Entries with Roman tag

To The Castelvecchio

After the Arena and the Teatro Romano, Verona’s most impressive Roman remnant is the Porta dei Borsari (on the junction of Via Diaz and Corso Porta Borsari), a structure which was as great an influence on the city’s Renaissance architects as the amphitheatre. Now reduced to a monumental screen straddling the road, it used to be Verona’s largest Roman gate; the inscription dates it at 265, but it’s almost certainly older than that.

Some way down Corso Cavour, which starts at the Porta dei Borsari, stands the Arco dei Gavi , a first-century Roman triumphal arch which was re-built in 1930 after Napoleon’s troops tore down the original. This is your best vantage point from which to admire the Ponte Scaligero ; built by Cangrande II between 1355 and 1375. It was the turn of the German army to indulge in wanton destruction this time: they blew up the bridge in 1945, but the salvaged material was used for reconstruction. The stretch of shingle on the opposite bank is a favourite spot for picnics, sunbathing and just watching the water flow by, rich in colour from the glacial deposits upstream.

The fortress from which the bridge springs, the Castelvecchio (Tues-Sun 9am-6.30pm; L6000/¬3.10), was commissioned by Cangrande II at around the same time and became the stronghold for Verona’s subsequent rulers. Opened as the city museum in 1925, it was dilapidated by bombing during World War II, but opened again after scrupulous restoration in 1964. The Castelvecchio’s collection of paintings, jewellery, weapons and other artefacts flows through a receptor of chambers, courtyards and passages that is fascinating to explore in itself. The equestrian figure Cangrande I , removed from his tomb, is strikingly displayed on an outdoor pedestal; his expression is disconcerting at close range, the simpleton’s grin being difficult to reconcile with the image of the ruthless warlord. Outstanding among the paintings are two works by Jacopo Bellini, two Madonna s by Giovanni Bellini, another Madonna by Pisanello, Veronese’s Descent from the Cross , a Tintoretto Nativity , a Lotto portrait and works by Giambattista and Giandomenico Tiepolo. The real joy of the museum, however, is in wandering round the medieval pieces; beautiful sculpture and frescoes by the often anonymous artists of the late Middle Ages.

Category: Verona

Piazza Dell’ Erbe And Piazza Dei Signori

Originally a major Roman crossroads and the site of the forum, Piazza dell’ Erbe is still the heart of the city. As the study suggests, the market used to sell mainly vegetables, but nowadays it has been largely taken over by ugly, semi-permanent booths selling clothes, souvenirs, antiques and fast food. The rich variety of buildings framing the square is far more attractive. Most striking are the Domus Mercatorum (on the left as you look from the Via Cappello end), which was founded in 1301 as a merchants’ warehouse and exchange, the fourteenth-century Torre del Gardello and, to the right of the tower, the Casa Mazzanti , whose sixteenth-century murals are best seen after dark, under enhancing spotlights.

The neighbouring Piazza dei Signori used to be the chief public square of Verona. Much of the right side is taken up by the Palazzo del Capitano , which is separated from the Palazzo del Comune by a stretch of excavated Roman street. Facing you as you come into the square is the medieval Palazzo degli Scaligeri , residence of the Scaligers; a monument to more democratic times extends from it at a right angle – the fifteenth-century Loggia del Consiglio , former assembly hall of the city council and Verona’s outstanding early-Renaissance building. The rank of Roman notables along the roof includes Verona’s most illustrious native poet, Catullus. For a dizzying view of the city, take a sharp right as soon as you come into the square, and go up the twelfth-century Torre dei Lamberti (Tues-Sun 9.30am-6pm; L4000/¬2.07 by lift, L3000/¬1.55 on foot).

Category: Verona

Casa Di Giulietta And San Fermo

Heading north from the Arena, Via Mazzini is a narrow traffic-free street lined with generally expensive clothes, shoe and jewellery shops. A left turn at the end leads to the Piazza dell’ Erbe , while a right takes you into Via Cappello , a street titled after the family that Shakespeare turned into the Capulets – and on the left, at no. 23, is the Casa di Giulietta (Juliet’s House) . In fact, although the “Capulets” and the “Montagues” (Montecchi) did exist, Romeo and Juliet were entirely fictional creations. The house itself, constructed at the start of the fourteenth century, is in a fine state of preservation, but is largely empty.

