Thursday, January 5, 2006

It is another beautiful day, sunny and cloudless.  We are off to see Bernini's "Ecstasy of St. Theresa" with all its spirituality and eroticism, its baroque splender, theatricality, and emotion.  Here are Deborah and Michelle on the site.

From Bernini's extatic vision to a vision of the dead was our path this day as we next dropped in on "dem bones" at a little church at the base of the Via Veneto, the most fashionable street in Rome.  Back in the 1700's a Capuchine monastary was abandoned and the bones of some 12,000 monks needed relocating.  Permission was given to house them in this church, where an enterprising cleric decided to turn the bones into art.  The result is a cemetary of five chambers displaying the bones, from ankle bone to knee bone and clavical, breast and skull, with a bevy of vertebra along the way,  that now are fetching designs, all capped off with the chilling message to the viewer: "What you are now, we once were.  What we are now, you will be."

We came back into the light to pose by Bernini's Tritone Fountain in the Piazza Barberini, and then we enjoyed the serenity of the Trevi Fountain along with a gellato or two.  Here Lena, Deborah, and Michelle throw the obligatory coins into the fountain to insure their return to Rome.