Swimming in Respighi, swaying to Wolf-Ferrari

In fact the Respighi binge is past now, but I still ought to honour it. After Dutoit's surely unrepeatable Proms feat of running Roman Festivals, Fountains and Pines together as a single second-half sequence, I reeled again from the surprising depth of the invention: quite apart from the superlative orchestration of Rimsky-Korsakov's pupil, it strikes me more than ever as a question of feeling, not painting or picture-postcarding. Which is why, perversely, I thought to launch this entry in Piranesian black and white. The darkest colours and some of the most haunting invention, to be sure, reside in the last of the trilogy to be composed, the four interlinked Festivals, which Dutoit wisely placed first since the ultimate Albert Hall spectacular would have to be left to the organ and the three extra trumpets capping the revived glory of the Roman cohorts in the 'Pines of the Appian Way'.

Feeding the Christians to the lions in the Colosseum obviously leads Respighi to invoke early Panavision and Technicolor garishness, though even this sequence is a cut above most film music (though not the scores of Nino Rota, Respighi's best follower. I'd put La Strada third only to Prokofiev's Ivan the Terrible and Shostakovich's King Lear music in that sphere). More haunting are the sounds rising at the start of the second 'picture' and, supremely, 'Ottobrata' from the sleighbell-accompanied passage onward, eerie and suspenseful. Here's Toscanini, followed by an outrageously fine performance of the final Epiphanic bacchanal from our own National Youth Orchestra under Vasily Petrenko at the Proms: apt, because his interpretation of Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony with the European Union Youth Orchestra was my absolute highlight of this year's Albertine festival, alongside the Stemme/Runnicles Salome (the NYO Petrushka under Gardner was stunning, too. Just to show that I'm not exclusively obsessed by complicated orchestral scores, I'd put William Christie's late-night Rameau motets in there too, and why not bung in the impassioned debut of the Borusan Istanbul Philharmonic earlier that evening).

The introduction of the mandolin in 'Ottobrata' is especially magical: the whole of the nocturnal slow fade sequence matches the  second 'Nachtmusik' of Mahler's Seventh Symphony. Which I'm sure Respighi must have known. There's also a bewitching night picture in the first of the Brazilian Impressions, conducted by Dorati on a CD of early-stereo Mercury recordings which also includes the delicious suite of discreet arrangements The Birds - Going for a Song probably doesn't mean much to the younger generations these days - as well as the two usual subjects. The second Brazilian Impression here is of a visit to a snake institute, complete with Dies Irae.

I finally got round to listening to Respighi's Sinfonia Drammatica of 1914, and the Mahler influence is undeniable in this monument to the shock and grief around the outbreak of the First World War. I expected it to be turgid and overblown, but the varied use of orchestra, a year before Fountains properly made the composer's name, can be extremely subtle and on a superficial listening to the late, lamented Ted Downes's recording with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, I could already grasp that Respighi is doing something unique with form in the slow burn-out which marks the last third of the first movement.

From there it was on to investigate some of the songs, in a disc I'd been given some years back by a Dutch friend and never listened to; the singers are a perfectly Italianate soprano, Andrea Catzel, and a barely adequate tenor whom it would be fairer not to name, but I'm grateful to pianist Reinild Mees for masterminding the project, of which the CD I have is the second volume.

It's so marvellous to hear beautifully set parlando Italian, as in the early 'Storia breve', and I'll never forget 'Nebbie' performed by Teresa Berganza in an encore to a Royal Opera House recital. Among the songs of 1909 there's charming pentatonic style, more suitable to evoke China, in 'Serenata indiana', a setting of Shelley, and more word-sensitivity in 'E se un giorno tornasse', an adaptation of Maeterlinck. And Respighi's gift to be simple but still individual comes in an ideal encore, 'Canzone sarda'.

