It’s easy finding beauty in Rome! Every street has jaw-droppingly gorgeous architecture, and the sun seems to caress each object with a special glow. During my morning walk, I passed amazing Roman basilicas and small art exhibits. After a double espresso, I spent several hours at Castel Sant’Angelo, viewing the exhibition L’alba di un museo.
Castel Sant’Angelo
Defensively poised above Ponte Sant’Angelo, one Rome’s most famous bridges, Castel Sant’Angelo is an ancient structure that’s “worn many faces over the centuries — imperial tomb, fortress, papal refuge, and prison“. Now, it’s one of the city’s “most preserved museums”. Currently, there are three exhibitions on display at the castle – “each, in their own way, tells the story of how art, faith, and stories shape our world”:
- Castel Sant’ Angelo 1911-1925. L’alba di un museo – Dawn of a Museum
- Roma e l’invenzione del cinema – Rome & the Invention of Cinema
- Giovanni Paolo II: The Man, The Pope, The Saint – In the Photography Shots of Gianni Giansanti
L’alba di un museo
The exhibition L’alba di un museo looks at the birth of the Castel Sant’Angelo Museum. The exhibits on display “revisit the early twentieth-century vision of turning the ancient fortress into a cultural home“.
“Visitors see rare works not displayed for decades, historic documents, and even a reconstructed model from the 1911 exhibition that first imagined Sant’Angelo as a public museum. The show is a quiet meditation on how the castle — once a place of war and power — became a space of art and memory.”
I took a ton of photos, but somehow lost most of them when uploading from my iPhone to laptop :o(. There were many amazing exhibits. I may go for a second tour to re-take the lost photos for future reference. Views from the top alone are well worth the price of an entrance ticket!
