London - touristy things...

The British Museum: 

Just wow. I love the British Museum. It’s so big and there’s so much to see that it’s easy to get tired and overwhelmed, there is just so much to take in. One of the reasons I would love to live in London is so I could go to the museums and galleries all the time and spread the experience out. It’s impossible to see everything or even enjoy everything in a short amount of time. So we rushed through, trying to get the flavour of the place.

There’s a new building in the middle of the museum, (well, new to me, I think it was built in 2000) – excellent architecture. It’s called the Queen Elizabeth II Great Court (not the most imaginative name) and it’s made the Museum’s inner courtyard into a large covered public square. It is a two-acre space enclosed by a glass roof with the famous Reading Room at its centre.

Tate Modern:
There was some wonderful work here. I’m more a Renaissance person when it comes to art, and often Contemporary Art leaves me cold with it’s obscure, often difficult, self-referential navel gazing. But when it’s good, it’s very good. I did find the temporary exhibition much more interesting than the general collection though.

The National Gallery:
The best, best place to go in London. It has some of my all time favourite works. I also spent quite a bit of time photographing gilt frames which I think will become a new obsession of mine. This is a truly wonderful place.

Afternoon Tea at the Ritz:
A super touristy thing to do, I know. It was fun though. There was far more food than we could eat – I don’t know how other people do it. I’ve read that there are better places to go in London for afternoon tea, but I’d never been to the Ritz, so that’s where we went. To be fair to the whole of the UK though, everywhere we went served excellent tea and scones (I tried them absolutely everywhere we stopped for a snack). Maybe it’s one of those cultural things, where the local standard is so high, there is just no place for terrible tea and scones, a bit like being in Rome (where there is no decent tea at all) but the coffee and the pastries are fabulous practically anywhere.

Edinburgh...

I have an ongoing list of places that are good to visit (but not live in), and places that are good to live in (but maybe not so interesting to visit), and usually when we travel I work out if I could live in a city, or if it’s more a visiting kind of place. I’m not sure which category Edinburgh fits into but I think maybe both.

For example when people come to Australia they all want to visit Sydney (quite rightly). It’s a beautiful city, vibrant, lots to do. And it has all the famous landmarks; you can climb the harbour bridge, visit the opera house, eat by the wharves, visit great galleries – of course you’d choose it. But if you were coming to live in Australia rather than visit, I’d argue Adelaide is a better (easier) place to raise a family and live a good life (unless you’re very rich – then choose Sydney). Adelaide is a much cheaper place to live, and much smaller. You can have a nice big old stone villa for the price of a flat in Sydney, you’re always pretty close to amazing, uncrowded beaches. The traffic is manageable even at peak hour. Get in the car and drive a couple of hours and you’re entering the outback and small country towns, then a couple more hours and you’re in deserts like nowhere else on earth. Adelaide had a great Festival and Fringe, good dining, and the best wineries in the whole country (I might be showing my bias there). It’s easy to navigate, clean, and pretty friendly. So Sydney’s a great place to visit, but Adelaide’s a great place to live.

There are some places that are both. I think Rome (my favourite city in the world) is both. And maybe Edinburgh is both too. It has that small city feeling that Adelaide does, like you could get around it easily, and it’s friendly. Plenty of students too, so it seems young and vibrant. And it’s an interesting place to visit. We did some touristy things (as you would) the Castle, an underground ghost tour, whisky tasting, but we also just walked and walked (it’s steep but compact). 

The art gallery is very good, the permanent collection was impressive, and they had a temporary exhibition while we were there called Beyond Caravaggio (about the influence of Caravaggio on other artists) which included a number of Caravaggio’s that I wouldn’t otherwise have seen including the Supper at Emmaus, and Boy Bitten by a Lizard (I could have seen both in London if it hadn’t been on loan, but still) and The Taking of Christ (which is usually hung in a Jesuit Community building in Dublin, so it’s unlikely I’d ever get to see it) and Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness (which is hung in Kansas City Missouri – so I would probably never ever have seen it).

Edinburgh was a great place to visit, but I also suspect it would be a pretty darn nice place to live, I’m going to leave it on both lists for now.

Three Churches of Rome...

Being a tourist in Rome is quite an experience. There are some tourist attractions that have thousands of visitors a day – they are shoulder to shoulder squashy, and some places that are so famous that they are known to practically everyone. But there are also many, many other places which seem to be almost overlooked. You can visit them and have them (almost) to yourself. And they are remarkable. Here are three of my favourites.

Basilica San Clemente

Not far from the Coliseum is the Basilica San Clemente, an amazing and remarkable church, which you could walk right past without even noticing. Like so many buildings in Rome the exterior doesn’t prepare you for what’s inside. The Basilica itself is beautiful (and richly over decorated), but that it not what makes it such a great place to visit.

