2025 Brescia

A Roman statue of Victory, found in Brescia

14.8.25

On the Torre Coltrina, with a great view south across the city, the Loggia just visible. Huge castle here – I had no idea Italy had such large medieval constructions.  A high outer wall then another inner one, both daunting.  Built on a natural hill, this place must have been impregnable for centuries.

A view of Brescia from the Torre Coltrina

Waiting to enter the Roman ruins, which open at 10am.  Steep stairs down from the castle, great views across the city.  In the historical museum area, very quiet, lots of back streets, many doubtless following ancient ways.  By the Roman theatre, reasonable preservation.  Seats broken but visible.  Reached by a system of galleries called vomitoria.  Really.

Roman amphitheatre, with vomitoria

Waiting to be conducted to the Roman museum here, even though the ticket said to go straight in… Ah well, Italy.  On the non-guided tour (sic), to see the 1st century BCE frescoes.  Good video showing the rise of Brixia – rather impressive temple and forum plus city.  Amazingly well preserved mosaic floor and frescoes – all 89 to 75 BCE.  Interesting wall design – like book bindings.  Trompe l’oeil fabrics beneath.  Real columns and painted ones.    Frieze along the top with geometric patterns – Cretan swastika, nested squares.

Frescoes and mosaics from two thousand years ago

Up into the main temple, or a reconstruction of it.  Bronze winged Victory mid 1st century CE.  Very impressive.  Pleats of the dress, and feathers of the wings amazing.  Lucky it survived.  Interesting “air lock” system: two sets of doors between main temple spaces.  You enter a small space between them.  The door closes, and the other door opens to view the Victory.  Keeps air cool.  Very strict on enforcing it.

A curious inscription

Back to a hall with hundreds of inscriptions - most real, some painted because still in situ.  Impressive how many have been found.  One inscription seems to have Germanic runes on it…

Along to the old cathedral.  Naturally three metres below current levels (reminds me of Esna).  As a result, the inside looks much bigger than the outside – a medieval Tardis.  The round form is both powerful and simple; echoing the round Romanesque arches.  Huge pillars, immensely thick.  Unusual design, with choir off main space, deep crypt below.  To the crypt – that cold, dank smell.  From 838, as is the church, according to the inscriptions.

The old, circular cathedral

Coffee in Piazza Paolo VI.  Good view of the old and new cathedrals and Broletto tower.  New cathedral facade has rounded and square pilasters with composite capitals - Ionic and Corinthian.  Extravagant broken curved pediment over the entrance.

On the way to the Piazza della Loggia, via the suspended rhinoceros

Air humid, sky overcast but bright, gentle breeze.  Perfect for sightseeing.  To Piazza della Loggia.  I’d forgotten about the clock opposite – very like the one in Venice.  Eating in L’oste sobrio, where they have banged us up by the fridge and toilets.  Not happy.  Terrible service – forgot about my food completely.  Ironically, when it did arrive, it was quite tasty…

To Pinacoteca Martinengo.  We’re practically the only visitors, of course.  A room with some great frescoes – one with a huge, shaggy dog.  Another room, with two Raphaels – real ones.  Weird pic by Moretto – Last Supper.  Christ has a hippy hat with badges, and a shell pinned on the left shoulder. Pilgrim symbols, apparently. The maid is carrying a dish of what looks like roast monkey, and none too fresh.  Striking pic of Christ and Veronica, with lots of soldiers looking fearful.  By Il Cariani.  

Christ and Veronica, by Il Cariani

Into a big hall, walls covered in blood-red cloth (other rooms were a glorious cobalt blue).  Fab pic by Moretto of nativity scene - very grand, very effective.  With a triplet of angels floating above, holding a scroll: “deus homo factus est”.  Like the three boys in the Magic Flute.  A smaller Moretto of the passion of Christ: him grey and resigned, the angel convincingly distraught.

