National Gallery of Modern Art

The National Gallery of Modern Art  is an art gallery in Rome dedicated to modern art.

It is located at Via delle Belle Arti, near the Etruscan Museum. With its neoclassical and Romantic paintings and sculptures, it marks a dramatic change from the glories of the Renaissance and ancient Rome. Its 75 rooms house the largest collection of works by 19th- and 20th-century Italian artists including Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, Giorgio de Chirico, Giovanni Fattori, Amedeo Modigliani, Giorgio Morandi, Giacomo Manzù, Alberto Burri, Antonio Canova.

There are also a few notable works by foreign artists, including Calder, Cézanne, Duchamp, Giacometti, Braque, Degas, Wassily Kandinsky, Mondrian, Monet, Jackson Pollock, Rodin, Van Gogh and Klein.

This is the Official Gallery Site:
http://www.gnam.beniculturali.it/index.php?en/1/home

Villa Doria Pamphili

The Villa Doria Pamphili is a seventeenth century villa with what is today the largest landscaped public park in Rome. It is located in the quarter of Monteverde, on the Gianicolo, just outside the Porta San Pancrazio in the ancient walls of Rome where the ancient road of the Via Aurelia commences.

It began as a villa for the Pamphili family and when the line died out in the eighteenth century, it passed to Prince Giovanni Andrea IV Doria from which time it has been known as the Villa Doria Pamphili.

The exterior containing statues gives a rich allure that was architecturally somewhat conservative for its date, looking back towards the Villa Medici or the Casina Pio IV, and rather more Mannerist than Baroque. It offered a forestaste of the richly stuccoed and frescoed interiors, where the iconographic program set out to establish the antiquity of the Pamphili, a family then somewhat parvenu in Rome, with origins in Gubbio. Inside, Algardi provided further bas-reliefs and stucco framing for the heroic frescoes drawn from Roman history painted by Grimaldi.

Borghese Art Gallery

The Borghese Gallery  is an art gallery in Rome housed in the former Villa Borghese Pinciana, a building that was from the first integral with its gardens, nowadays considered quite separately by tourists as the Villa Borghese gardens. The Galleria Borghese houses a substantial part of the Borghese collection of paintings, sculpture and antiquities, begun by Cardinal Scipione Borghese, the nephew of Pope Paul V (reign 1605–1621). The Villa was built by the architect Flaminio Ponzio, developing sketches by Scipione Borghese himself, who used it as a villa suburbana, a party villa at the edge of Rome.

Scipione Borghese was an early patron of Bernini and an avid collector of works by Caravaggio, who is well represented in the collection by his Boy with a Basket of Fruit, St. Jerome, Sick Bacchus and others.


This is the GALLERIA BORGHESE website:
http://www.galleriaborghese.it/

Villa Medici

The Villa Medici is an architectural complex centred on the villa whose gardens are contiguous with the larger Borghese gardens, on the Pincian Hill next to Trinità dei Monti in Rome. The Villa Medici, founded by Ferdinando I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany and now property of the French State, has housed the French Academy in Rome since 1803. A musical evocation of its garden fountains features in Ottorino Respighi's Fontane di Roma.

In 1803, Napoleon Bonaparte moved the French Academy in Rome to the Villa Medici with the intention of preserving an institution once threatened by the French Revolution. 

From that time on, the boarders no longer belonged solely to the traditional disciplines (painting, sculpture, architecture, metal-engraving, precious-stone engraving, musical composition, etc.) but also to new or previously-neglected artistic fields (art history, archaeology, literature, stagecraft, photography, movies, video, art restoration, writing and even cookery.) Artists are no longer recruited by a competition but by application, and their stays generally vary from six to eighteen months.

Beautiful Borghese Gardens

Villa Borghese is a large landscape garden in the naturalistic English manner in Rome, containing a number of buildings, museums and attractions. It is the second largest public park in Rome (80 hectares ) after that of the Villa Doria Pamphili. The gardens were developed for the Villa Borghese Pinciana ("Borghese villa on the Pincian Hill"), built by the architect  Ponzio, developing sketches by Scipione Borghese, who used it as a villa suburbana, a party villa, at the edge of Rome, and to house his art collection. The gardens as they are now were remade in the early nineteenth century.

