Museums

Thanks for all your comments regarding Muti! Cora, I'm with you in that the first photo looks the most like him and the second and third are not as convincing. Stephen, my aspiring filmmaker, took the photos before the performance started. I guess we'll never know for sure whether we saw Muti or not! Earlier in the day we visited the Campidoglio, which observers call the nexus of ancient and modern Rome. You walk up a raft of steps to the piazza, where stands the monumental statue of Marcus Aurelius on horseback. I consulted my college art history text to learn about the statue's significance and we took lots of photographs. Funny then, that we would see the same impressive statue again inside the Campidoglio museum. Turns out that the original Marcus Aurelius was moved indoors since my college text was published and a copy now stands in the piazza. (I guess that means I'm old.) Here in Rome history abuts history if you will. In any given museum you may find Roman statues, copies of Roman statues, Roman copies of Greek statues, Renaissance copies of Roman statues...you get the idea. We have seen the same bust of Caracalla I don't know how many times. My boys are forever asking me, "Is this real?" I'm not sure what real means. Popes moved things here and there and rich Italians collected any number of unrelated objects and housed them together, so you're often not sure exactly what you're seeing. Wall text, usually only in Italian, is not much help. And the guards, when they're in the seats, are reading newspapers or playing with their cell phones. My boys get a big kick out of this. Italians know that no matter what they do people will come from all over the world to see these treasures.