A melancholy beggar

A six-string double bass from 1610, majolica.  Two paintings by the Anguissola sisters, the one by Sofonisba very fine.  A room full of pix by Giacomo Ceruti, also known as Pitocchetto – scenes of popular life.  Two beggars in a wood – haunting gaze of a blind (?) beggar.  Another of a seated beggar, gazing with infinite sadness…

Abraham and Isaac

Amazing sculpture of Abraham and Isaac, copy of Simon Troger, in wood and ivory.  Brilliant use of vertical forms to capture the angel’s intervention.  Unusual meeting of Jacob and Esau by Francesco Hayez (1844).  Like one by Holman Hunt…  Beautiful marble version of Laocoön and his sons by Luigi Ferrari.  

Laocoön and his sons

To the Santa Giulia museum, big, modern inside – and with aircon.  Some fine bronze heads found on the Roman site – Messerschmidt, but not screaming.  Amazing excavations under the Santa Giulia monastery – a house with extensive frescoes.  Beautiful, an almost complete mosaic of Bacchus and his pards (just one).  This domus only discovered in 1967.  Too much to see here, in one of the best museums of its kind that I have visited.  We leave, delighted and exhausted.

Roman heads, not screaming

Now tanking up with coffee and carbs before the drive back after a great day.  Brixia/Brescia is just fab.

More destinations:

1987 Italy

1988 Venice

1992 Padua, Venice

1993 Urbino

1994 Venice 

1994 Bari

1994 Rome 
1994 Trieste, Ljubljana 

1995 Siena, Bagno Vignoni, Pienza

1996 Torino

1998 Elba 

1998 Modena 
1999 Weimar, Venice

2024 Ravenna - with photos

Moody's Black Notebook Travels

1994 Rome

 6.9.94  On the Pendolino

From Piacenza to Roma.  Lovely train – red and sleek like a long stickleback.  In the Rome guidebook (one of the new visual ones from DK – excellently executed), page 87 – there is a patron saint of drivers: Santa Francesca Romana.  Rome.  Good to be back.  Driving through the streets I'd forgotten how beautiful – no, grand – it is.  The churches, the striated golden stone.  And motorini dappertutto.  Fine weather.  To Il Miraggio restaurant – fine spaghetti with a sprinkling of fish.  Bad news: I have seen the Mémoires of Saint-Simon in a second-hand bookshop…  To our room – number 106 – tremendous view of Trevi Fountain – tremendous noise too.

I sit outside San Pietro – refused entry because of my shorts - don't you just love the church's mercy? (Ironically, too, they are letting in others with shorts…)  A walk to the Spanish Steps.  Erroneously, I have to say, since I thought I was heading due west.  The sun moves to the west early here it seems.  Sun very strong – almost Yogyakartan at times – but there is a good breeze.

Down to the Tiber – very French, with trees (unheard of in Italy) along its banks.  Pass a square with bookstalls (but no prices).  So to here, driving up past the restaurant where I remember distinctly (why, I know not) eating Fegato alla Veneziana.  It's amusing (ish) watching everyone with shorts stride purposefully up to the cerberi, only to be refused (mostly).  To the Villa Sciarra (Trastevere after the Gianicolo (fine view).  Melancholy beauty of the ochre house.  Lots of kids, lovely evening.  Cats everywhere – Egyptian cats…

Now in Piazza della Santa Maria in Trastevere – a "characteristic quarter…" waiting for our Negroni.  Which turns out to be about four times stronger than any Negroni I've ever drunk.  Return to the hotel smashed.  Eat pizza (50 metres from the hotel), then gawp at the fountain.

Bella….

7.9.94 Hotel Fontana

The view from the third floor breakfast room (light with black grand piano) stunning down to the fountain (the coins visible).  The sun catching the papal stemma.  Last night very strange: smashed out of my head (I've never had such a strange single drink in my life), there were various loud noise – the police, cleaning lorries, who knows what.  But bed hard and comfortable.

The Pantheon - much bigger that I remember – really such a palpable demonstration of Roman power and ingenuity. M.AGRIPPA.L.F.COS.TERTIUM.FECIT in huge letters.  Behind me the restaurant/café where Mr Greenaway made The Belly.  On the way the strange wall of colours from the Temple of Adriano – now part of the Stock Exchange.  Motorini – lots of superb romane on them too, charging around.  Bikes less common. Inside the Pantheon – stupendo – such power and lightness – and that massive hole punched heavenwards.  The porch reminds me of Dendera – and perhaps has a similar function in a way.  

