This past Saturday I went to the outskirts of Rome to check out IKEA. Just as interesting to see the inner city of Rome, are the contemporary suburban areas. The store is located just outside the A90 ring road near Anagnina, the last stop on the Metro A line, so it took a while to get there. A number of bus lines run from the metro station to the shopping center where IKEA is. The store was about what I expected it to be (after all, they in America) but I did enjoy seeing a European big box store.
I especially liked the parking lot, which had natural “green” parking spaces instead of pavement. While the driving areas were still asphalt, the actual spaces were left as turf. A plastic honeycomb shaped structure is laid down and filled with gravel and topsoil, permitting short turf to grow. This reduces storm water runoff, partially filters water as it permeates into the ground, and is much more attractive. It also allows trees to be planted between spaces without needing large landscape islands.
I haven’t looked into cost comparisons between this system and all-pavement. While I imagine these systems require some degree of regular maintenance, it seems like they’d be much more sustainable (lifetime and environmentally) than all asphalt, which gets cracked and uneven quickly, needing to be entirely repaved after 10 years. Alternatively I’ve also seen parking lots here with the spaces paved in brick or pavers, to control settling from the weight of vehicles in addition to some permeability.
On Friday I went to the Cimitero del Verona (Verona Cemetery), when I was close by on a visit to my studio site at Porta Maggiore. It is the primary municipal cemetery in Rome and opened in 1812. It covers an immense area (see map) and is organized in a grid layout. Toward the front of the cemetery the blocks were filled with various smaller monuments and family tombs. Further in, entire blocks are occupied by large mausoleum buildings, two or three stories high. Built at different times, there are a variety of different styles. The newer ones are pretty plane, resembling a typical contemporary building in Rome. Inside are levels of individual tombs accessed by staircases. I was intrigued by how many of these, essentially buildings, have been built solely for burials. It is literally a city for the dead. The cemetery was very peaceful to walk through on a sunny day. I occasionally saw a grounds keeper or another visitor, but otherwise there were not very many people there. See photos here.
We had a four day weekend in Rome for Easter, so a friend and I decided to take a short trip to Siena Friday through Saturday (April 2-3). Siena is a small city in the Tuscany region, about 250 km north of Rome. It was a very relaxing trip and the weather cooperated nicely. We spent a lot of time sitting in Piazza del Campo, the major square in the old town and famous for the twice-annual horse race held there. The irregular semicircular piazza (photo below) slopes down to one point so people gather there and sit and lay down, unlike most piazzas that are flat and have few places to sit. There were hundreds of people there during the day enjoying the sun, but at night activity is mostly limited to the perimeter restaurants, bars and cafes.
On the piazza is the Palazzo Publico, originally a town hall built in around 1300, with the Torre del Mangia campanile. We went up the tower for great views of Siena and the Tuscan countryside in all directions. The Palazzo is now a museum, which we went through too. Most interesting was a temporary exhibit on Bauhaus architecture which included several drawings by Walter Gropius and other Bauhaus and modernist architects, plus a number of architectural models of their works.
We stayed at a campground located outside the old city, which rented small trailer cabins. It was actually quite new and nice – and inexpensive. It was a pretty nice campground with its own restaurant and bar. Two bus routes ran between the city and the campground, but on Saturday we decided to walk back into the city instead. We happened upon Basilica dell’Osservanza, a modest brick church and monastery standing alone in the countryside. Originally built around 1490, it was rebuilt after being almost entirely destroyed in World War II. The exterior brickwork was attractive on its own, with the cupola (roof tip of bell tower) entirely in brick as well. Inside was small and minimal, and still regularly in use. It was refreshing to see. A few other churches we saw in Siena also had more modest interiors.
Architecturally almost all of Siena’s old buildings have brick facades, instead of stucco like in Rome. This was much more attractive, without crumbling, dirty stucco covering the real walls. In more contemporary areas surrounding the old city, the buildings are pretty similar to those in Rome and other cities in Italy. Overall Siena is a very attractive, pleasant city. The surrounding Tuscany landscape was the most beautiful scenery I have seen so far in Italy (though the weather and time of season probably had something to do with it). I really enjoyed walking through the countryside and getting to explore the small, charming city as well. It was a great short break from school and Rome. See all photos here.
The second half of spring break my friend and I were in Paris. We flew from Prague very early in the morning on Thursday (March 18), and arrived into the city a little after 8am at Gare du Nord (North Station), a few blocks east of our hostel, located probably a mile or two north of the river and the center of the city. After finding the hostel we took the Metro “downtown” near most of the major museums, sites and tourist attractions Paris has to offer.
First impression of Paris – it is enormous and a little disorienting if you don’t have a solid sense of direction where you are. Not really what I had been expecting, the different sites seem much more disjointed. Unlike Rome where the central ancient city is a deceivingly small area, Paris is just the opposite with everything further apart than one might expect from a map view. The overall scale of buildings and blocks in Paris are of course much larger than in Rome. Certainly more orderly (considering sventramento, the later slicing through of wide avenues through the city), but more difficult to comprehend at a human scale due to its urban massiveness. There seems to be less hierarchy between major and minor streets, so it is not as easy to orient oneself to a particular prominent thoroughfare. An aspect of Rome I may have criticized before, the juxtaposition of ancient and newer neighborhoods of contrasting scales and configurations, is actually quite useful for someone unfamiliar to be able to tell distinctly when moving between different portions of the city.