The big number for mezzo-soprano and string orchestra of 1918 Il tramonto, a winner as performed by the glorious Christine Rice on Pappano's EMI Respighi disc, is also a Shelley setting, by the way. How the poet of  'The Sunset' must have wished there were a word as beautiful as 'tramonto' in the English language.. Any excuse to re-use my shot of Shelley's grave in Rome's English cemetery from the 2011 Death in the South blog entry.

Then it was time to revisit Respighi's orchestrated selections from Rachmaninov's Etudes-Tableaux, and back to the best Fountains I've ever heard - even in less than state-of-the-art sound, from Victor de Sabata. This sets the seal on the work itself being my favourite of the Roman trilogy for its poetry as a whole (I've been there already on the blog, but de Sabata's exceptional interpretation merits a revisit). Sadly the entire recording of 1947 isn't up as a single unit on YouTube, which means that the highlight, the horn blasts for the Triton fountain, lacks its proper impact bursting out of the silence of the Valle Giulian poetry. Still, you get a sense of de Sabata's electricity as well as his control.

This was a serendipitous discovery bringing me back full circle after a coincidental excursion into the delicious music of Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari: I knew de Sabata's recordings of his Overture to Il segreto di Susanna - the Gardelli recording of which was a favourite LP in my teens, sadly never on CD to my knowledge - and the Intermezzo from I quattro rusteghi, an encore winner if ever there was one (so is the quirky little waltz from I gioielli della Madonna).

They're on a two CD EMI set as fillers to the Verdi Requiem, but I don't think I'd ever got as far as the Respighi or the Rossini William Tell Overture, a lesson in articulation that almost outdoes Toscanini.

It may have been an unconscious echo from my Respighi listening, but I came back to Wolf-Ferrari simply as a result of seeing an unheard disc on the piles of unindexed CDs and popping it on.

Most of the Violin Concerto could have been written in the 1890s - in fact at least one of the themes dates from that time -  but was actually premiered, close to its composition, in Munich on 7 January 1944. Hardly an auspicious time or place, and I still haven't quite got to the bottom of why Wolf-Ferrari and his muse-violinist, Guila (sic) Bustabo were there (nor indeed clarified Respighi's links to the Fascists).

The anachronistic quality isn't, to my ears, as much of a liability as it is in Korngold's sticky concerto of the same period. While Korngold was mired in late romanticism, Wolf-Ferrari somehow kept his favoured neoclassical mode fresh. Heavens, the tag - Arthur Lourie's re Stravinsky, contrasting Schoenberg's 'neo-Gothic' - was nearly two decades in the future when the Italo-German gave the cue to the next similarly duo-national composer, Busoni, with the Goldoni-based operas Le donne curiose (1903) and I quattro rusteghi (1906 - and yes, dear reader, I've seen it, in Zurich. Charming in parts but way too long-winded, though that may have been a false impression given by a rather cumbersome production).

The Violin Concerto certainly charms in its opening dream-tune, brought back Dvořák and Elgar style in the otherwise sparkling finale's nostalgic cadenza. The work even surprises us with galloping anger in the third-movement Improvviso, which while not exactly stylistically of the 1940s may express something of the pain Wolf-Ferrari felt at what he and his beloved Guila were going through. It's all well documented in the CD's 96 page accompanying booklet. Looking for something to demonstrate from YouTube, I came across this performance, accompanied by the violin part. Seemingly it's not embeddable, but do click on the link. Maddening that there's no credit for the performers, but I'm fascinated to see a comment asking if this is the Bustabo/Kempe recording - I didn't know there was one. Anyway, it's very fine, but then so is the slightly cooler one I've been listening to at home.

There Vienna-based violinist Benjamin Schmid and conductor Friedrich Haider, who's obviously worked wonders on the Oviedo Filarmonía, were discoveries for me. Haider loves his special composer-project to bits, and it's quite something that his performance of the delicious, encore-worthy Rusteghi Intermezzo is every inch as good in its way as de Sabata's. That miniature is surely the very essence of what protagonist Adrian Leverkühn tries to define, rather surprisingly, in Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus when he speaks of his old teacher:

For him, music was music, if that was what it was, and his objection to Goethe's statement that 'art is concerned with the serious and the good' was that something light can be serious, too, if it is good, which it can be just as easily as something serious can...I have always taken him to mean that one must have a very firm grasp of the good to be able to handle what is light.

