Parco Dei Mostri

"Per favore not toccare le bambole"

"Please don't touch the dolls"

On Monday we had a little trip to Il Parco dei Mostri, this little garden out in Viterbo, with rock sculptures of monsters all over. It was so beautiful and cool.
There was some guy who I guess lost his wife and son in a war, so he moved out there and kind of went a little crazy and had all of these sculptures made. It was the most perfect place I've ever seen. It was a beautiful day and it was so nice to be around greenery. It really hits me sometimes how little natural life there is here.
After that we went to a natural hot sulfur bath. Ezio and Rob came too and it was weird to be in a swimming pool with my teachers. It was fun, but totally dehydrated me and left a film of eggy smelling junk on my skin.









For art history today we just walked around Garbatella, a little pre-fascist suburb that was built when they started to realize that cramming a million people into tiny houses in a tiny bit of land wasn't so healthy. It was kind of like a disney town - everything was built to look kind of medieval or gothic or renaissance or baroque, but all made from the same cheap materials.

I forgot to post a while ago that we went to St. Ignazio with art history. It was really cool to hear about it from Ezio because everything is cooler to hear from Ezio. The ceiling has a weird perspective thing, and at the time it was built the jesuits couldn't afford to make a dome so they just painted a fake one. It's totally black now, because they used a bad varnish on it, and since it's in perspective (it looks like a dome if you're standing in the same place to see the ceiling) it looks totally weird anywhere else in the church and is kind of dizzying to look at. They also took it down a while back to clean and found a few tons of dust weighing on the back of it.



We also had a little Borrominian tour, which was really interesting. Borromini was an architect that worked around the same time as Bernini, but he was really shy and Bernini was rude and took all his best jobs. As much as I love Bernini so so much, Borromini was, I think, a better architect. His work is a lot simpler and more interesting. Bernini just used a lot of gold.
And while we're on the topic of Borromini, I'll tell ya somethin' else. This sunday Marian and I skipped Porta Portese (can ya believe it) and we to see St. Ivo. OH my goodness it was beautiful. The spiral lantern is unbelievable, and i would have been content to just see that, but the inside (which is only open sunday morning) was incredible. It was small and tall and oval and simple and white. It was so beautiful. There was a little british baby inside wearing a Red Sox shirt. It's been a while since I've seen that.

St. Ivo's Lantern

St. Ivo, inside.

Helicoidal staircase!

We weren't supposed to go there.