March 2026

I went twice to the Seurat show at the Courtauld, the second time with Jill, when we ran into Olivier Weil who is curating the Gysin show in Paris. He was intrigued to see that none of the pictures had come from the Musée d’Orsay. I normally enjoy Seurat’s work, but this selection – Seurat and the Sea – seemed to miss the point for me. He is all about light, but the picture plane has to come into it and he clearly either didn’t understand how reflections and shadows actually work or was being so sloppy he didn’t care. To paint the reflection of one boat then leave it out on another turns the area of paint between them into an area of uncertainty. The reflection of a tower is simply wrong, and the eye notices this and it jars. Maybe he just wasn’t as good a painter as I thought he was even though I love Bathers at Asniérs and La Grande Jatte.

My friend Marsha came from Norwich to spend a few days with me which was fun. She had worked on both Australian and UK Oz magazine and was the co-founder and the editor of Spare Rib, Britain’s first feminist magazine. We have a lot in common.

Suzy and Richard came to dinner to reminisce about out our Egyptian travels and Suzy took this photograph using the wall mirror which looks like a collage but isn’t.

On the 17^th Antonio, Jesse and I met at the Academy to further plot the celebration of Allen Ginsberg’s 100^th anniversary. The main event will be held at the Queen Elizabeth Hall with panel discussions at Swedenborg House. Here I can be seen applauding one of our joint decisions. Jesse and I had previously visited the Wallace Collection to see the Caravaggio on temporary loan – my second visit. There were a lot of dinners that month: Lucy came to visit and Theo and Mina took me to my favourite local Italian, Demartino, which is about as authentic an Italian trattoria as you can get in London. It was advance planning for my next trip.

Everything went according to plan. Camila and I met at Fiumicino Airport, landing from Lisbon and London at almost the same time. There was no cab line but as usual, although there are supposed to be fixed rates, we ended up paying more than we should have. We were staying at my friend Maria’s B&B, a self-contained part of her flat just south of the Vatican. Maria wasn’t there but arrangements had been made and we were just in time for dinner at the local trattoria.

Easter is not the best time to visit Rome, the Pope is doing his thing, but Camila teaches at university and the Easter break was the only time she could get away. The weather forecast was not good but our first day happened to be sunny. I had never been into the Colosseum, just admired what is left of the outside. We arrived first at the Arch of Constantine (AD 315) which is made up of recycled marble mostly from one previous arch, with friezes and roundels all taken from older monuments and recut to depict Constantine. I particularly liked the ‘disgruntled river-gods’ – as Amanda Claridge calls them – reclining in the spandrels of the lateral archways.

I had Amanda Claridge’s book Rome: an Oxford Archaeological Guide [2^nd rev ed, 2010] with me as it is the standard work. It is best to simply photograph those pages you are likely to need each day as it weighs a lot. And so to the Colosseum. I have always been fascinated by the Colosseum because my hometown of Cirencester, the Roman Corinium, had its own amphitheatre. Ours housed 8,000 people and was about the cheapest model you could get, whereas the Roman original was the first, by far the largest and architecturally sophisticated. We used to call the one in Cirencester ‘the Humpty-dumps’.

Vespasian built the Colosseum between AD 70 and 79 (it was completed in AD 80 after his death) as a triumphal monument in the Roman tradition from his share of the spoils of war, in this case the Jewish Triumph of AD 70 when the Romans returned with 50,000 kilos of gold and silver taken from the Temple at Jerusalem. It’s huge, it held 50,000 people, and I think much of its appeal comes from the fact that it is so familiar. The view inside is so like that of the Albert Hall or the Dome or the thousands of other auditoriums based on it. A Calendar of AD 358, when it was almost 300 years old, claimed it held 87,000 but it was adapted over time. There was a strict seating hierarchy: senators closest to the arena, then knights, then plebeians and right at the top, the poor, slaves and any women who dared attend. These top tiers were all of wood. The middle three ranges had stone seating and Claridge reminds us that the section of marble seating low down on the east side is ‘an erroneous piece of reconstruction done in the 1930s’. There’s loads about it on the web. Here are a few views, showing how much of the South side has been robbed, and how much of the below stage structure has survived.

It was a good day to see Trajan’s Column, (AD 113) with strong shadows, though it is now thought the reliefs on the side were never meant for close inspection but were added later as an act of piety when the column became his tomb. For an up-close look, you get a better view by examining the plaster casts in the Victoria and Albert Museum which were made before Rome’s air pollution did its work and which you can get closer to. The pedestal room beneath the column in the V&A used to be a favourite place for staff trysts, but all that changed when the Cast Rooms were restored.