Spellbound by my re-reading of this extraordinary novel, which is nothing like what little I remember of it from my teens, and now I can't wait to get to the end; it's turned into quite the metaphysical thriller. But in the meantime, some 'serious-light' music (Prokofiev used the term interestingly, too). JEG's performance of the Rusteghi Intermezzo is almost as fine as the ones I cite above, and you get a glimpse of Wolf-Ferrari's Venice, though I apologise for the naff dancing.

Finalmente, let's wheel back to Toscanini in what sounds like a very early (pre-electrical recording era?) performance of the delicious and authentically neoclassical overture to Il segreto di Susanna.

Death in the south

Romantic their poetic aspirations and their post-mortem canonisation may have been, but there was nothing mythical about the deaths of Keats and Shelley. I thought I owed my latest, serendipitous visit to their graves in the quiet corner of Rome that is the non-Catholic cemetery by the pyramid of Cestius a bit more background reading. Daisy Hay's Young Romantics proposes not only a more social history of the way in which the lives of the Shelleys were entangled with Byron as well as the lesser figure of Leigh Hunt, but a bigger celebration of those long-suffering half-sisters Mary Shelley and Claire (Jane) Clairmont.


Keats, alas, is a marginal figure in Hay's history - a shame, since he was probably the nicest of the male pack. Hay makes it clear what a catastrophe was his last-minute bolt for Rome in late 1820 with the helper who's buried beside him, the artist Joseph Severn.


The idea was to seek a warmer clime for Keats's advanced tuberculosis, but they should never have left England: the stormy channel crossing in cramped conditions was a nightmare for a sick man, and all Severn could do in those cramped lodgings by the Spanish Steps was try and allay his friend's 'dread of never seeing [England] more' and attempt to ease a horrible death. There's still a waft of bitterness from the inscription on Keats's grave, designed by Severn and Charles Brown


though a fairer plaque is set into the wall nearby.


This is the most open, green corner of the cemetery with views over to the pyramid.


Three-year old William Shelley had been buried nearby, one of several young victims of his parents' roving around Italy. He succumbed to malaria in Rome; not long before his baby sister Clara had fallen sick on an unnecessary, hasty and uncomfortable journey to Venice, and died in her mother's arms. The cause, as with so many unhappy instances in the fates of the Shelleys, sprang from Lord Byron's unfortunate liaison with Claire, which led the Shelley-Clairmont trio to Italy in the first place. This is hardly the place to try and untangle its web, but the offshoot of that relationship was in many ways the most tragic figure of all, the little girl Allegra - separated from her doting mother after the early months, and consigned by Byron against all Claire's pleadings to a convent on unhealthy land, where she died aged five.


In all this, one thing seems clear: for all the vaunted equality of the women - for which Mary's mother Mary Wollstonecraft had fought so hard - the men always closed ranks. But how young, how untested, they all were! Mary was still in her early twenties when, having suffered miscarriages, the loss of two treasured children and several depressions which seem all too explicable, Shelley (depicted by Severn in a posthumous image above writing Prometheus Unbound in the Baths of Caracalla) was drowned in the Bay of Lerici - an inexperienced boatman in a poorly constructed vessel, the Don Juan. Shelley's preferred name had been the Ariel, which may partly account for the inscription on the grave I found so useful for my only-connect Arts Desk piece on Abbado's Shakespeare programme.


But what's in the grave? All that remained from a messy attempted cremation of the disfigured, washed-up corpse on the beach at Viareggio was an organ Hay surmises was the liver rather than the heart, and even that was squabbled over before being handed over to Mary. And there it is, cor cordium. Bit of a mystery why Edward Trelawny, Shelley's bragging friend of less than a year, should be buried alongside him; but he'd bought the plot of land, and there he was interred at the age of 88 in 1881. Mary as keeper of the flame had lived on until 1851, always doing the decent thing by her late husband and preserving a measure of immortality through her Frankenstein. Claire maintained an uneasy independence as governess and died in 1879, almost 60 years after Shelley's drowning.

