|
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.
|