We did not restrict ourselves to Classical Rome but also encompassed the Italian Renaissance, being good tourists. There is so much to see. There are more than 20 museums just specialising in Classical Rome and we only saw two. There are even more Baroque palaces. The Galleria Doria Pamphilj is the sort of palace I normally avoid as I can’t stand Baroque furnishings and most of its art leaves me cold. However, this palace – still in private hands – contains some exceptional paintings; notably Velázquez’s Portrait of Innocent X (1650), one of Francis Bacon’s favourites, and three Caravaggios. This museum is number one on my friend Valerie’s Caravaggio Trail and also contains Raphael, Lippi, Titian and all the usual suspects. Here’s your man’s John the Baptist (1602).

Despite having ‘jump the line’ tickets, we hung around outside the Vatican Museum for some time. But if you will go to the Vatican at Easter you are asking for trouble. It is one of the world’s greatest collections. Having recently been in Egypt I was prepared to miss the Egyptian museum which I seem to remember consists almost entirely of statues of Sekhmet, my favourite goddess, but there is much else to see. I tried to go straight to the Sistine Chapel, which is about a kilometre away from the entrance at the other end of the building, and work our way back, but the one-way crowd control system somehow subverted this and we were straight away in Bramante’s Octagonal courtyard, face to face with the Laocöon statue group. (C1 BC). Laocöon was the priest of Apollo at Troy and the work depicts he and his two sons being strangled by two snakes. It’s a vigorous piece of work. We had a facsimile of it in my art college in the early sixties, as did most other art colleges. It was first dug up in 1506 and at one point Michelangelo was thought to have made it and faked a Roman attribution. It was well known in London from copies in the eighteenth century and William Blake did several engravings of it. Camila, who is a Blake specialist, burst into tears upon seeing the real thing for the first time. Here’s Blake’s engraving and his complex commentary.

You must pass through the Raphael rooms before you reach the Sistine Chapel and so naturally pass through the Stanza della Segnatura which houses The School of Athens (1509-1511), his best known work; his Mona Lisa, his David. Astonishingly, most of the thick crowds of tourists, following flags or teddy bears on sticks, didn’t stop or even seem aware that they were missing one of the high points of the Vatican Museum. We stopped and had a good look. A few days later, we found a large-scale reproduction of it pasted on the wall of an outdoor café in Trastevere, where the faces were all substituted with contemporary actors and personalities (I didn’t recognise any of them, sadly).

From Raphael it is still quite a treck before you emerge, accompanied by a thousand others, into the Sistine Chapel where attendants keep the line moving, shoving people into the middle if they want to stop and look. Smart phones raised they march dutifully on. In fact, photography is not allowed so there is much remonstration. Here’s one I took back in March 2023. We found seats by the side and looked up until our necks hurt. We were very lucky because Michelangelo’s The Last Judgement, (1536-1541) the fresco that covers the whole altar wall of the chapel, had been covered for restoration until presumably only a day or two before we got there. They had hoped to finish before Easter and did so, just. It had been coated in a white film, caused by the breath of so many visitors. New ventilation has apparently been installed.

Did I mention the food? A meal with a decent bottle of Valpolicella or Montepulciano costs about half as much as it would do near me in Fitzrovia. And it tastes better.

We happened to coincide with the largest exhibition of Hokusai ever held in Italy. The Palazzo Bonaparte featured over 200 works borrowed from the National Museum of Krakow, and at Camila’s urging we went to see it. His attention to detail and delicately balanced compositions are a delight to see. My complaint has always been that all his women look alike: a standard doll-like face with no personality, presumably reflecting the society he was depicting. It was great to see though.

The last time I was in Rome the Pantheon was free to enter. Now that there is a fee there are enormous queues and even the line with tickets bought on-line is long. I was surprised because unless you enjoy architectural history, there is really very little to see. The Pantheon is one of my top ten favourite buildings. It has influenced so much Western architecture and even now is a breathtaking piece of construction. Until a few years ago it was the widest unreinforced concrete dome in the world, and its internal decoration can be found in Regency buildings all across Britain. Of course, Greek Revival architecture stems from Greek originals but the Pantheon with its smooth, more slender columns, was also a template for Britain. (My other favourite buildings include Borobudur; the Hagia Sophia; Karnak; Notre-Dame de Paris; the Alhambra; Casa Batlló and the Duomo di Milano.) The only light comes from the oculus at the top which also lets in the rain, but there is a proper drainage system to cater for that. The main ‘site’ is the tomb of Raphael; the dome is all. Everyone has fun taking photographs.

There’s some nice carved marble round the back, too, that most tourists don’t bother to go and look it. The road goes through what was once a building, so we are looking at an inside wall.