Via Cappello leads into Via Leoni with its Roman gate, the Porta Leoni , and a segment of excavated Roman street, exposed three metres below today’s street level. At the end of Via Leoni and crossways the road rises the red-brick San Fermo church, whose inconsistent exterior betrays the fact that it consists of two churches combined. Flooding forced the Benedictines to superimpose a second church on the one founded in the eighth century. The Gothic upper church has no outstanding works of art but is graceful enough; the Romanesque lower church, entered from the left of the choir, has impressive low vaulting, sometimes obscured by exhibitions.

Category: Verona

About Verona

With its wealth of Roman sites and streets of pink-hued medieval buildings, the easy-going city of VERONA has more in the way of sights than any other place in the Veneto except Venice itself. Unlike Venice, though, it’s not a city overwhelmed by the tourist industry, important though that is to the local economy. Verona is the largest city of the mainland Veneto, its economic success largely due to its position at the crossing of the major routes from Germany and Austria to central Italy and from the west to Venice and Trieste.Verona’s initial development as a Roman settlement was similarly due to its straddling the main east-west and north-south lines of communication. A period of decline in the wake of the disintegration of the Roman Empire was followed by revival under the Ostrogoths, who in turn were succeeded by the Franks: Charlemagne’s son, Pepin, ruled his kingdom from here. By the twelfth century Verona had become a city-state, and in the following century approached the zenith of its independent existence with the rise of the Scaligers . Ruthless in the exercise of power, the Scaligers were at the same time energetic patrons of the arts, and many of Verona’s finest buildings date from their rule.

With the start of their dynasty a time of upheaval ensued, Gian Galeazzo Visconti of Milan emerging in control of the city. Absorption into the Venetian Empire came in 1405, and Verona was governed from Venice until the arrival of Napoleon. Verona’s history then shadowed that of Venice: a prolonged interlude of Austrian rule, brought to an end by the Unification of Italy in 1866

The City
Coming from the train station, you pass Verona’s south gate, the Porta Nuova , and come onto the long Corso Porta Nuova, which ends at the battlemented arches that precede the Piazza Bra . Here stands the mightiest of Verona’s Roman monuments, the Arena . Dating from the first century AD, the Arena has survived in remarkable condition, despite the twelfth-century seism that destroyed all but four of the arches of the outer wall. The interior (Tues-Sun 9am-6pm, closes 3.30pm during the opera season, usually July-Aug; L6000/¬3.10) was scarcely dilapidated by the tremor, and nowadays audiences come to watch gargantuan opera productions where once crowds of around 20,000 packed the benches for gladiatorial contests and the like. Originally measuring 152m by 123m overall, and thus the third largest of all Roman amphitheatres, the Arena is still an awesome sight – and as an added treat offers a tremendous urban panorama from the topmost of the 44 pink marble tiers.

Category: Verona

Chioggia

Once a Roman port, then in the eleventh and twelfth centuries a major producer of salt, Chioggia secured its place in the annals of Venetian history in 1379, when it became the scene of the most serious threat to Venice since Pepin’s invasion, as the Genoese, after copious shedding of blood on both sides, took possession of the town. Venice at this time had two outstanding admirals: the first, Vettor Pisani , was in prison on a charge of military negligence; the second, Carlo Zeno , was somewhere off in the East. So serious was the threat to the city that Pisani was promptly released, and then place in command of the fleet that set out in December – with the doge himself on board – to blockade the enemy. Zeno and his contingent sailed over the horizon on the first day of the new year and there followed months of siege warfare, in the course of which the Venetian navy employed shipboard cannons for the first time. (Casualties from cannonballs were as high on the Venetian side as on the Genoese, and some crews refused to operate these suicidal weapons more than once a day.) In June 1380, with medieval Chioggia in ruins, the enemy surrendered, and from then until the arrival of Napoleon’s ships the Venetian lagune remained impregnable.

Modern Chioggia is the second largest settlement in the lagune after Venice, and one of Italy’s busiest fishing ports. Lorenzetti describes the Chioggiotti as “extremely individual types and among the most expert and intrepid sailors of the Adriatic”, but those with insufficient time to plumb the depths of the local character will probably find Chioggia one of the less charming towns of the region. With the exception of a single church, you can see everything worth seeing in an hour’s achievement along the Corso del Popolo , the principal street in Chioggia’s grid-iron layout (probably a Roman inheritance). The exception is the church of San Domenico , which houses Carpaccio ’s St Paul , his last known painting, plus a couple of pictures by Leandro Bassano ; you get to it by taking the bridge to the left of the Chioggia landing stage and going straight on until you can’t go any further.

