2007 April archive at eternallycool.net

Archive for April, 2007

Apr

Soccer Goes for Baroque

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Categories: Past & Present and Advertising

Adidas Soccer Ceiling

In our excitement about last year’s World Cup we missed this fabulous Adidas ad which graced the ceiling of the main Cologne train station, Hauptbahnhof. Even so we’re thrilled to find it now and to admire it for its brilliant invention upon the Baroque ceiling painting found in Rome’s church of Sant’Ignazio.

Soccer stars (all Adidas-sponsored, of course) replace saints and they find heavenly delight in kicking a host of soccer balls towards the heavens. Among the players who transcend bounds of earthly time and space are David Beckham (Real Madrid and England), Kaka (AC Milan and Brazil), German national team captain Michael Ballack (Chelsea FC) and his team mate Lukas Podolski (FC Bayern Munich), Zinedine Zidane (Real Madrid and France), Raul (Real Madrid and Spain), Lionel Messi (FC Barcelona and Argentina), Juan Roman Riquelme (Villareal CF and Argentina), Nakamura (Celtic Glasgow and Japan) and Djibril Cisse (Liverpool FC and France).

It took Hamburg-based illustrator Felix Reidenbach 40 days to complete this pantheon of soccer gods and he must have made a serious study of Fra Andrea Pozzo’s 17th century fresco of The Apotheosis of Saint Ignatius in Sant’Ignazio. Just as Reidenbach’s train-station soccer gods appear to be making an ascent into the heavens, the breath-taking perspective of Pozzo’s mind-boggling church vault makes the viewer believe that they’ve entered the church just in time to see Saint Ignatius being raised to heaven amidst a crowd of angels and saints.

Apr

2760 Years of Rome:

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Categories: Birthday of Rome, Historic Sites and Past & Present

Apr

The Pageant, the Party, the Parade

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Categories: Birthday of Rome, Historic Sites and Past & Present

Rome celebrated this weekend with a three-day gala celebration in honor of the city’s 2760th birthday on April 21st. The party kicked off on Friday evening with a goddess pageant in which Rome’s loveliest young women competed for the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity represent the ancient deity Roma. The winner donned a helmet and hoisted a spear to the thunderous applause of an audience that showed full appreciation of her beauty and of the fighting skills she demonstrated in the city defense competition. Judges for the event were some of Rome’s most illustrious citizens, including the Empress Livia, the She-Wolf, the war-god Mars, and Hadrian’s esteemed consort, Antinous.

Saturday’s events included a rekindling of the eternal flame that once burned in honor Vesta, Rome’s goddess of hearth and home. As Vesta’s temple in the Forum Romanum is currently in ruins after centuries of neglect, organizers chose to hold the event in front of Rome’s majestically-preserved Temple of Hercules. Once a god and now a Disney superhero, Hercules attended the ceremony in his usual but oh-so-elegant lion-skin cardigan. “I’m pleased to host these ceremonies at my Temple, Hercules told the press. Poor Vesta, she’s been homeless for so long now. It’s the least I could do with her temple being ruined and no funding for restoration in sight. Don’t you think it’s nice to see the Virgins back at work after all these centuries, even if their home is in shambles?” Following the ceremony, the Roman Emperor hosted a fundraising dinner at the Imperial Palace Hotel. Guests of honor were the Vestal Virgins (who, by necessity, attended without escorts). Four hundred tickets were sold for 1000 sesterces each. Proceeds will be used to support the grain dole.

The weekend of celebration culminated in a Sunday morning parade from the enormous Circus Maximus to the glorious Forum of Caesar. Throngs of plebeians, slaves, friends, Romans, and countrymen lined the parade route hoping for a glimpse of the newly crowned goddess Roma. They were rewarded with a magnificent spectacle of a kind not seen in Rome since the cinematic arrival of Cleopatra in 1962. Bacchic revelers, belly dancers, celebrated gladiators, prisoners of war, senators, and praetorian guards marched through the streets to the beat of drums.