On our first day in Paris we went to a few of the major sites: Notre Dame, the Pantheon, and of course the Eiffel Tower. The spatial quality around the Eiffel Tower was not what I expected. It seemed much less grand on the ground than I had imagined. We walked up to the second level (not the very top) which still provided a great view of the city in all directions.
Friday morning we met up with my friend and classmate Jackson who was also visiting Paris that week and actually staying in the same hostel. We took a regional train out to visit the Palace of Versailes. The gardens were massive but unfortunately not in bloom yet as we visited in mid March. I enjoyed the Hall of Mirrors. After a few hours Spencer and I returned into the city for lunch and a visit to the Louvre. The museum was enormous, but we actually didn’t stay there very long. We then took a long Metro ride out to see Parc de La Villette that I wanted to check out. It is a large contemporary park (1980s) designed by Bernard Tschumi, with 35 “follies” – large red cubes placed on a grid throughout the park that are all deconstructed into various forms and functions. Like most places, it was not quite as I had imagined, but it was certainly interesting to experience.
On our last day Saturday we visited the Pompidou Centre. I enjoyed the contemporary exhibits much more than those in the Louvre. For lunch we ate at a cafe nearby. On our way to the bus stop to the airport, we stopped at La Défense. We flew out of Paris Beauvais, a very small rural airport, and got back to Rome around midnight.
I’m glad I made it to Paris. Given our short time there and the massive size of Paris, we mostly had to stick to sightseeing and didn’t really get to explore much of the city as a whole. Knowing very little French and being generally fatigued after a week and a half of traveling were also factors. Overall it was a good week though and we were able to see a lot of interesting and significant places. See all my Paris photos here.
Spring break was three weeks ago now, following a week-long class trip to the Veneto region of Italy. My friend Spencer came to visit and we traveled to Prague and Paris during the week with a couple days in Rome at both ends.
We flew from Rome to Prague Monday afternoon (March 15) and were there through early Thursday morning. Despite colder temps and cloudy skies, first impressions of Prague were good. The Prague Airport is nice and new and transportation into the city was easy and inexpensive. A 26 CZK (about $1.50) transit ticket got us a city bus ride and Metro trip to the city center where we were staying. Prague is a transit-intensive city with several metro lines, bus routes and surface tram lines. Like everywhere else I’ve visited in Europe, the bus and tram systems use the honor system where passengers must validate a transit ticket when they board, but oddly the subway metro system also uses this form of payment, instead of a typical access-controlled system with turnstiles or automatic gates. It was quite unusual to be able to just walk freely into the metro. Similar to Rome, a standard ticket permits 75 minutes of unlimited travel.
On Tuesday we walked around the city center hitting most of the significant places and sites. The city is large but the old center is quite compact with everything being pretty walkable. Except near the train terminal, everywhere we went was well-maintained and clean. Streets were mostly asphalt or cobblestone with sidewalks paved in decorative cube stones. The urban layout is much more consistent and contingent than in Rome where medieval streets mesh with modern wide thoroughfares and areas are disjointed by ancient ruins. Prague’s architecture is definitely distinct from Rome and more quintessential European. The majority of building facades are painted and pastel tones, making for a very colorful city.
Worth mentioning – the Czech Cubism Museum, housed in the House of the Black Madonna (top photo), the first and most prominent example of cubist architecture in Prague, built in 1912. The exhibit included cubist paintings, sculpture, furniture, and architectural drawings. Very interesting to learn more about an architectural and art movement so specific to Czech, and Prague in particular.
Another major site was the Prague Castle, an enormous, eclectic compound looking over the city of Prague. Dating back to the 9th century AD, several additions of the centuries has made it one of the largest castles in the world, including the Gothic cathedral, St. Vitus. We walked up to the castle, which permits fantastic views of the city, and walk through the outside, not actually going in. We did stop in the cathedral, which was my first Gothic cathedral to experience in person. The space was incredible. The interior height is emphasized by the structural expression of the Gothic style.
For dinner we had some typical Czech fare – dumplings, pork, sauerkraut, and the pub’s beer sampler. We ended up sitting at the end of a table shared with two other men. Evidently most dinning out in Prague is done by reservation.
Wednesday, among exploring the city center more on foot, we took the metro to the Žižkov Television Tower, to take in the 360 view from the observation level. Additionally we stopped back at the Nový Smíchov shopping center just a few blocks south of our hotel in the middle of a busy, redeveloped neighborhood called Anděl. The three level shopping center was comparable to American malls on the inside, but the exterior was tastefully hidden behind a long street facade of existing four-five story buildings, with a contemporary glass entrance opening up at one end to a street space surrounded by several other modern glass buildings and a busy tram stop. Nový Smíchov included a movie ciniplex and a full-sized Tesco store, a UK-based big box retailer similar to Walmart.
That evening we ate at a pretty good Thai restaurant and returned to the hotel pretty early because our early flight to Paris in the morning. We had to get around 3:30 to catch a night bus back to the Prague airport. It was very convenient, going right by our hotel. Prague was a very nice city to visit, modest and well-maintained. Architecturally it is a historic city that does not resist contemporary interventions.
See all my photos from Prague here.