This was our day to visit the Villa Borghese but we stopped off enroute to see the Ara Pacis (13 BC). This altar dedicated to the Pax Romana of Augustus is no longer where it was originally built. It was found in pieces, many of which were then scattered to collections in Naples, Florence, Vienna and Rome but by 1937, after a very large new find, the pieces were reassembled (except for those in the Louvre who, already pissed off at having to return so much of the stuff that Napolean stole, are represented by a cast.) There is a lot of controversy over the overblown installation building by Richard Meier that many people feel is so unsympathetic to the surrounding architecture it should be pulled down. But the altar itself has a remarkable frieze showing priests and the Imperial family chatting and interacting with small children holding their hands or tugging at their togas. Different as Classical Rome was, with its gladiators and Vestal Virgins, these human gestures resonate for me and provide a connection to our ancestors across two thousand years.

We stopped off for selfies then walked to the Villa Borghese. I’d forgotten quite how steep the climb is up to the park from the Piazza del Popolo but managed it, just. It is a beautiful park housing a number of important museums but worth a visit in its own right. We were heading to the Galleria Borghese and its collection of Renaissance art.

You can’t just show up and book a ticket at the Galleria Borghese. The building stands over a network of tunnels and caves, some from antiquity some natural, and cannot take too much weight. Only 300 visitors are permitted on the ground floor and just 90 at a time on the first floor. Consequently, admittance is restricted to tour groups which you must book ahead. Unfortunately, this means you are at the mercy of your tour guide. Ours was a great fan of Bernini, whose most celebrated early sculptures are all there, and spent an inordinate amount of time extolling his virtues. I can’t stand Bernini and see his statues as contrived and artificial, little more than the 17th century equivalent of Playboy magazine. However, in every room there is a Bernini there is also a group of Roman statues which to me are of far more interest.

The collection includes Raphael’s Sacred and Profane Love, which I was able to sit and appreciate alone while the tour group were clustered around a writhing figure at the other end of the room. The greatest treasures for me are their six Caravaggios and his Young, Sick Bacchus (1593) in particular which is also an early self-portrait. Naturally the guide was also very keen on Canova’s Venus Victrix, (1805) a portrait of Pauline Bonaparte (sister of the emperor) commissioned by her husband Camillo Borghese. It was unusual for an aristocrat to be portrayed naked, but Canova also did a naked statue of Nappy that is now in Apsley House on Hyde Park Corner so it balances out.

Camila is a wonderful travelling companion. She laughs at my jokes (!) and is prepared to accompany me to lessor known sites that I particularly like. On the 2nd we slowed the pace first by visiting the two little temples just over the bridge from Trastevere: the Temple of Vesta (late 2nd c BC) and the Temple of Portunus (70 BC). Both are remarkably complete. The former is a circular Hercules temple and retains its Corinthian columns though its marble entablature and original roof are gone. I like its size and beauty – the columns come from Greece and have integrated bases. And just next door stands the perfect little Temple of Portunus, set on a high podium to keep it clear of the flooding Tiber. We were on our way to Trastevere to meet Camilia’s friends. It was a truly international lunch: Benjamin is from Iran, I am a Brit, Camila is Brazilian and Britney is from Hawaii. And we all like wine. We did pop into a bookstore on the way back. Being an old bookseller – in every sense – I can’t help but check them out. This is the Open Door bookshop, a very nice place.

The next day we visited the Terme di Caracalla, (211-16 AD) south of the Colosseum. These are huge, capable of holding as many as 10,000 people and were in use for more than 300 years. As usual the Christians robbed the marble for their ghastly churches and moved the statuary to their palaces: the Farnese Hercules now in Naples is from there as are the winged thunderbolts in the Duomo in Pisa. But a huge amount remains: large areas of mosaic floor are intact and even fragments of wall mosaics are on display near their original positions. The site includes a large central garden which, in the spring sunshine, was quite delightful.

The weather held and using our Archaeological Park membership cards we covered the whole site from Trajan’s Column down to the Colosseum. This is the area of the Imperial Forums, and there are a number of them, making it quite hard to decipher. In fact, it would take a week to do a proper historical tour of the site. We just wandered and absorbed the atmosphere. To the north-west you get a good view of Trajan’s Markets, basically a Roman shopping mall, nestled closely against his forum. It recently featured in Emily In Paris-Rome if you watch such a thing. Some buildings are open and I loved the life-sized livestock in the Forum Romanum, particularly the pigs.

When I was a rock critic there was a well-known saying that ‘Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.’ Well, here’s proof that you can. We were admiring the only group of columns still standing from antiquity when an Indian couple offered to take our picture. It was a nice gesture. It is not all columns and statues; some painting remains though nothing like as extensive as in Pompei. The site is well managed with clear pathways leading through it and adequate signage. I did occasionally catch a glimpse of Rome 2000 years before, the senators in their togas, the merchants in their shops. It is a time machine.