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The
Piazza Venezia, for all practical purposes an
open-air bus station these days, takes its name from the
sober and beautiful
Palazzo Venezia that occupies its
entire northwest corner.
Begun in 1455 as an enlargement of the residence of
Pietro Barbo, the pleasure-loving Venetian
cardinal-soon to become Pope Paul II-the
palace would emerge as the first great work of the
Renaissance in Rome.
As
pope, Paul II ordered the pre-Lenten
carnival, Europe's most famous, to be relocated here
so he could watch from his balcony (the same perch
from which Mussolini addressed his followers
five centuries later).
The highlight of the carnival was a horse race from
Piazza del Popolo to the tomb of C. Publicius
Bibulus. Known then as the Via Lata, it would
come to be called the
Corso-meaning course.
The palazzo's beautiful gardens, with their graceful
double loggia, once extended to the far side of the
piazza but were removed to make way for the
Vittorio Emanuele. Happily, the Basilica S.
Marco, enclosed within the main wing of the
Palazzo Venezia and entered through a double
portico of stone taken from the Teatro Marcello
and
Coliseum, was left untouched. The
Venezia's Museum , one block up the Corso at V.
del Plebiscito no. 118, contains a rich collection
of 13th- to 18th-c. art. As you approach, note the
small building at the corner, Palazzo Bonaparte,
where Napoleon's mother lived from 1815 to 1836 and
made frequent appearances on the little balcony.
Of the two approaches to the
Capitoline, the more daunting, encompassing 122 steps,
leads to the church of S. Maria in Aracoeli .
Built in the 7th c. on the site
of the Roman
 Citadel-from
which the honking of geese alerted
Romans to the attack of the Gauls in 390 B.c.-the
Aracoeli (altar of heaven) is a perfect example of the
literal and symbolic layers of which Rome is built:
The Citadel was replaced by a
temple to Juno, the mother-goddess, and the temple was
in turn replaced by the palace where legend holds that
Octavian had his vision of the heavens parting to reveal
the Virgin Mary
upon an altar-harbinger of the Christian era to come.
Its original spare brick facade
masks an ornate interior, with columns salvaged from
Augustus's Palatine residence. Just inside the front
door is the worn tombstone of Giovanni Crivelli by
Donatello, now set into a column. Return to the
sidewalk, and mount the hill once more via Michelangelo's
Cordonata , past the massive twins
Castor and Pollux to
Piazza del Campidoglio , the seat of Roman
government since 1534.
The gilded bronze equestrian
statue of
Marc us Aurelius in front of the Palazzo
Senatorio, Rome's City Hall, is a copy of the original,
which was moved here from the Lateran Palace by
Michelangelo.
The original can be seen behind
glass in the Palazzo Nuovo , which with
Palazzo dei Conservatori across the piazza forms the
Capitoline Museum, an incomparable treasure of
Roman art. |