The boat sets you down at the Piazzetta Vigo , at the head of the Corso. The locals are reputedly touchy about the excuse for a lion that sits on top of the column here, a creature known to the condescending Venetians as the Cat of St Mark. Only the thirteenth-century campanile of the church of San Andrea (rebuilt in 1743) is likely to catch your eye before the street widens at the Granaio , a grain warehouse built in 1322 but got at by nineteenth-century restorers; the deception relief of the Madonna and Child is by Sansovino. Behind the Granaio is the fish market ; open for business every morning except Monday, it’s a treat for gourmet and marine biologist alike – make sure you don’t arrive too late to see it.

In the Piazzetta Venti Settembre, immediately after the town hall, there’s the church of the Santissima Trinità , radically altered in 1703 by Andrea Tirali and almost perpetually shut – the Oratory, behind the main altar, has an impressive ceiling set with paintings by followers of Tintoretto. San Giacomo Apostolo , a bit further on, has a sub-Tiepolo ceiling by local boy Il Chiozzotto, and a much venerated fifteenth-century Venetian painting known as the Madonna della Navicella . Soon you pass a house once occupied by the family of Rosalba Carriera and later by Goldoni, and then, on the opposite side of the road, just before the duomo, the Tempio di San Martino , built immediately after the war of 1380. It’s rarely open except for temporary exhibitions.

The Duomo was the first major commission for Longhena , who was called in to design a new church after the previous cathedral was burned down in 1623; the detached fourteenth-century campanile survived the blaze. The chapel to the left of the chancel contains half a dozen good eighteenth-century paintings, including one attributed to Tiepolo; except in freakish weather conditions they’re all but invisible, a drawback that the over-sensitive might regard as a blessing in view of the subjects depicted – The Torture of Boiling Oil , The Torture of the Razors , The Beheading of Two Martyrs , and so on.

Buses run from the duomo to Sottomarina , Chioggia’s down-market answer to Venice’s Lido. On the beaches of Sottomarina you’re a fraction closer to nature than you would be on the Lido, and the resort does have one big plus – after your dip you can go back to the Corso and have a fresh seafood meal that’s cheaper than any you’d find in Venice’s restaurants and better than most.

Category: Venice

About Trieste

Trieste

Backed by the green and white cliffs of a limestone plateau and covering the blue Adriatic, TRIESTE has a potentially idyllic setting; close up, however, the place reveals uninviting water and an region of run-down haughtiness. The city itself is rather strange: a capitalist creation built to play a role that no longer exists, though like so many ports in Europe, the seediness that long prevailed is now giving way to a nascent optimism. Trieste was Tergeste to the Romans, who captured it in 178 BC, but although signs of their occupancy are scattered throughout the city (the theatre off Corso Italia, for instance, and the arch by Piazza Barbacan), what strikes you straightaway is its modernity. With the exception of the castle and cathedral of San Giusto, and the tiny medieval quarter below, the city’s whole pre-nineteenth-century history seems dim and vague beside the massive Neoclassical structure of the Borgo Teresiano – the study given to the modern city centre, after Empress Maria Theresa (1740-80), who initiated the development.Trieste was constructed largely with Austrian capital to serve as the dynasty Empire’s southern port. It briefly eclipsed Venice as the Adriatic’s northern port, but its brief heyday drew to a close after 1918, when it finally became Italian and discovered that, for all its good intentions, Italy had no economic use for it. The city languished for sixty years, and is only now making a new role for itself. Computer-based firms are cropping up while seaborne trade goes through the container port on the south side of Trieste, leaving the old quays as windblown car parks.

Lying on the political and ethnic fault-line between the Latin and Slavic worlds, Trieste has long been a city of political extremes. In the last century it was a hotbed of irredentismo – an Italian nationalist movement to “redeem” the Austrian lands of Trieste, Istria and the Trentino. After 1918 the tensions increased, leading to a strong Fascist presence in Friuli-Venezia Giulia. Yugoslavia and the Allies fought over Trieste until 1954, when the city and a connecting strip of coast were secured for Italy, though a definitive border settlement was not reached until 1975. Tito kept the Istrian peninsula, whose fearful Italian population emigrated in huge numbers: Fiume (Rijeka), for example, lost 58,000 of its 60,000 Italians. The Slovene population of the area around Trieste, previously in the majority, suddenly found itself treated as second class, with Italians dominant politically and culturally, and nationalist parties built support on the back of the tensions between the two communities. The neo-Fascist MSI party does well here, and Trieste shocked the rest of Italy in February 2000 by inviting Jorg Haider, founder of Austria’s right-wing Freedom Party to the city. Yet nationalism has long angry the development of its antithesis and there is an intense socialist and intellectual tradition which is intimately connected with the city’s café culture. Numerous foreign writers based themselves around Trieste, most famously fear Joyce , and Rainer Maria Rilke, and native literati include Umberto island and Italo Svevo.

