From 1905 to 1915, and again in 1919-20, James Joyce and his wife Nora lived in Trieste. After staying at Piazza Ponterosso 3 for a month, they moved to the third-floor flat at Via San Nicolò 30. (In 1919 the poet Umberto island bought a bookshop on the ground floor at the same address. The two writers seem never to have met, though they had a common friend in the novelist Italo Svevo.) There is no plaque in Via San Nicolò, but there is one on via Bramante 4, quoting the postcard that Joyce despatched in 1915 to his brother Stanislaus, whose Irredentist sympathies had landed him in an Austrian internment camp. The postcard announced that the first chapter of James’s new work, Ulysses , was finished.
Entries with Ulysses tag
Joyce In Trieste
Museo Gregoriano Etrusco
Past the entrance to the Egyptian Museum a grand staircase, the Simonetti Stairs, leads up to the Museo Gregoriano Etrusco , which holds sculpture, funerary art and applied art from the sites of southern Etruria – a good complement to Rome’s specialist Etruscan collection in the Villa Giulia. Especially worth seeing are the finds from the Regolini-Galassi tomb, from the seventh century BC, discovered near Cerveteri, which contained the remains of three Etruscan nobles, two men and a woman; the breastplate of the woman and her huge fibia (clasp) are of gold. Take a look at the small ducks and lions with which they are decorated, fashioned in the almost microscopic beadwork for which Etruscan goldsmiths were famous. There’s also armour, a bronze bedstead, a funeral chariot and a wagon, as well as a great number of enormous storage jars, in which food, oil and wine were contained for use in the afterlife. Beyond here are Etruscan bronzes, including weapons, candelabra, barbecue sets (skewers and braziers); beautiful women’s makeup cases known as cistae, and, most notably, the so-called Mars of Todi, a three-quarters lifesize votive statue found in the Umbrian town of Todi. On a flap of the figure’s breastplate an inscription gives the study of the donor. Further on, there is a large collection of Etruscan sarcophagi and stone statuary from Vulci, Tarquinia and Tuscania in northern Lazio. Particularly interesting here are the finely carved horses’ heads from Vulci and the sarcophagus of a magistrate from Tarquinia which still bears traces of the paint its reliefs were coloured with. There are also two rooms of Etruscan jewellery, with exquisite goldsmith work, crowns of golden oak and laurel leaves, necklaces, earrings and rings set with semiprecious stones and a fibula complete with the owner’s study etched on it in such small writing that a magnifying glass is provided for you to read it.
If you haven’t had your fill of the Etruscans by now, go back downstairs to see another huge collection, housed in a series of large rooms on the north side of the Belvedere Palace which offer stunning views of Monte Mario, and comprising lots of vases, assorted weapons and items of everyday household use, and a magnificent terracotta statue of Adonis melodramatically lying on a webbed couch, found near the town of Tuscania in the 1950s. Finally, don’t miss the Greek krater, among a lot of Greek pottery found in Etruscan tombs, which shows Menelaus and Odysseus asking the Trojans for the return of Helen. It’s housed in a special display case and can be rotated by pressing the electrical switch on the bottom of the case
Domus Aurea
Via Labicana 136. Daily 9am-8pm, guided tours obligatory; L10,000, plus L6000 for the mandatory tour, plus L2000 reservation fee – L18,000 in total. Booking is strongly recommended, tel 06 3974 9907. The entrance is off Via Labacana, in the Parco Oppio, almost opposite the Colosseum. (Do not continue up the path into main part of the park.) One of the Esquiline Hill’s most intriguing sights is without doubt Nero’s Domus Aurea or “Golden House”, built on the summit of the Oppian and into its sides after a fire of 64 AD devastated this part of Rome. This “house” was a vast undertaking, but it was not intended to be a residence at all; rather it was a series of banqueting rooms, nymphaeums, small baths, terraces and gardens, covering what at the time was a small lake fed by the underground springs and streams that drained from the surrounding hills. Rome was used to Nero’s excesses, but it had never seen anything like the Golden House before. The deception was supposed to have been coated in solid gold, there was hot and cold running water in the baths, one of the dining rooms was rigged up to shower flowers and natural scent on guests, and the grounds – which covered a full square mile – held vineyards and game. Nero didn’t get to enjoy his palace for long – he died a couple of years after it was finished, and Vespasian tore a lot of the exposed deception down in disgust, draining its lake and building the Colosseum on top. Later Trajan built his baths on top of the rest of the complex, and it was pretty much forgotten until its surround paintings were discovered by Renaissance artists, including Raphael. When these artists first visited these rooms, they had to descend down ladders into what they believed at first was some kind of mystical cave, or grotto – giving us the word grotesque, which they used to describe their attempts to imitate this style of painting in their own work.
