Many readers may remember that in 2004 a woman in Florida discovered a miraculous image of the Virgin Mary on her grilled cheese sandwich and sold the toast in question (which at the time was already 10 years old and moldy) for some $28,000 on eBay.
Now, everyone on your Christmas list can achieve such effects with the Holy Toast bread stamp by World Wide Fred - it’s a gift we’re sure will warm the heart of any Rome lover.
Available in the US at Perpetual Kid (and in Urban Outfitters Stores), in Britain at I Want One of Those, and in the EU at Hoge.
It’s crisp, cool, and sunny in Rome - perfect for wandering about and enjoying the holiday spirit. Among our favorites here at the eCool compound is the snow shovel Christmas tree in the window at La Rinascente on Via del Corso. Let it snow!
Julius Caesar and Napoleon are the stars of a new advertising campaign for Zaptor, a video-on-demand service.
Both Caesar and Napoleon hoist remote controls rather than imperial batons, and the copy on the ads reads, “Rule your television. Watch what you want - when you want.”
Advertising Agency: Hjaltelin, Stahl & CO., Copenhagen, Denmark
Creative Director:Nicolai Stahl
Art Director:Peter Strange
Copywriter: Gustaf Hultberger
Photographer: Martin Juul
Published: November 2007
We’re still surveying Rome’s most fabulous Christmas windows and so today we take you for a visit to the fashionable Via Condotti, where the boys at Dolce & Gabbana have put together a window that pays holiday homage to their Sicilian heritage.
Elegantly mannequins wearing gorgeous gowns are scattered throughout an interior-scape filled with marzipan fruits and brilliant hand-painted Sicilian ceramics. Too much is never enough at D&G. Enjoy this feast for all the senses.
As the holidays near, the stress of shopping can be overwhelming. On this Photo Friday, Susan Sanders brings us a glimpse of the difficulties involved in selecting the perfect addition to the family presepe.
At the Piazza Navona Christmas fair, everyone gets in the act. Grandparents, parents, and kids clamor around temporary stalls in the piazza as they decide whether this is the right year to add another wiseman, a butcher, or a pizza maker to the elaborate and ever growing nativity scene at home.
For more photos of Rome (and beyond) by Susan, visit her Rome with a View blog.
Traditionally Moschino has used its Rome store window as a stage for fashionable cultural commentary. They often respond to events in the Eternal City or seasonal occurances with witty displays that cut right to the heart of the matter.
This year they provide a light-hearted look at traditional Christmas treats, providing their ultra-thin mannequin with an inedible gingerbread chorus. If there’s a second act this holiday, we’ll be sure to let you know!
We’re window shopping this week as we celebrate the Roman Holidays. Yesterday we showed you two of our very favorite storefront presepe scenes - one made of chocolate and one balanced on enormous rounds of Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese.
Today we follow the same theme, presenting a whole new view of the traditional story. We spotted this one in a pharmacy near the Pantheon and were utterly charmed by the idea of staging the scene in a big natural sponge.
On March 2nd 2008, four frescoed rooms in the house of Rome’s first emperor, Augustus, will be open to the public for the first time.
Those who would like to enjoy the paintings will be required to purchase a new “single ticket” providing access to the Roman Forum, the Colosseum, and the Palatine (this ticket also a new development in the Eterna in early 2008) and to view the rooms on a guided tour.
The four rooms on the lower level of the Imperial residence, as well as a small study above them, were found in the 1970s. They were in a particularly fragile condition and have only now been restored to their original state, Bottini said.
Experts believe they were part of a smaller house below the ruins of Augustus’ sprawling imperial palace - the house he established when he was still just Julius Caesar’s adoptive son Octavian and not Rome’s first emperor.
Culture Minister Francesco Rutelli called the opening of the rooms ”an extraordinary event, the fruit of decades of work which has been possible thanks to state funds but also funding from private bodies like the World Monument Fund”.
The holidays are approaching and stores in Rome are pulling out all the stops and decorating their windows in celebration. We don’t want you to miss a moment of the fabulous spectacle this provides!
While last week we showed you images from Rome’s Christmas Fair in Piazza Navona with its myriad of presepe figures, this week we’ve been strolling around in search of some of the more original presepe offerings adorning shop windows in the Eterna.
A stroll past Rome’s famous gelateria, Giolitti, is always worth the time as the pink grapefruit and rice flavors are as close as one can get to nectar and ambrosia. But, at Christmas, a visit to this celebrated ice-cream scooping locale holds extra delight, as the gelato wizards there often create scrumptious-looking presepe scenes such as that placed in a chocolate cave with a candy village scene towering above (left).
Yet not even a chocolate Christmas creche can trump the innovative idea of featuring a creche scene on a pile of parmigiano (right). Spotted on Via della Scrofa, the display provoked a round of the age-old carol, “O Christmas Cheese.”
Ron Hutt’s paintings (recently featured in a New York Times article) are hipped-up versions of Greek red figure vases, such as the painting above in which we see Aphrodite after her rendezvous with Ares calling her husband Hephaestus on her cell phone to say she will be late getting home.
So why feature these Greek-style paintings and their classical content on eCool, a blog about Rome? First, we at the eCool compound love modern takes on mythology, so we simply can’t resist these witty remakes. More legitimately, it’s a fact that painted Greek vases were a major Greek export to the Italian peninsula. In fact, more such vases have been found on the ancient Italian peninsula than in Greece itself.
Why is this artist so interested in modernizing an ancient art form, as in the painting above in which Heracles battles helicopters which are half human and half machine and is aided by two stem cell warriors, or that below in which the goddess Demeter is depicted as a protective earth mother and is encouraging a pair of endangered polar bears as they take apart a gas guzzling Hummer while Hummingbirds lend a beak to carry off a tire?
On his website, Ron Hutt explains:
The Greek narratives have a unique ability to contain and creatively express the conflicts inherent to life and offer to anyone who takes the time to read and contemplate them the rich reward of a humanized imagination.
We like the blending of the classical world with social critique meant for our 21st-century fast-paced world. If you like it too and would like to see more, Ron Hutt’s paintings are currently part of an exhibit titled, “Wit on Wry,” at the Islip Art Museum in New York.
