Top to Bottom: Borgheses & Etruscans

We queued in line half an hour before the Borghese Gallery opened, as instructed.
Shuffled in the doors opened, lined up to hand over our e-tickets, moved to the coat check line to store Robert’s backpack, and joined the line waiting for actual entrance. That’s four lines, and we had booked our tickets weeks in advance over the internet. Here’s a tip – get to the Borghese early, because that last line takes half an hour to enter the museum if you are at the end of the queue. That’s thirty minutes time subtracted from the scant two hours you’ve got. Because, trust me, when that time’s up, the guards herd you out with brisk and firm efficiency.
That said, the Borghese gallery, justly famed for phenomenal art, an excellent audio guide (and drawing permitted), is worth it. Three out of four ain’t bad.
I burned twenty minutes drawing the sacred figure (from Sacred and Profane Love) because I wanted to look deeply. Je regrette rien.
Amongst all the famous masterpieces, I was very taken with this little drawing.Took photos like everyone around me until I was barked at by a guard.
I didn’t stress about having to leave because I have another reservation for later in the month. Next time I’ll spend more time downstairs.
Walked through the Borghese park, a very pleasant stroll, to our chosen lunch venue. I didn’t realize it was a stone’s throw from the Spanish steps. Uh oh. Escada to the left of us, Versace to the right. Terminally Hip territory. Gina’s, Via S. Sebastianello, 7A, was strong on concept and décor. The food wasn’t bad either. My sandwich, which came trussed up as a point of style, was fine. Robert didn’t care for it, though he enjoyed his Caeser salad. (I somehow doubt romaine lettuce with grilled chicken was the meal of choice for the emperor, but thanks for the name, Julius.) The thing is, meals made to impress aren’t as appealing as they once were. We like simple, good food in a reasonably comfortable atmosphere, the kind of joint that has a coterie of regulars.
When I was planning this part of the trip I made an effort to balance spectacular paintings with artifacts. We Ubered to National Etruscan Museum, Villa Giulia Piazzale di Villa Giulia 9, to take a look at the Etruscan collection. Once there, we realized we couldn’t tackle the museum without a postprandial espresso. The museum personnel were exceptionally kind and helpfully directed us to a nearby coffee bar that was populated by students (it is a truth universally acknowledged where there are college students, there is coffee). Well caffeinated, we returned to the virtually uninhabited museum.  Robert looked up in the room next to the entry hall.The showpiece is the life-sized funerary figures of a husband and wife reclining atop their sarcophagus, eternally calm and smiling. They looked distinctly Persian to me, but I am no scholar of historical ethnicity. I read the wall plaques, as I do, and found this painted pot’s story poignant. Hercules, renown slayer of monsters, ‘even in the flower of his strength’ was unable to defeat the monster assaulting this man; the vagaries of old age.There were repositories for human remains shaped like huts, tools for cooking and spinning, various bronze shards and fragments, and this row of penises that reminded me of toy cannons. They were in a case of various body parts used to implore the gods for a miracle. What has stuck with me, days later, is the story behind four figures on a temple frieze. The story goes an Etruscan king, mortally wounded himself, ate the brains of his dead enemy. Mercury was bringing him a vial with the elixir of immortality but a goddess (Athena? Artemis?) was so disgusted by his cannibalism that she withheld it. Blood and the wholesale death of warfare, acceptable. Eating brains, not so much. Glad there was a line not to be crossed.
I visited all forty rooms and it was oddly reassuring to see the exhibits of stirgils and strainers, gold rings and mirrors, painted pots and cheese graters; the humble detritus of the people who lived before the rise of the empire, and the vast numbers required to sustain the preeminence of Rome, obscured by the grinding war machinery of Roman glory.