• Today the Galleria Borghese is housed in the Villa Borghese itself. The garden Casino Borghese, built on a rise above the Villa by the architect Giovanni Vasanzio, was set up by Camillo Borghese to contain sculptures by Bernini from the Borghese collection, including his David and his Daphne, and by Antonio Canova, with paintings by Titian, Raphael and Caravaggio.

• The Villa Giulia adjoining the Villa Borghese gardens was built in 1551 - 1555 as a summer residence for Pope Julius III; now it contains the Etruscan Museum.

• The Villa Medici houses the French Academy in Rome. In the 1650s, Diego Velázquez painted several depictions of this Villa's garden casino festively illuminated at night. Before electricity, such torchlit illuminations carried an excitement hard to conceive today.

• Other villas scattered through the Villa Borghese gardens are remains of a world exposition in Rome in 1911.
  • The Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna located in its grounds has a collection of 19th and 20th century paintings emphasizing Italian artists.
  • Architecturally the most notable of the 1911 exposition pavilions is the English pavilion designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens now housing the British School at Rome.

In the very Heart of Rome

Via Margutta is a small street in the center of Rome, near to Piazza del Popolo, accessible as a small alley from Via del Babbuino, in the old quarter of Campo Marzio, also known as "the foreigner's quarter".  It is a place with many art galleries and fashionable restaurants, where before the Renaissance there were only modest craftsmen workshops and stables.

In the 1950s, after the film Roman Holiday it became an exclusive road, and a residence of many famous people, like film director Federico Fellini. It can be reached from the north traveling by the Via Cassia or by Flaminia until arriving to the large square Piazzale Flaminio, and then passing through the city door in the wall that leads to Piazza del Popolo square, from this point it is a walk of several meters to the left of the Flaminio Obelisk towards Via del Babuino, on the left side of this road there is an alley that leads to Via Margutta.

Yearly exposition of "100 Painters of Via Margutta"

"One hundred painters of Via Margutta", is a traditional arts festival usually warmly acclaimed by citizens. The expo is sponsored by the Major and Province of Rome, the Lazio Region, and for many years has been an interesting opportunity to help critics discover new artists.

The meeting makes Via Margutta a true public art gallery, presenting more than 1,000 works, including oil paintings, drawings, watercolors, also of unknown or less-famous artists, accurately chosen by a jury, coming from many countries. They work in every expressive typology like figuration, abstractionism, portrait, symbolism, surrealism, etc.

Admission is free, the exposition is open to everybody, the viewing of the works is casual and an easygoing attitude is the norm.

Between the historical inhabitants of the street we can remember Giulietta Masina, Federico Fellini, Renato Guttuso.

Throw a coin in ....and you'll come back to Rome

A traditional legend holds that if visitors throw a coin into the fountain, they are ensured a return to the Eternal City. Among those who are unaware that the "three coins" of Three Coins in the Fountain were thrown by three different individuals, a reported current interpretation is that two coins will lead to a new romance and three will ensure either a marriage or divorce. Another reported version of this legend is that it is lucky to throw three coins with one's right hand over one's left shoulder into the Trevi Fountain.

An estimated 3,000 euros are thrown into the fountain each day. The money has been used to subsidize a supermarket for Rome's needy. However, there are regular attempts to steal coins from the fountain.

Along the Spanish Steps

The Spanish Steps (Scalinata della Trinità dei Monti) are a set of steps climbing a steep slope between the Piazza di Spagna at the base and Piazza Trinità dei Monti, dominated by the church of Trinità dei Monti. The Scalinata is the widest staircase in Europe.