Emperors and popes: mostly bad, some mixed

What a sorry but enticing saga is the history of Rome – rather oddly told, it has to be admitted, in Robert Hughes’s popular and understandably art-skewed book bearing the city's name as title. Odd and skewed since, once the glory days and the era of the Grand Tour are over, Hughes seems to be stumped for specifically Roman material and goes tramping all over Italy, and sometimes the rest of Europe. He’s also no Simon Winder – see one of my endless paeans to Germania – in that the personal flavour of the Prologue gets lost in the chronological, if still selective, account that follows.


Yet Hughes can be entertainingly wrathful on the grandeur and follies of emperors and popes. He questions, as any good historian must, the story of Rome as told entirely from a Christian perspective. Horrible things happened to the early Christians, to be sure; but equally horrible and worse tortures lay in store for the so-called Pagans (a term I had to reassess, since of course it embraces so much of the humanities) under the so-called Christian emperors.

I do like the sound of the emperor Julian – some ‘Apostate’; it simply transpires that the fledgling Christianity didn’t speak to him; but he never went round stoking any fires under the believers.


Besides, one forgets that Julian’s predecessor Constantine wasn’t exactly a ‘Christian emperor’ in the all-embracing way we think of it. Tolerant of the Roman majority and no zealot after his ‘vision’ at the Ponte Milvio, he was nevertheless another of those family monsters – putting his own son by an early marriage to death on the accusation of a later wife, boiling her alive in the hot-room of the palace when it turned out she’d lied. No wonder mamma Helena sublimated her sorrow by going off round the middle east buying up bits of cross and less easily transportable objects.


Much worse for history, though, was the later, forged ‘Donation of Constantine’ which gave free rein to papal infallibility. And it’s no surprise, of course, that most of the later popes wallowed in luxury and persecuted the faithless with a zeal that puts even Caligula and Nero to shame. But here the paradoxes accumulate, especially since many who would seem to us the worst have given us Rome as we so wonderingly know it. Most likeable to a libertarian is Leo X, Giovanni de’Medici, who kept a pet elephant, led a shameless gay sex life and honoured scholars and poets.


But his feckless spending led to that sale of indulgences, posts and art treasures which gave his polar opposite, Martin Luther, fuel to his rightful indignation. Nevertheless I know which I’d rather invite to an ideal dinner party.

Even the anti-religious Hughes has mixed feelings about the ‘manic-impressive’ Sixtus V. Stalin could hardly have done a better job on purging the criminality which beset Rome when Sixtus, born Felice Peretti, came to power in 1585.


He drove many of the spectacular lines we see through Rome today, often at the expense of the classical, with which he held no truck – other than to show its inferiority to Christianity; the tale of the dragging of the Egyptian obelisk from the back of St Peter’s to stand at the centre of the square in front takes on Neronian dimensions. He also stuck a statue of St Peter, cast from melted-down classical bronzes, on top of the magnificent Trajan’s column. As Hughes reports, ‘in dedicating the statue of Peter, His Holiness explained that such a monument as Trajan’s could become worthy to bear the effigy of Christ’s Vicar on Earth only if it were rededicated in the cause of the Catholic Church – an astonishing piece of casuistry’.


Another tale chills the blood but simultaneously warms one’s spirit to know that ordinary Romans did sometimes fight back: here's what followed an accusation carried out in the traditional dialogue between the messages posted on the old statue called the Pasquino (a BC Greek sculpture of Menelaus) near the Piazza Navona and those on the river-god Marforio outside the Travertine Prison (now at the entrance to the Capitoline Museums on the Campidoglio). Let Hughes tell the tale:

…one day during the reign of Sixtus V Pasquino was seen wearing a horribly filthy shirt. Why, Marforio wanted to know, did he wear such a stinking rag? Because Donna Camilla was the pope’s sister, who in her humbler days had been a washerwoman but had just been ennobled by His Holiness.

