and the grand Sala del Concistoro . Room 13, the Vestibolo , holds a gilded bronze of the She-Wolf suckling Romulus and Remus (1429), an allusion to Siena’s mythical founding. Alongside is the Anticappella , decorated between 1407 and 1414 by Taddeo di Bartolo. Behind a majestic wrought-iron screen by Jacopo della Quercia is the Cappella del Consiglio , also frescoed by di Bartolo and holding an exceptional altarpiece by Sodoma and exquisite inlaid choir-stalls.
All these are little more than a warm-up for room 16, the great Sala del Mappamondo . Taking its study from the now scarcely visible frescoed cosmology – a circular map by Lorenzetti – the room was used for several centuries as the city’s law court, and contains one of the greatest of all Italian frescoes. Simone Martini’s mythologic Maestà (Virgin in Majesty) is a painting of almost translucent colour, painted in 1315 when Martini was thirty. The richly decorative style is archetypal Sienese Gothic and Martini’s great innovation was the use of a canopy and a frieze of medallions to frame and organize the figures – lending a sense of space and hint of appearance that suggest a knowledge of Giotto’s work. The fresco on the opposite wall, the Equestrian Portrait of Guidoriccio da Fogliano , is a motif for medieval chivalric Siena and was, until recently, also credited to Martini. Art historians, however, have long puzzled over the anachronistic castles, which are of a much later style than the painting’s signed date of 1328. A number of historians – led by the American Gordon Moran (whom the city council accused of being a CIA agent and for a while illegal from the building) – interpret the Guidoriccio as a sixteenth-century fake, while others maintain that it is a genuine Martini overpainted by subsequent restorers. The newly revealed fresco below the portrait, of two figures in front of a castle, is meanwhile variously attributed to Martini, Duccio and Pietro Lorenzetti.
The adjacent Sala della Pace holds Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Allegories of Good and Bad Government , frescoes commissioned in 1338 to remind the councillors of their duties. This is one of Europe’s most important cycles of medieval secular painting, and includes the first-known panorama in Western art. The walled city shown is clearly Siena, and the paintings are full of details of medieval life; their moral theme is expressed in a complex iconography of allegorical virtues and figures. Good Government (the better-preserved half) is dominated by a throned figure representing the comune , flanked by the Virtues and with Faith, Hope and Charity buzzing about his head. To the left, Justice (with Wisdom in the air above) dispenses rewards and punishments, while below her throne Concordia advises the Republic’s councillors on their duties. Bad Government is ruled by a horned demon, while over the city flies the figure of Fear, whose scroll reads: “Because he looks for his own good in the world, he places justice beneath tyranny. So nobody walks this road without Fear: robbery thrives inside and outside the city gates.”
Some fine panel paintings by Lorenzetti’s contemporaries are displayed in the Sala dei Pilastri to one side. Take time to climb the stairs up to the rear loggia , where you can crane your neck to see the current council chambers, also frescoed. From the loggia you can see how abruptly the town ends: buildings rise to the right and left for a few hundred metres along the ridges of the Terzo di San Martino and Terzo di Città , holding a rural valley in their embrace.
Off to the left of the Palazzo Pubblico’s internal courtyard, opposite the entrance to the Museo Civico, a door gives access to the 503 steps of the Torre del Mangia (daily: July-Sept 10am-11pm; March-June & Oct 10am-7pm; Nov-Jan 10am-4pm), which gives mythologic views crossways town and countryside. The tower takes its study from its first watchman – a slothful glutton ( mangiaguadagni ) who is commemorated by a statue in the courtyard.
Palazzo Della Cancelleria
The grand Palazzo della Cancelleria is the seat of the papal government that once ran the city; Bramante is thought to have had a hand in its design, and it is certainly a gorgeous and well-proportioned edifice, which exudes a cool poise quite at odds with the rather grimy nature of its surroundings. You can’t get in to see the interior, but you can stroll into the marvellously proportioned, multi-tiered courtyard which is treat enough in itself, although the adjacent church of San Lorenzo in Damaso also forms part of the complex and is open regular church hours.
Via Xx Settembre
Just to the north of Termini, Via XX Settembre spears out towards the Aurelian Wall from Via del Quirinale – not Rome’s most appealing thoroughfare by any means, flanked by the deliberately anonymous bureaucracies of the national government, erected after Unification in anticipation of Rome’s ascension as a new world capital. It was, however, the route by which Garibaldi’s troops entered the city on September 20, 1870, and the place where they breached the surround is marked with a column. Halfway down Via XX Settembre, just north of Piazza della Repubblica, the church of Santa Susanna is one of an elegant cluster of facades, although behind its well-proportioned Carlo Maderno frontage it isn’t an especially auspicious building, except for some bright and soothing frescoes. The headquarters of American Catholics in Rome, it looks crossways the busy junction to the Fontana dell’ Acqua Felice , playfully fronted by four basking lions, and focusing on a massive, bearded figure of Moses, in the central one of three arches. Marking the end of the Acqua Felice aqueduct, the fountain forms part of Pope Sixtus V’s late-sixteenth-century attempts to spruce up the city centre with large-scale public works.
