Dear all,
It’s Saturday and i’m back in one of my favourite spots at the BSR- my desk in the library- watching a feral cat pad backwards and forwards along the garden path (more on them later). Rome continues to be enchanting, the BSR welcoming and the conversations diverse and impassioned. Saturdays are always a treat for me as the building goes quiet, with no bells calling us to meals, no staff and no visiting researchers. The bustle of the week is part of what I love about life here but at weekends my brain can catch up with itself.
The last couple of weeks have been a whirlwind of welcome activities, gallery and museum visits and beginning to make headway with my research topic. I’ve been in touch with wonderfully helpful Italian academics in archaeology and architecture, learnt how well my google translate app tackles printed Italian (very) and found a wealth more resources and reading now I have a few key terms to search for in Italian and French.
Possibly the most challenging aspect of life here is Italian though- I am no linguist- and Monday and Thursday mornings are now entirely language classes. Never being one to do things by half I am attempting to do both beginner and intermediate Italian simultaneously. If someone finds me in a crumpled heap under a table at some point we will know this was a bad idea. I am making headway, and our teacher Manuela is superb… but it is a bit of an uphill struggle!
A highlight of the last couple of weeks was the introductory talks. All the award holders gave a ten minute presentation about themselves, their work and their research topic while they’re here. Both the diversity and overlaps of everyone’s work was fascinating. We had presentations on Roman ports, to mannerism, to depictions of race in furniture, representations of Emperors in material culture, to ‘sticky’ sentences in latin… and so much more. You can find out a little bit more about us all on the BSR’s website here. However, if you’re all interested let me know and I can maybe profile an award holder each time and a bit about their work?
The main highlight of life here though is Rome herself. My favourite thing to do is to just walk around the city- with no fixed itinerary, popping into every open door of a church or museum that looks interesting en-route. Sometimes I have come back soaked to the skin or freezing cold (the weather here has not been lovely); but more often I have found a treasure- a new medieval tower to add to the map I am building up, a piece of pottery from a market, a great coffee, an expensive detour into a bookshop that inexplicably has niche arts books in English or - as yesterday- a detour into a church that happens to have three Caravaggios tucked into a chapel at the back.
The more I walk and look the more the superficial similarities to older English cities are disappearing and the more I am appreciating quite how different ‘Italian’ urbanism is… but this is a longer topic I will maybe come back to another day.
One aspect I will touch on briefly is the gift that Rome’s churches give to the city in accessible and beautiful public space. On almost every street (and often multiple times per street) there will be an open door to a dry, sheltered space with seats and, usually, breathtakingly beautifully decorated. You can sit here quietly and think, pray or rest, run in to light a candle, or you can wander around admiring the building and its art.
You may be asked if you want to part with 50c for a postcard or to light up a chapel to see the art better but otherwise these remarkable spaces are free to all. I had long noticed the way Nolli marks churches as public spaces in his map- but not appreciated quite how rich a part of Roman city fabric there were until now.
And from one architectural highlight to another, the feeding house for the BSR’s cats. I am not a huge cat person but even I appreciate the characters of the five feral cats who have made the BSR’s garden their home. The residence manager has had them all ‘fixed’ and makes sure they are fed, and the maintenance man has built them a house behind the garden shed to keep their food dry. The introduction to the cats and how they should be treated was an important stop on our building tour, so our resident latin scholar has taken on the feeding responsibilities at weekends. It was she who introduced me to this remarkable structure- complete with (entirely redundant) balcony!
And on that mildly absurd note I will end!
A Presto!
Eleanor
I had a feeling Eleanor Jolliffe would be my delightful guide to Rome. I had a friend who spent time at BSR years ago. To my shame, I have never visited the city! Whilst I hope to make amends quite soon, I’ve made Eleanor my surrogate. I just know I’m going to love this. And the “done” cats.