Without a doubt, the highlight of the parade was a special appearance by the Emperor and Empress. Waving at the crowd, the royal couple walked hand-in-hand in what was clearly an attempt to dispel tabloid rumors that their marriage was on the Tarpeian Rock. The event was extremely stylish with participants decked out in fashions from the city’s hottest designers. Despite temperatures in the mid-70s, fur was de rigueur and many of the best-dressed wore exotic black bear pelts and lion skins.

Optimus Maximus, a not-for-profit organization that helps out-of-work gladiators transition to new careers, provided security for the weekend’s events.

Apr

Rome is Where the Hearth Is

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Categories: Birthday of Rome, The Rest of Italy and Past & Present

Vestal Virgins 21 April 2007

Among the many gods and goddesses charged with protecting the ancient city of Rome was Vesta, the goddess of house and hearth. Every Roman family worshiped Vesta in their home, and early on in Roman history, a king named Numa decreed that the city of Rome, like a family, would honor Vesta by building a temple to her in the Roman Forum.

Because Vesta was the goddess of the hearth, her temple housed a flame that was always kept burning thanks to the careful care of Rome’s most important women, the Vestal Virgins, who lived nearby. Just as Romans considered women the caretakers of the home, the Vestal Virgins were considered to be special guardians of the state, watching carefully to insure that the fire burned at all times.

Now the Temple of Vesta is in ruins and the house of the Vestal Virgins is nothing more than a must-see on every tourist itinerary. But the spirit of Vesta lives on. Yesterday, 21 April 2007, Rome celebrated its 2760th birthday and among those present at the party were modern-day Vestal Virgins who rekindled the sacred fire (never mind they were standing in front of the Temple of Hercules when they did so - it’s the thought that counts).

Certainly the goddess was pleased by the observation of her rituals, but if truth be told she’s not in Rome much these days. Vesta’s taken her home fire to the Venetian lagoon. Since 2001 the deity has been the CEO of Venice’s waste management and environmental services company, having decided to extend her homemaking influence beyond the bounds of the Eterna in an effort to keep La Serenissima fresh and clean.

Vesta Dumpster & Trash Bag

Apr

Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes

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Categories: Fashion

Shoes by Marc Jacobs

Apr

Food that’s Fresh as the Roman Spring

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Categories: Food & Wine

Rome’s food markets are overflowing with fresh spring fruits and vegetables: crispy asparagus, fresh peas that can be popped straight into your mouth, sweet sweet strawberries, huge bulbs of fennel, radishes that glow, and long, lovely fava bean pods.

So, what to eat today? Could anything be more Roman than a Fava Bean, Asparagus & Arugula Salad with Shaved Pecorino? Maybe a side of Fresh Pea Hummus scooped up on spicy radishes?

Apr

Patricia Cronin: Lost & Found

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Categories: Art & Design

New York artist Patricia Cronin is currently working and living in Rome. While in the Eterna, Cronin is spending her time exploring the life and the artistic works of Harriet Hosmer, a 19th-century American sculptor who moved to Rome in the 1850s, when she was just 22 years old. In the course of her highly successful career, Hosmer became known as the first professional woman sculptor: she was critically acclaimed and her works were widely exhibited. Despite all this, Hosmer’s stunning Neoclassical marble sculptures are largely unknown.

Cronin has vowed to change that situation and has spent the past nine months working on the Harriet Hosmer Catalogue Raisonne. Being an acclaimed artist herself, Patricia wasn’t content to produce a photographic catalog of Hosmer’s work. Rather, she’s chosen to represent her Neoclassical colleague’s marble sculptures with a series of monochromatic watercolors. The results are stunning - Cronin’s watercolors showcase the luminosity of marble while giving a sense of the weight and the volume of each of Hosmer’s stone figures.