The thing that makes it so interesting is the historical layering. There is a 12th century church at ground level, which was built on top of a 4th century church, which was built on top of a pagan temple of Mithras (Mithras was, probably a competing religion with early Christianity, and had something to do with the cult of the Bull, but since no written records were kept about the practices of the religion, nobody knows for sure). They liked underground temples though, and this one was probably built inside another building, possibly a home, possibly a mint. Each layer is partially excavated and you can go down and down through hundreds and hundreds of years of continuous worship and continuous history. 

Despite its amazingness , we walked around the underground layers of San Clemente with only a few other people (nothing like those crazy Vatican crowds) – which is really the best way to see it. It meant we could take our time and really absorb the history and atmosphere of the place – which was wonderful. And even though I hadn’t heard of it until we started planning our trip, it was one of my favourite places in Rome, and one I’d definitely go back to

The two other churches that were highlights of our trip to Rome have some of my favourite art in the world – Caravaggio paintings, of course.

Santa Maria del Popolo

Once you are inside Santa Maria del Popolo (an unassuming façade), the first chapel to the left of the choir is the Cerasi Chapel, which has two large canvases painted by Caravaggio in 1600-01. They show The Crucifixion of Saint Peter and the Conversion on the Way to Damascus. Both are characterized by the dramatic chiaroscuro lighting and realism Caravaggio is famous for. 

In between these two paintings is The Assumption of the Virgin by Annibale Carracci, (painted just prior to Caravaggio's paintings). This juxtaposition is a great example of how revolutionary and dynamic Caravaggio was compared to the other painters of the day, the Carracci (while beautiful) looks passive and a little contrived compared to the drama and realism in the Caravaggio’s. 

San Luigi dei Francesci

The church of San Luigi dei Francesci is home to a celebrated trio of Caravaggio paintings: The Calling of Saint Matthew (my favourite painting in the world), The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew and The Inspiration of Saint Matthew, (known collectively as the St Matthew cycle).

The Calling of Saint Matthew and The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew were installed in 1600, the two paintings caused a sensation, and became the talk of Rome. Caravaggio was commissioned to do another painting for the altarpiece (the third and final work), The Inspiration of Saint Matthew which was in place by 1602.

These Caravaggio paintings are some of the greatest paintings in the history of art. Beautiful, profound, dynamic, and incredibly moving. They are just hanging around in relatively small churches in Rome – churches you might just walk by without even noticing. This is such an amazing thing to me. I honestly can’t wait to go back and see them again.

Florence (or) I'll Have Truffles With That...

Florence is beautiful, it is picture postcard gorgeous. Truly. And yet, strangely I didn’t love it the way I loved Rome (dirty, dusty, traffic-y Rome). I wonder if it’s because it is so perfect. I saw a man cleaning the streets with a vacuum cleaner the size of a baby elephant. Now that’s taking your cleaning seriously. So clean, and such lovely expensive shops, great food too. 

This is where my truffle obsession started.

The sweet shops! Oh my these were wonderful. I bought lots of them home as 'gifts'. Gifts that ended up in my stomach. Sorry lovely friends, next time I won't eat your presents (probably).

But sometimes so much perfectness can be a little… disconcerting. It felt very much like walking through a stage set – it was so perfect it didn’t seem quite real. But I guess that’s a small nit-picky thing to say, it’s beautiful really.

Interestingly you have to pay to go into churches in Florence (a more mercantile city than Rome, where all the churches are free to enter) but since I’d dragged Luke to many, many churches in Rome, and since we only had two days in Florence, we didn’t bother. Instead we went to the Uffizi and the Academia on one day, and just wandered the streets trying the local food and wine and getting lost, on the other (a perfect activity in such a lovely place).

Now, I’m not a very tall person, and one of the things I’ve noticed before about galleries showing Renaissance paintings is how hard it is to see them clearly, the dark, reflective varnished surfaces make them difficult to see, and very difficult to photograph. It doesn’t matter of course because the major works are so familiar, you can fill in the details, or just move your head a bit so the light catches the surface in a different way. But still, they’re not easy to see the way they are in a reproduction.

However, the advantage of that is that I started to look at the parts of the paintings that were directly in my eye line (lots of feet, flowers and dogs since you ask). I spent a lot of time too, looking at the corners of the works, the people in the backgrounds, the little details, the amazing gilt frames. And this was the extraordinary thing… I saw things in those paintings (paintings I would have said I knew like the back of my hand) that I’d never seen before. The little vignettes, perfect, small back-stories, hidden gems under the murky varnish. It gave me a whole new appreciation of seeing works in the flesh (so to speak), because these details couldn’t be seen in reproduction. Generally the major narrative is what you see, (what’s Mary doing? Who’s that guy with the sword?) but when you’re actually in front of the paintings you can see the small details, (there’s a kitten under that chair, look, violets growing in the grass) the edges intersecting with the frames (my goodness those frames!), the colour of the walls, the positioning of the works. They are all the things available to you when you’re in the gallery itself. It creates a space where what you see is influenced by being present and being able to see something contextually and thoroughly. It was a wonderful revelation to me, and a new way of looking at the familiar. Once I started I couldn’t stop, and ended up coming home with hundreds of photographs of the corners of paintings. 

That’s going to be hard to explain on slide night.