Tourist in Town 1

In late December and early January, we had plans.

But Omicron (OH-MY!-cron) canceled them.

The next solution: be a tourist in the (adopted) home town.

A MIC card costs 5 euros. That card ensures a year of free entrances to 18 civic museums and 25 archaeological sites in Rome. 

You have to figure out how to book your free visit on the weekends (Covid rules), but on weekdays? Walk right on in. 

It is a no-brainer.

Among the sites we visited is the unusual Centrale Montemartini - a defunct power station converted into a museum. 

But the massive building complex was never gutted. If you have any appreciation for the aesthetics of even the most industrial equipment and structures of the 1920s and 1930s (clean lines, solid forms, and here or anywhere else in the Western hemisphere, BUILT TO LAST), then you would thoroughly enjoy the cleaned-up but largely intact environment. 

The story goes that this was a kind of a lark on the part of the civic museum organization of Rome. Such a huge number of ancient statues and artifacts in storage, they thought, why not clean up this old power plant and temporarily display some of these works in it?

And once the exhibition was up, they just allowed it to be permanent.

Such a quintessentially Roman thing to do. 

Blend two or more eras, and live comfortably with the combination.

What may be all the more remarkable to anyone with a greater familiarity with Rome's neighborhoods as major find-spots for important artifacts is that many of those artifacts are HERE.

Equally compelling was Central Montemartini's special exhibition of Roman mosaics, many of which were discovered in the midst of excavations for a modern building project and salvaged just before the ancient Roman ruins surrounding the mosaics were destroyed (labels repeatedly emphasize this sense of rescue in the nick of time). 

These things are exquisite. The tiles are extremely small, affording the maker the luxury of using a lot of colors in small area to, in this case, really convey the plethora of colors in fish scales.

And who would expect these bright green walls to enhance the mosaics, with all of their fleshy pink-toned fish specimens? But they do.

When I say that the museum space is huge, this is not hyperbole. This is one of two adjoining buildings.

The location is a bit south of the Rome most people know, near the old cylindrical Gasometer, which is a favorite landmark. If you like innovative jewelry that relates to a famous place like Rome, but isn't tacky or touristy, I recommend Co.Ro, which has created a line inspired by the Gasometer. 

Republican era portrait busts abound, with that 'warts and all' look about them. It was only after Julius Caesar's demise that portrait sculpture became idealized. 

Extraordinary Roman sarcophagi are also here, and help chart the progression of Roman burial practices (which evolved from cremation to the storage of bones in ossuaries and eventually to full-on inhumation or bodily burial) and containers for the dead that were carved with Christian imagery.

Two women in the upper third of this shot were seated and drawing, so heads-up, artists: Rome still permits that kind of study within some museum spaces. In and of itself, the tradition is long observed here: a way of knowing the world is to draw it.

The ruins that house the 'free cats' connected to the Torre d'Argentina cat shelter (from which we adopted our boys) once contained these sculpture fragments. I left this museum patron in the shot for the sake of scale. 

So when your plans are guasta (broken), adjust. Be a tourist in the town you live in. And if you are planning to travel to Rome (as of this post, Italy's country-wide Covid cases are still above 50,000 per day, but she still would love to welcome your visit), consider going to unconventional places where spaces are wide open, there are fewer people, and the views are still extraordinary.