In the Piazza at the base is the Early Baroque fountain called Fontana della Barcaccia ("Fountain of the Old Boat"), built in 1627-29 and often credited to Pietro Bernini.
During May, part of the steps are covered by pots of azaleas. In modern times the Spanish Steps have included a small cut-flower market. The steps are not a place for eating lunch, being forbidden by Roman urban regulations, but they are usually crowded with people.

In the piazza, at the corner on the right as one begins to climb the steps, is the house where English poet John Keats lived and died in 1821; it is now a museum dedicated to his memory, full of memorabilia of the English Romantic generation.

At the top the Viale ramps up the Pincio which is the Pincian Hill, omitted, like the Janiculum, from the classic Seven hills of Rome. From the top of the steps the Villa Medici can be reached.

The Capitoline Museums

The Capitoline Museums are composed of three main buildings surrounding the Piazza del Campidoglio and interlinked by an underground gallery beneath the piazza.

The three main buildings of the Capitoline Museums are:

• Palazzo Senatorio, built in the 12th century and modified according to Michelangelo's designs;
• Palazzo dei Conservatori, built in the mid-16th century and redesigned by Michelangelo with the first use of the giant order column design; and
• Palazzo Nuovo, built in the 17th century with an identical exterior design to the Palazzo dei Conservatori, which it faces across the palazzo.

In addition, the 16th century Palazzo Caffarelli-Clementino, located off the piazza adjacent to the Palazzo dei Conservatori, was added to the museum complex in the early 20th century.

The third floor of the Palazzo dei Conservatori houses the Capitoline Art Gallery, housing the museums' painting and applied art galleries. The Capitoline Coin Cabinet, containing collections of coins, medals, jewels, and jewelry, is located in the attached Palazzo Caffarelli-Clementino.

The hill of weddings

The Capitoline Hill between the Forum and the Campus Martius, is one of the seven hills of Rome.
The Capitoline contains few ancient ground-level ruins, as they are almost entirely covered up by Medieval and Renaissance palaces (now housing the Capitoline Museums) that surround a piazza, a significant urban plan designed by Michelangelo.
The church of Santa Maria in Aracoeli is adjacent to the square, located near where the ancient arx, or citadel, atop the hill it once stood. At its base are the remains of a Roman insula, with more than four stores visible from the street.
The existing design of the Piazza del Campidoglio and the surrounding palazzi was created by Renaissance artist and architect Michelangelo Buonarroti .
 Michelangelo's first designs for the piazza and remodelling of the surrounding palazzi date from 1536. He reversed the classical orientation of the Capitoline, in a symbolic gesture turning Rome’s civic center to face away from the Roman Forum and instead in the direction of Papal Rome and the Christian church in the form of St. Peter’s Basilica.

Professional Congress Hostess

The main duty of a Professional Congress Hostess is to set up and implement a congress or  a social event from the very start to the end of it.  She  takes care of fulfilling customers' needs  who partecipate to cultural, sport, religious events,  conventions, workshops, seminars,conferences, congresses, exhibitions.

She is asked to set  up and check the  list and number of partecipants,  welcome them at the entrance of the exhibition or congress, check down their personal information,  distribute brochures, dépliants and leaflets, accompany them in the rooms where the congress is going to take place, invite them to have lunch or dinner, give them any information about the congress schedule, about monuments, shopping, bank closing hours,transport & tourist information, give them language assistance for the whole  duration of the congress, let them know about social events taking place in the town that hosts the congress. 

 She is asked to fulfill customers' needs,  being a valid support to her boss,  informing him/her  of changes that may occur during the congress. She must speak at least 2 foreign languages, have a well round education, be sensitive, reliable, having elegant manners.  Great hotels, palaces, villas, embassies are the locations chosen  for these events.  She is also assumed  to have a very good knowledge of computer science and its main software applications.  

She is needed to have a higher diploma  in foreign languages or tourism; besides this she is asked to be good looking, having very good manners, being kind, reliable, punctual, efficient, taking responsibilities. She's also assumed  to be healthy, very calm and patient....it's not a job to be underestimated...! Only if you think to have all of these characetristics, please take your own risk and try.