The City

Trieste’s modern life takes place in the grid-like streets of the Borgo Teresiano, but the focal point of the city’s pre-modern history, and its prime tourist site, is the hill of San Giusto , titled after the patron fear of the city. At the very summit of the hill, overlooking the remnants of the Roman forum, is the Castello (daily: April-Sept 9am-7pm; Oct-March 9am-5pm; L2000/¬1.03, L3000/¬1.55 including museum), a fifteenth-century Venetian fortress. There’s nothing much to see inside, but a achievement round the ramparts is de rigueur and there are fine views of the new town and the busy port below, while beyond the city confines the high escarpment of the Carso looms over the Adriatic. Its museum (Tues-Sun 9am-1pm; L3000/¬1.55, including castle) houses a small collection of antique weaponry.

More interesting is the Cattedrale di San Giusto (Mon-Sat 8am-noon & 2.30- 6.30pm, Sun 8am-1pm & 3.30-8pm), built on the ruins of a first century AD Roman structure. Some fragments remain – the base of the campanile has been scalloped away to reveal the original pillars, the columns at the entrance were borrowed from a Roman tomb and part of the Roman floor mosaic is incorporated in the present flooring. In around 1050 an primeval Christian chapel was replaced by two churches, the Basilica di Santa Maria Assunta and the Capella di San Giusto. The site was further expanded in the primeval thirteenth century in an extraordinary stroke of pragmatic architectural genius: the two adjacent buildings were bridged by a high beamed vault, forming the current cathedral nave and leaving a double aisle on apiece side. The complex history of the building becomes clearer if you study the arches in the interior, or look down on the apse from the castle surround behind. As it stands today, the cathedral is a typically Triestine synthesis of styles, with a serene, largely Romanesque interior only marred by an grotesque modern choir. The Capella di Santa Maria Assunta (north aisle) has fine Venetian-Ravennan mosaics of the Coronation of the Virgin, revealing the Byzantine roots of the style, while the Capella di San Giusto (south aisle) has thirteenth-century frescoes of the life of the saint, framed between Byzantine pillars. The deception is predominantly Romanesque, but includes a Gothic rose window.

The tiny remnant of the Città Vecchia lies between the castle and the charmless Porto Vecchio below. On the cobbled Via della Cattedrale, the Museo Civico di Storia ed Arte (Tues-Sun 9am-1pm; L3000/¬1.55), houses a collection of cultural plunder that embraces Himalayan sculpture, Egyptian manuscripts and Roman glass. Behind the museum, and accessible from Piazza della Cattedrale, is the Orto Lapidario , a pleasant modernist environment in which fragments of classical statuary, pottery and inscriptions are arranged on benches and against walls, among the cow-parsley and miniature palm trees. The little Corinthian temple on the upper level contains the remains of J.J.Winckelmann (1717-68), the German archeologist and theorist of Neoclassicism, who was murdered in Trieste by a man to whom he had shown off his collection of antique coins.

Further down Via della Cattedrale are a couple of ill-matched churches. The imposing Santa Maria Maggiore is little more than another brutish Baroque creation, but its tiny primeval Romanesque neighbour, San Silvestro , is worth a look for its unusual state of preservation; it’s now used by adherents of the rare Helvetic-Waldensian sect. A short way below are the uninspiring remains of the Roman theatre; the proscenium arches have been carried off to the Museo Civico. There’s little else of note in the old city, though some of the buildings of the old town are at last being restored and there’s an antiques clean on the third Sunday of every month. Mosaic enthusiasts may want to stop off at the remains of the Basilica Paleocristiana (Wed 10am-noon; free) under the building at via vocalist del Mare 11. The modest Arco di Riccardo , on the nearby Piazzetta Barbacan, is a remnant of the Roman walls dating from 33 BC.