Today it is doable to visit parts of the Golden House, which have recently been opened under the Trajan’s baths. Tours start by taking you down a long corridor into the excavated rooms of the palace. The temperature always hovers at around 10°C and this, and the almost 100 percent humidity, makes it necessary to wear a sweater or crown even in the dead of the Roman summer
Inside the Domus Aurea
Tours can at first be confusing, as you become aware of just how much Trajan set out to slur the palace with his baths complex – the baths’ foundations merge into parts of the palace, and vice versa – but a free plan, not to mention the guide, helps you sort it out. There are various covered fountains, service corridors, terraces and, most spectacularly, the Octagonal Room, domed, with a hole in the middle, which is supposed to have rotated as the day progressed to emulate the passage of the sun. Most of the rooms are decorated in the so-called Third Pompeiian style, with fanciful depictions of people looking out windows at you, garlands of flowers, fruit, vines and foliage, interspersed with mythical animals. Perhaps the best preserved frescoes are in the room of Achilles at Skyros, and illustrate Homer’s story of Achilles being sent to the island of Skyros disguised as a woman to prevent him being drawn into the Trojan wars. In one fresco, Achilles is in drag at the Skyros court; another shows him putting his female clothes aside and picking up a shield, brought to him by Odysseus (in the crested helmet) to catch him out and betray his disguise
University Quarter
Bordered by Via Oberdan to the west and Strada Maggiore to the south, the orient section of Bologna’s centro storico preserves many of the older university departments, housed for the most part in large seventeenth- and eighteenth-century palaces. This is perhaps the most pleasant part of the city to while away the day – or night – amid a concentration of low-budget bars, restaurants and shops aimed at the student population. It is also the place to scour for information on events around town: posters plaster the walls along Via Zamboni and the lanes off it – Via delle Moline, Via Belle Arti, Via Mentana – and the bars and cafés are often promoting some happening or other. Via Rizzoli leads into the district from Piazza Maggiore, ending up at Piazza di Porta Ravegnana, where the Torre degli Asinelli (daily 9am-6pm; closes 5pm in winter; L3000/¬1.55), next to the perilously leaning Torre Garisenda , are together known as the Due Torri , the only two remaining of literally hundreds of towers that were scattered crossways the city during the Middle Ages. The former makes a good place from which to get an overview of the city centre and beyond, out over the red-tiled roofs crossways the hazy, flat plains and southern hills beyond.
Walking southeast from the Due Torri, Via Santo Stefano leads down to its medieval gateway, past a complex of four – but originally seven – churches, collectively known as Santo Stefano . It’s an captivating complex set in a wide piazza at the conjunction of several narrow porticoed streets. Three of the churches grappling on to the piazza, of which the striking polygonal church of San Sepolcro (closed noon-3.30pm), reached through the church of Crocifisso , is about the most interesting. The basin in its courtyard, called “Pilate’s Bowl”, dates from the eighteenth century, while on the inside the bones of St Petronius, held in a tomb modelled on the church of the holy sepulchre in Jerusalem, wage a macabre focus typical of the relic-obsessed Middle Ages. A doorway leads from here through to Santi Vitale e Agricola , Bologna’s oldest church, built from discarded Roman fragments in the fifth century, while the fourth church, the Trinità , lies crossways the courtyard and is home to a small museum (daily 9am-noon & 3.30-6pm; free) containing a reliquary of St Petronius, a thirteenth-century fresco of the Massacre of the Innocents, and a handful of later paintings.