Sant'Ignazio – fine, powerful church, and even finer building outside – rare movement in the Piazza.  Wonderful ceiling in the church – extreme perspective.  Chiesa del Gesù – little to see because of restauri – but OTT.  Church of St. Louis of the French – three marvellous Caravaggios – especially the Calling of St. Matthew – those fingers: pointing à moi? - and à toi?  To the Piazza Navona – surely one of the most beautiful and dramatic of all – the church of Sant'Agnese in Agone, pure baroque, pure Borromini – I must learn more of him.  The manhole covers here have SPQR.

By Marcus Aurelius column, at the end of Via Tritone/Largo Chigi a wonderful pedestrian subway that is a bookshop. To Tazza d'Oro – wunnerful – near the Pantheon, too – my centre of Rome, my omphalos.  Bus ride (hot and crowded, Lire 1,200) to Stazione Termini, then to Santa Maria Maggiore.  Big, very big – I was able to see thanks to my long trousers over my short ones, carried all day.  Fine march of columns.  

Now at Da Giggetto – near the sinagoga, and the Portico of Octavia (by taxi – about 7,000 Lire for three people – very reasonable, and the taxisti always polite with their Roman drawl – one, yesterday, reading "Greek philosophy"…).  We sit near four free-standing columns from who knows when, and the remains of a portico.  The synagogue heavily guarded…  On the way here, the Vittorio Emanuele monument, a hideous pink…

Typical sounds – bad rock from a window high above us, a ball being bounced by bimbi, motorini (many), car alarm going off.  We try: artichokes a la juive, baccala' spinati (cod, fried), and – da-da – suppli al telefono (is there a wire?).  And then we'll see…  The Romans with their eternal telefonini (I went into SIP today to ask about modems and telefonini – they knew nothing even though they had some ads in their window.)  Opposite us, the old women out on their chairs in the street…

8.9.94

Basilica of Constantine – a bit impressive. Lovely in the early morning, cool shade, the deep green – especially the pines – which we can smell sometimes.  Truly romantic mixture of churches, trees and awesome ruins.  The fused bronze coins in the marble floor…  To the Capitoline Museum.  The Roman statues remind me of Musée Rodin – except that here there's a crowd.  Fine views of Campidoglio and Sindaco's place.

For no very good reason, down to E.U.R. on the metro – full, smelling like Jakarta.  On Linea B, a mad accordionist – earning around 10,000 Lire for five minutes…  Metro dull – functional, no ads.  Very sparse coverage of the city.  Just not part of Italian culture (even in Milan, very half-hearted).  cf. London and Paris – almost defines the city.

To the Colosseo Quadrato, the strange Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana – pure arches in the famous building (also called Palazzo della Civiltà del Lavoro, closed off), elsewhere columns reduced to rods.  The metro long and dull back.  The image better in films in this, cross between La Défense and Crystal Palace.

The wind is rising: a storm is on its way…

9.9.94

Café Greco – rather impressive, like a gallery – wonderful green conservatory before us.  Elsewhere plush scarlet velvet.  Some of the pix really very good.  The waiters in smart black tie and tails.  Marble table tops.  Fine.  Unlike the weather, which is turning.  To Piazza del Popolo – the double churches, but not as I remember them from winter.  

Motorini di Roma – along with the fountains, and pines, and ruins – Respighi – Rome is mopeds – the motors of the city – for a population too lazy to move – "Jump on me/Leap on me, O desire to work…".  Motto of the city – mopeds – they jump on their mopeds instead – fountains of youth, of history, La Dolce Vita.  Carbon monoxide or Cinquecento – renaissance/Fiat.  So be it: Roman Holidays...

More destinations:

1987 Italy

1993 Urbino

1994 Trieste, Ljubljana 

1995 Siena, Bagno Vignoni, Pienza

1996 Torino

Moody's Black Notebook Travels