Where did Cavaradossi paint the Attavanti?

You reckon you know, and in terms of what Puccini, Giacosa and Illica wanted from the first Roman location of Tosca, you'd be right: the huge Church of Sant'Andrea della Valle near the Campo dei Fiori and the Palazzo Farnese. When I last went inside some years ago, I didn't find it up to the artistic scratch of its other grandiose near-neighbours, Sant'Ignazio or the Gesu. But I read that Domenichino had a hand in the decoration, so maybe I need to take another look.

The point, though, is that productions like Catherine Malfitano's generally clear and human one for ENO (Gwyn Hughes Jones's Cavaradossi and Henry Waddington's Sacristan pictured above by Mike Hoban) don't need to aim for massiveness when Sardou's original play gives them another cue. His first directions are for 'The Saint Andrew of the Jesuits Church in Rome'. By which he means the much smaller, more perfect church of Sant'Andrea al Quirinale.


Sardou continues: 'Architect Bernini: fully curved arches above large plain pillars of white marble with red veneer'. So he knew it; and I do, too, and love its oval perfection almost as much as Borromini's San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane just down the road. But again I haven't been inside for some years, so I'm grateful for these Wiki images.


Changing the location does give a designer the option for a tighter, less blowsily Baroque setting for Act 1. But of course the several Toscas filmed on location always use the bigger church. Why, in these, does Domingo's Cavaradossi have to be such a bad artist? In the first film, with dubbed soundtrack (but better singing) his Attavanti Magdalen is a piece of Woolworth's soft porn. Never mind the 'art'; feel the quality of the singing.



And enjoy Gigli as a lighter Cavaradossi, though I've come across none - and we heard about ten snippets from various 'Recondita armonia's in the second of our five Tosca class at the City Lit - who sings the opening piano against dolcissimo strings as requested.



I'm most in love with the blooming, sensuous love-triangle of Carreras, Ricciarelli and Karajan among the sound recordings of this act. What ardour in the second half of the love duet.



Anyway, on my four-hour trek across Rome, I did suddenly think I should pay homage once more to each of the opera's venues. Sant' Andrea della Valle was closed at 3pm, of course, but here's another, this time rather modest Roman fountain before it.


Next time a tour of the Palazzo Farnese - apparently they're more frequent than they used to be - is essential to see Annibale Carracci's profane ceiling fresco celebrating 'the triumph of love' with the coruscating cortege of Bacchus and Ariadne, well evoked in Robert Hughes's Rome.


Where Scarpia's room might be is an irrelevance. Again, in Sardou's La Tosca Act 4, it's a much sparser affair in the Castel Sant'Angelo; in Act 2 we have the grand Farnese reception which takes place offstage in the opera, complete in the play with Queen Marie-Caroline of Naples (who faints at the news of Napoleon's victory), the Marquis Attavanti and Paisiello. A sun-lit sidewall


and the back view from the Via Giulia


should ring the changes. And finally, of course, the Castel Sant'Angelo once again, which glowed rather benignly in the late afternoon sun.

Roman fountains

Only one of the dozen I notched up on my noon-to-dawn trawl through Rome features in Respighi's Fontane di Roma, and I was sorry not to pay a fleeting return tribute to the Trevi (nor, for that matter, to the Piazza Navona nor my favourite, the exquisite little turtle fountain in the Jewish quarter, the cleaning of which my fellow-blogger Willym expounded upon so eloquently while he was living there). Bernini's Triton of 1642 rather disappointed me when I first made its acquaintance quite some time after hearing the tone-poem - lonesome in a rather lugubrious sloping square, and ungraced by the tumbling cascades of nymphs Respighi's music suggests (let's have Toscanini in that number before we eventually put together all four musical pictures in two performances by the orchestra I went to hear).



Yet shortly after dawn, in a more or less unpeopled space with less traffic roaring around it than usual, our marine conch-blower did look rather impressive. This time, though, I fell for the more intimate water-tricklers. Robert Hughes, in the latest Roman popular history which I've just starting ploughing into, reminds us that there was no natural water pressure in the ancient city to provide cascades, just modest tumbles via the several aqueducts that sloped, and in some uneven places were persuaded by tunnels to slope, into the centre. Two re-used mascheroni first, then, one on the wall that separates Santa Sabina from the Parco Savello on the Aventine, designed by Giacomo della Porta in 1583


and the other, which you must forgive me for repeating from the first walking-tour piece, at the prettiest end of the Via Giulia


commissioned by the Farnese family living in the famous palace which now backs on to the street, and which of course has a rather splendid fountain of its own in the square on the other side.


I'll save up the modest effort in front of Sant'Andrea della Valle for a Tosca ramble and jump to early next morning, when I passed Bernini's Barcaccia being cleaned in the rosy dawn (but it rarely photographs well)


and climbed the hill past the Triton to the four commissioned by the 'manic-impressive' (thank you, Robert Hughes, who paints a terrifying picture of him) Sixtus V between 1588 and 1593, giving their name to Borromini's San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane. Three are by that Pope's great planner Domenico Fontana (would you believe): Juno


the Arno


and the Tiber


while the fourth, Pietro da Cortona's Diana, is seen from a distance in context.


Fontana as master of Sixtus V's most grandiose projects was also responsible for the Fontana dell'Acqua Felice with Moses in the middle, terminus of the clean-water viaduct of that name. This has had the clean-up the four down the road still need, and attempts to work on Santa Maria della Vittoria with the famously agonial-ecstatic Bernini St Teresa within are graced by a contrasting piece of advertising.


Well, that was it before I reached a different sort of terminus in time for the 7.52 train to the airport. But, as I wade my pleasurable way through eight CDs of mostly treasurable archival material from the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, let's see as well as hear the orchestra on happy home-territory form in Respighi's Fontane as equally divided between Pappano for the first two



and the ever-underrated Pretre (I'm sure it is) for a very vivacious Trevi at noon and the Villa Medici at sunset.