There was a limit to what great figures would endure from Pasquino, and this crossed the line. It got to the ears of Sixtus, who let it be known that if the anonymous satirist owned up to writing it, his life would be spared and he would receive a present of one thousand pistoles, cash. But if anyone else found him out and denounced him, he would be hanged. Naturally the nameless graffitist – for who was going to turn down such a reward? – confessed. Sixtus V gave him the money and spared his life, but unsportingly added that ‘We have reserved for Ourselves the power of cutting off your hands and boring your tongue through, to prevent your being so witty in future’. But nothing would shut Pasquino up; he had a hundred tongues and two hundred hands. The very next Sunday he was seen draped in a freshly laundered, still-wet shirt, to dry it in the sun. Marforio wondered why he couldn’t wait until Monday. ‘There’s no time to lose,’ said Pasquino, thinking of His Holiness’s taxation habits. ‘If I stay until tomorrow perhaps I’ll have to pay for the sunshine’.


Anyway, it’s Sixtus we have to thank for some of Rome’s avenues and the fountains I much admired on my dawn walk back to Termini the other Monday. But as far as the human cost is concerned, compared to all this, the caprices of Pio Nono in the 19th century and Mussolini (and Berlusconi) in the 20th seem like childsplay.

15/12 - a neat addition from Banksy and his disfigured cardinal in Liverpool's Walker Art Gallery. Read about it here, or just enjoy/abhor the seasonal sentiment I've extrapolated: 'The statue? I guess you could call it a Christmas present. At this time of year it's easy to forget the true meaning of Christianity - the lies, the corruption, the abuse.'

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.

From noon to dawn in Rome

Which is to say, from Piramide seen here at about 12.15pm to the Piazza del Popolo at 6.20am the following morning. What a serendipitous city it is. I'd been racking my brains for a Shakespeare connection in Rome to go with the Arts Desk piece on Abbado's Tempest/Lear programme I was due to see the night of my latest day in the city. And what happened? The airport bus, contrary to the promise of the ticket sellers, landed us quite a way from the centre, at Rome Ostiense Station (perhaps because it was a Sunday, and many of the main roads were blocked to traffic). But there was Cestius's pyramid gleaming in the autumn midday sun, and beyond it one of my favourite spots in all Rome, the non-Catholic cemetery outside the walls where Keats and Shelley's heart are encased. And there, of course, on Shelley's stone, are inscribed lines from Ariel's song 'Full fathom five'. I had my link among the tombs of this glorified cat shelter, its supremely indifferent living inhabitants still well fed by the charitable organisation so reliant on donations from English felophiles especially.


Better still, though, was such an auspicious start for walking the city from a place that isn't often open (and at 1pm the Roman picnickers and the handful of tourists were all very politely sent packing). Well, I'd better save a few discoveries for a separate cemetery piece, and trace my four-hour route as succinctly as I can. My options were to branch off for a lunch in an excellent little restaurant we know in Testaccio, or head up the Aventine, another relatively quiet glory of Rome. And as time was short, I wanted to be the all-devouring tourist again. So up it was from the park behind the Post Office where Russian ladies were all dining off tinfoil on the benches and past the relatively modern sanctuary of Sant'Anselmo where plainsong is still sung so beautifully and the little garden alongside the Romanesque campanile of Santi Bonifacio ed Alessio


to one of my favourite churches, Santa Sabina, strictly a basilica, with its beautiful prototype Corinthian columns - curiously not palimpsested from ancient Rome, but constructed specially for the occasion.


The Parco Savello next door leads down an avenue of pines


to one of the best views in the city, and as close as I wanted to get this time to St Peter's.