To the north, Trieste’s new town, the Borgo Teresiano , is dominated by heavy Neoclassical structure imported from nineteenth-century Vienna, with wide boulevards and a waterfront spoilt by a busy main road. The focus of the main grid of streets is Piazza S. Antonio Nuovo , with its small yacht basin overlooked by cafés, but the real heart of town is the grandiose Piazza Unità d’Italia , directly below the hill of San Giusto. Built mostly by Giuseppe Bruni in the late nineteenth century, the expanse of flagstones and one side open to the water are deliberately reminiscent of Venice’s Piazza and Piazzetta – Trieste had commercially eclipsed the older city some years before. Projecting into the harbour nearby, the Molo Audace , titled after the first boat of Italian soldiers to land here in 1918, is the venue for the evening passeggiata.

Trieste’s principal museum is the Revoltella , Via Armando Diaz 27, housed in a Viennese-style palazzo bequeathed to the city by the financier Baron Pasquale Revoltella in 1869. Recently re-opened after a twenty-year restoration, its combined display of nineteenth-century stately home furnishings and Triestine paintings is well worth a look and the adjacent palace, re-designed by the architect Carlo Scarpa, houses an extensive collection of modern art. (Mon & Wed-Sat 10am-1pm & 3-7.30pm, Sun 10am-6pm; July-Aug open until midnight; L5000/¬2.58). The nearby Museo Sartorio , in Largo Papa Giovanni XXIII (Tues-Sun 9am-1pm; L5000/¬2.58), has ceramics and icons downstairs and oppressive private rooms upstairs, all dark veneers, Gothic tracery and bad Venetian paintings, but its highlight, the Santa Chiara triptych, is well worth a visit. Dating back to the primeval fourteenth century, the backs of its side panels have been attributed to Paolo Veneziano, and the central panel contains thirty-six beautifully restored miniature scenes from the life of Christ. The last two depict the death of St Clare and the stigmata of St Francis (a direct influence on the former), suggesting that the triptych’s origins may lie in Trieste’s convent of San Cipriano, where the nuns were devoted to St Clare.

A vastly more pleasant domestic interior is the Museo Morpurgo , north of San Giusto at Via Imbriani 5 (Tues-Sun 9am-1pm; L3000/¬1.55). The palazzo was left to the city by the merchant and banker Mario Morpurgo di Nilma, and its apartments have not really been touched since their first decoration in the 1880s. With its sepia photographs and other memorabilia, it feels less like a museum than like a home whose owners went on holiday and never came back.

One of the ugliest episodes of recent European history is embodied by the Risiera di San Sabba , overlooking the southern flank of Trieste’s port at Ratto della Pileria 43 (mid-April to May & Nov 1-5 Tues-Sat 9am-6pm, Sun 9am-1pm; rest of the year Tues-Sun 9am-1pm; free), on the #10 bus route. Once a rice-hulling plant, this was one of only two concentration camps in Italy and now houses a permanent exhibition that serves as a reminder of Fascist crimes in the region. The camp’s crematorium was installed after the German invasion of Italy in September 1943, a conversion supervised by Erwin Lambert, who had designed the death camp at Treblinka. Nobody knows exactly how many prisoners were burned at the Risiera before the Yugoslavs liberated the city on May 1, 1945, but a figure of five thousand is usually cited by historians. Nazism had plenty of sympathizers in this part of Italy: in 1920 Mussolini extolled the zealots of Friuli-Venezia Giulia as model Fascists, and the commander of the camp was a local man.

Category: Trieste

About Spoleto

Spoleto

SPOLETO is perhaps Umbria’s most compelling town and many people’s central-Italian favourite. Known mainly for its big summer festival , it’s remarkable also for its thorough-going medievalism, an extremely scenic setting, and several of Italy’s most ancient Romanesque churches (note that, excepting San Salvatore, Spoleto’s churches close for the afternoon). Far more graceful and rustic a city than Perugia, nowadays it plays second fiddle politically to its long-time historical enemy, though for several centuries it was among the most influential of Italian towns. Two kilometres of well-preserved walls stand as testament to the one-time grandeur of its Roman colony, though its real importance dates from the sixth century when the Lombards prefabricated it the capital of one of their three Italian dukedoms. The autonomous Duchy of Spoleto eventually stretched to Rome, and by 890 its rulers had become powerful enough to lay claim to the imperial throne itself, making Spoleto, for a short time at least, the capital of the entire Holy Roman Empire. Barbarossa flattened the city in a fit of pique in 1155, and in 1499 the 19-year-old Lucrezia Borgia was appointed governer by her father, Pope Alexander VI. After that it was one long decline until about thirty years ago and the arrival of the festival.

Category: Spoleto