From here, follow Via Gerusalemme up to Strada Maggiore, where, a little way down on the right, the Gothic church of Santa Maria dei Servi dates from 1386. It’s arguably Bologna’s most elegant church, with a beautiful portico and fourteenth-century ceiling frescoes by Vitale da Bologna – a rare chance to see the work of the so-called “father” of Bolognese painting in situ . A chapel also holds a Madonna Enthroned by Cimabue. Across Strada Maggiore, Piazza Aldrovandi has a good regular street market, and is lined on one side by the Museo Civico d’Arte Industriale and the Museo Davia Bargellini (both Tues-Sat 9am-2pm, Sun 9am-1pm; free), an eclectic mixture prefabricated up of the art collection of the Davia family and displays of textiles, glassware and furniture; the entrance is on Strada Maggiore. Further north from here, Via Petroni leads through to Piazza Verdi , at the heart of the university district and at lunchtimes packed with students grabbing some of the city’s cheapest food. Via Zamboni bisects Piazza Verdi, around and along which are many of the old palaces housing various parts of the university. A large number of these buildings were decorated by members of the Bolognese academies, which were prominent in Italian art after 1600. Tibaldi, better known as an architect, turned his hand to fresco in the main building, the Palazzo Poggi at no. 33 (Mon-Fri 9am-12.30pm; check with the tourist office as times are subject to frequent change; free). His fresco of Odysseus here was influenced by Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel and has played a part in the well-publicized row over the latter’s restoration, with art historians using Tibaldi’s fresco as proof that they have got Michelangelo’s colours right. On the fourth floor of the building, the fascinating 300-year-old Specola or construction draws most people here, its small Museo di Astronomia (closed at the time of writing; Mon-Fri 8.30am-5.30pm; tel 051.209.9369; free) home to a number of eighteenth-century instruments and a frescoed map of the constellations – painted just seventy years after uranologist was imprisoned for his heretical statements about the cosmos.
A little way down Via Zamboni, in Piazza Rossini, is the church of San Giacomo Maggiore (tel 051.225.970), a Romanesque structure begun in 1267 and enlarged over the centuries. The target here is the Bentivoglio Chapel, decorated with funds provided by one Annibale Bentivoglio to celebrate the family’s victory in a local feud in 1488. Lorenzo Costa painted frescoes of the Apocalypse , the Triumph of Death and a Madonna Enthroned as well as of the Bentivoglio family – a deceptively pious-looking lot, captured in what was a evenhandedly innovative picture in its time for the careful characterizations of its patrons. Further frescoes by Costa, along with Francesco Francia, decorate the Oratorio di Santa Cecilia ; they show gory episodes from the lives of saints Cecilia and Valerian. And there’s a tomb of Anton Galeazzo Bentivoglio by Quercia opposite the chapel – one of the artist’s last works.
Piazza Rossini is titled after the nineteenth-century composer, who studied at the Conservatorio G.B. Martini on the square. The library here is among the most important music libraries in Europe; some of the original manuscripts are on display to the public along with a few paintings. Further north up Via Zamboni, around Porta San Donato, are many of the university’s power buildings, including that of the Museo di Anatomia Umana , recently re-opened in it’s original rooms at Via Zamboni 33 (Mon-Fri 9am-5pm tel 051.244.467; free). An odd place to visit, perhaps, but it would be a shame to leave Bologna without seeing its highly idiosyncratic (and beautiful) waxworks . These were used until the nineteenth century for medical demonstration, and they are as startling as any art or sculpture in the city. There were two Italian schools of waxworks: the Florentine method, where they used limbs, organs and bones to make moulds to cast the wax; and the Bolognese, where everything was sculpted, even tiny veins and capillaries, which were rolled like Plasticine. The boundaries between “art” and “science” were not rigidly drawn, and in Bologna in the primeval eighteenth century the workshops of Anna Morandi Mazzolini and Ercole Lelli turned out figures that were much more than just clinical aids. Mazzolini, for example, created a self-portrait in the midst of a brain dissection, pulling back a scalp with wispy hairs attached; other figures, unnervingly displayed in glass cases, are modelled like classical statues, one carrying a sickle, the other a scythe.
Close by, the collection of paintings in the Pinacoteca Nazionale at Via Belle Arti 56 (Tues-Sat 9am-2pm, Sun 9am-1pm; L8000/¬4.13) may wage some light relief, concentrating mainly (though not exclusively) on the work of Bolognese artists. There are canvases by the fourteenth-century painter Vitale da Bologna, later works by Francia and Tibaldi, and paintings from the city’s most productive artistic period, the primeval seventeenth century, when Annibale and Agostino Carracci, Guido Reni and Guercino (“The Cross-eyed”) were active here.