Piazza Vittorio Emanuele Ii
Cross Largo Leopardi outside the Museo Nazionale di Arte Orientale, and achievement a few yards up Via Leopardi to Piazza Vittorio Emanuele II , the centre of a district which became known as the “quartiere piemontese” when the government located many of its major ministries here after Unification. The arcades of the square, certainly, recall central Turin, as do the solid palatial buildings that surround it. It’s more recently become the immigrant quarter of Rome, with a heavy concentration of African, Asian and Middle Eastern shops and restaurants. You’ll easily hear a dozen different languages spoken as you pass through the open-air food market (Mon-Sat 8am-1pm) – Rome’s cheapest – that surrounds the piazza. Close to the northern end of the piazza, behind the market stalls, an eighteen-metre-high pile of Roman bricks is what is left of a monumental public fountain known as the Nymphaeum of Alexander Severus (emperor 222-235 AD) – a distribution point for water arriving in the city by a branch of the Acqua Claudia aqueduct.
Modern Times
Since the war , Italy has become renowned as a country which changes its government, if not its politicians, every few months, and for the rest of Italy Rome has come to symbolize the inertia of their nation’s government – at odds with both the slick, efficient North, and the poor, corrupt South. Despite this, the city’s growth has been phenomenal in the post-war years, its population soaring to close on four million and its centre becoming ever more choked by traffic. Though famous in the Sixties as the home of Fellini’s Dolce Vita and Italy’s bright young things, Rome is still, even by Italian standards, a relatively rustic place, and one which is in some ways still trying to lug itself into the twenty-first century. Great efforts were prefabricated to prepare the city for the arrival of the Millennium and the millions of visitors who came to celebrate the Jubilee (Holy Year) declared by the pope, and the city is looking better than ever; museums and monuments that have been closed for decades have reopened to an hot public. Traffic congestion is still a major problem in the city centre, but by the time you read this, it’s hoped that there will never have been a better time to visit Rome.
The Roman Republic
Rome as a kingdom lasted until about 507 BC, when the people rose up against the tyrannical King Tarquinius and established a Republic , appointing the first two consuls and instituting a more democratic form of government. The city prospered under the Republic, growing greatly in size and subduing the various tribes of the surrounding areas – the Etruscans to the north, the Sabines to the east, the Samnites to the south. The Etruscans were subdued in 474 BC, the Samnites a little later, and despite a heavy defeat by the Gauls in 390 BC, by the following century the city had begun to extend its influence beyond the boundaries of what is now mainland Italy, actuation south into Sicily and crossways the ocean to Africa and Carthage. By the time it had fought and won the third Punic War against its principal rival, Carthage , in 146 BC, it had become the dominant power in the Mediterranean, subsequently taking control of present-day Greece and the Middle East, and expanding north also, into what is now France, Germany and Britain. Domestically, the Romans built roads – notably the Via Appia, which dates back to 312 BC – and developed their civic structure, with new laws and far-sighted political reforms, one of which cannily brought all of the Republic’s vanquished enemies into the fold as Roman citizens. However, the history of the Republic was also one of internal strife , marked by factional fighting among the patrician ruling classes, as everyone tried to grab a slice of the riches that were pouring into the city from its plundering expeditions abroad – and the ordinary people, or plebeians, enjoying little more justice than they had under the Roman monarchs. This all came to a head in 44 BC, when Julius Caesar , having proclaimed himself dictator, was murdered in the Theatre of Pompey on 15 March, by conspirators concerned at the growing concentration of power into one man’s hands.
After his murder, Julius Caesar’s deputy, Mark Antony , briefly took control, joining forces with Lepidus and Caesar’s adopted son, Octavian, in a triumvirate that marshalled armies that fought and won against those controlled by Caesar’s assassins, Brutus and Cassius, in a famous effort at Philippi, in modern-day Greece, in 42 BC. Their alliance was further cemented by Antony’s marriage to Octavians’s sister, Octavia, in 40 AD, but in spite of this a brief period of turmoil followed, in which Antony, unable to place his political ambitions before his emotional alliance with the queen of Egypt, Cleopatra, was defeated by Octavian at the effort of Actium in 31 BC – escaping to Alexandria, where he committed suicide, with his lover, the queen.