A quick lunch at a friendly cafe on the Viale Aventino, and then up to pay homage to the obvious, barging through the hordes of Chinese tourists, Indians touting identical forms of tripod-souvenir (do they ever sell any?) and South American panpipe bands. The old Romans would have seen auspices in the flocks of birds above the Arch of Constantine and the Colosseum


though apparently the migratory rush-hours at this time of year are seen as threatening by present-day citizens; men in white bodysuits stand on the hospital island making frightening noises through megaphones to stop the flocks from shitting on the earthlings. I was also surprised to see Italian twitchers down by the Tiber. But not before I'd headed via Largo Argentina to the three Tosca locations I know pretty well - though I've only been inside overdone Sant'Andrea della Valle (not on this occasion). Retraced old steps past the Campo dei Fiori, the Palazzo Farnese and the Fontana del Mascherone on handsome Via Giulia. The mask and the basin are ancient Roman objects re-used by the Baroque.


One thing I'd not done on previous visits was to step down to Tiberside and walk between the Ponte Sisto and the Ponte Cavour. Which in effect meant spectacular views from several angles of the Castel Sant'Angelo.


Finally it was up the tacky end of the Via del Corso to the Piazza del Popolo, from outside which I made the big mistake of taking a tram northwards to the hotel near the Parco della Musica. I should have finished off the walk, but I wanted to check my route for the reverse journey early the following morning. Which meant that when I enquired of a local on the tram whether the stop I thought I wanted was indeed 'Ankara Tiziana', he must have misheard and thought I wanted 'Tiziano', three further on.

Which got me well and truly lost, since it was off my maps, in a rather interesting residential part of Rome. I even walked in ignorant curiosity past Zaha Hadid's amazing new MAXXI (Museum of the 21st Century) building, but was too flustered and time-conscious to stop and check it out. Including the two old ladies who sent me off in the wrong direction to Piazza Mancini when I was in fact nearly there, no-one I asked was able (or, in most cases, bothered) to identify the Largo in which the hotel was situated until finally a kind young couple walked me there. The Hotel Astrid, run by Best Western, was a convenience stop organised by the Accademia, but really I can't recommend it too highly: the staff were delightful, the rooms refurbished and (around the courtyard at least) quiet, the lift not working but the grand (Edwardian-era?) marble staircase splendid, the cafe on the top floor - though I had to leave too early to breakfast there - graced with superb views over the Tiber to St Peter.

And the Parco della Musica is spectacularly state-of-the-art, too, with a huge book/CD shop, fine cafe and outdoor space before Renzo Piano's three copper-domed halls which doubles as an amphitheatre in the summer.


The concert I don't need to recapitulate here, but I must also praise the simple, excellent restaurant I went to with Nicky Thomas afterwards, La Vignola, where the waiter apologised for the lack of porcini but showed us instead a basket of freshly gathered mushrooms. Another plus is that you can eat locally well away from the tourist trail, so good food is guaranteed.

One last bonus: as the tram got me back to Piazza del Popolo at 6.15 the next morning, I had enough time to skip the Metro and walk to Termini for the airport train. Which meant another stroll down (or up) memory lane, past the Spanish Steps with the rosy dawn and the crescent moon still showing behind the Virgin on the Colonne dell'Immacolata


and up past Bernini's Triton


as well as the four other water-figures by Borromini's fabulous San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, illustrated - 2/11 update - in a later 'Roman fountains' post.

Nothing had prepared me for the chaos at Fiumicino - at least 500 travellers waiting for a single x-ray baggage security check - or the one-and-a-half-hour delay when, in some panic, I finally got to my flight with an official five minutes before take-off. But that's all part of the authentic Italian experience, too: what is it they say? ALITALIA = Always Late in Takeoff, Always Late in Arrival. Anyway, I did get back to London with just time enough to stop off at home and pick up my teaching stuff for our fourth Tosca class at the City Lit. But I'd had my 18 hours of Roman vision, and really hadn't expected to be so smitten afresh by a city I thought I could almost take for granted.