The creation of a Catalogue Raisonne for Harriet Hosmer is a laudable task that will help to close the gender gap that currently characterizes our understanding of American Neoclassical sculptors working in Rome. Furthermore, Cronin’s self-assigned task of recording each and every one of Hosmer’s works with her own hands presents a particularly interesting challenge: The Queen of Naples, a life-size marble sculpture that contemporaries considered to be Hosmer’s crowning achievement, is missing. Only written descriptions of the work remain and so Cronin has spent months grappling with the problem of how to paint what she cannot see. The solution she’s settled on is that of representing the missing sculpture as a series of haunting apparitions whose forms can barely be discerned. It’s a brilliant move. The technique makes Cronin’s Queen of Naples paintings utterly compelling for they force the viewer to contemplate the transitory nature of all things - even (or especially) marble sculptures which usually seem so very permanent and unchangeable.

How did a contemporary American artist become interested in the work of a Neoclassical sculptor like Harriet Hosmer? Thoughts of life, death, and change over time brought Cronin and Hosmer together. In 2002, Patricia unveiled a 3-ton marble mortuary sculpture that she made to mark the grave in which she and her partner Deborah Kass will someday be laid to rest. Called Memorial to a Marriage, the widely-celebrated sculpture is carved of Carrara marble in the manner of a 19th century sepulcher. Therein lies the moment at which Cronin was introduced to Hosmer. And one can only imagine that it must have been love at first sight, for despite the boundaries of space and time that separate them, Cronin and Hosmer are a perfect match.

Patricia Cronin is represented by the Claire Oliver Gallery in New York. Through July her work can be seen by appointment at the American Academy in Rome: 06 581 2674.

Apr

Don’t Go Breakin’ My Egg

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Categories: Food & Wine

Look closely and you’ll see that this giant chocolate Easter egg is embellished with an image of the Temple of Castor and Pollux in the Roman Forum. Old meets new in the most unlikely places in the Eternal City.

If you didn’t get enough chocolate at Easter time, make a beeline to Valzani, an old-fashioned chocolate store in Trastevere at Via del Moro 37a/b. They’ve been in business since 1925 and that’s given them a lot of time to figure out what to do with chocolate Easter Eggs that didn’t find a home before the holiday. Break them! Sell them! Eat them!

Apr

Eros: Love Among the Ruins

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Categories: Historic Sites and On Show

Sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll in the ancient world? You bet! The god in charge of (almost) all of them was Eros or Cupid, the love child of Venus, the goddess of lust and sexuality.

With his cherubic face and his teenage sense of humor, Cupid was a god who spent most of his time doing the bidding of his mother, Venus. In fulfilling her lusty missions, his weapons of choice were the bow and arrow, and, to his credit, the teen god shot his darts with uncanny accuracy. In fact, ancient Romans feared being the target of Cupid’s arrows - and for good reason. His quiver was filled with both gold- and lead-tipped projectiles and both types of arrows left their victims utterly unable to control their emotions.

Wounded by the immortal marksman’s golden-tipped arrows, one fell into a life of blissful romance and true love. But that almost never happened. More commonly, Cupid fired off blunt, leaden projectiles. Those struck by the dreaded lead darts were destined to chase wildly after the very person who would be utterly repulsed by their affections.

Want to know more about erotic love in the ancient world? Get thee to the Colosseum. Until the middle of September an exhibit titled Eros showcases Cupid and his mother Aphrodite or Venus. On display are painted vases, sculptures, and frescoes that illustrate ancient amor in all its glory.

Apr

Saints gone postal

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Categories: Advertising

San Dalo & Dwich

Postcards designed by the Armando Testa firm (ostensibly) to promote good behavior in church.

San Dalo, patron saint of summer footwear, reminds churchgoers that they should be properly attired, while San Dwich, about to garnish his panino with ketchup, admonishes the faithful that gum chewing and eating are not acceptable in church.

San Itario, patron saint of hygiene, pulls a toilet flush chain, suggesting that unnecessary noise should be avoided, while San Gria, with her pitcher of fruited-wine, conveys the message that the pious should attend mass only when sober.

By ADCI Promocards. Postcards are distributed free of charge in participating restaurants, bars, and pizzerias throughout Italy.

Art direction by Laura Sironi, text by Maria Meioli, and creative direction by Michele Mariani.