Tickets have finally been released for August and September. We were able to buy our 4 tickets to pick up at the ticket office. We weren’t able to use our VISA card in 3 attempts so I switched over to PayPal and it went through in a second. Didn’t have time to figure out why the 3-D secure by VISA wasn’t working today as we timed out.
EDIT: here’s the link https://www.tosc.it/tickets.htm?affiliate=T2C&sort_by=event_datum&sort_direction=asc&fun=erdetail&doc=erdetaila&erid=912678
Mona, can you post the link for ticket purchases? Thank you. wbf
Yay. Really glad you got those tickets and can quit stressing about THAT detail, Mona!
wbfey1, the link she kindly provided comes up in Italian but there's a dropdown for English on the lower right of the page. It's sort of not where you might expect the language toggle to be. :O)
Kathy, also glad I didn’t wait until the 20th of this month to start looking. I have looked once a day since the ticket office told me to check every day and today was the day. I checked that coveted museum off of my to do list. We leave in a week and a half.
Your diligence has paid off, Mona! I hope your trip is wonderful and the Borghese meets all your expectations. You've earned it! ;-)
Congrats on the tickets. IMHO, the Bernini work there is the most beautiful work done by a human.
I found that the online ticket sales for the Broghese Galleria, Uffizi, Academia, and The Last Supper were finicky regarding credit cards. I got to my third card (it was covered in cobwebs) before I found one the site would take.
This magnificent video essay about Bernini by the historian , Simon Schama , is well worth watching before you visit The Borghese , it will measurably enhance your visit . ( The St Teresa is in a church near Termini , Santa Maria Della Vittoria ) - https://youtu.be/Wet-VF2bDCA This is part one of four parts
Yep, but while Bernini is the star of Galleria Borghese, do take time to admire the fine trompe l'oeil embellishments of the individual rooms? This is one rare museum where the pieces of the collection were specifically grouped by theme, and decoration of the rooms they occupy also echo those themes.
And , numerous fine paintings upstairs .
We’ve been to several Bernini venues in the past but it will be the first for our teenaged granddaughters who have been looking forward to this experience for years. I forwarded the YouTube (PG-13 😉) link on to them. Great program, I watched all 4 parts. I’d previously only seen 1 part.
I gave them a book I’d brought back from a previous trip on the Borghese Villa/Gallery to peruse before our upcoming trip.
It’s so funny but my first foray into posing a question/topic on this forum >10 years ago was about an American tourist’s reaction to walking into the room with the sculpture after leaving the rooms with the paintings, was to turn around at the doorway and loudly exclaim to his wife “there’s nothing in here but a bunch of statues”. That man was clutching a RS book. I had to delete the post because it ultimately garnered so many negative comments about whose to say or “judge” what a person gets out of an experience in Europe.
Steven, thanks again for the link. I shared it with my granddaughters who are watching it and sent this comment “Wow, just WOW!”
Mona , I'm glad you are all enjoying it . If your trip takes you to Florence , the St Lawrence is at the Uffizi , and the bust portrait of Costanza Buonarelli , is at the Bargello ( it is on the second floor , in a small gallery off the main floor ) absolutely captivating , knowing the story .
Good to know as we are going to Florence (and Venice) too.
we called most of the places including the Borghese Gallery and found them easy to deal with
I've only been able to watch Part 1 so far, Steven, but my thanks as well! It's fun to be amongst other fans of the great man!
Of 4 famous Davids in Italy, Bernini's is by far my favorite. It takes a very rare talent to create the sort of lifelike energy, movement and expression he coaxed from cold stone! Michelangelo's pieces look pretty static by comparison.
LOL, this might be covered in one of the other parts but St. Theresa at Santa Maria Della Vittoria? The audience of male members of the patron Cornaro family - and possibly a half-hidden head of the artist himself - looking on from the sidelines comes off as a goofy bit of sacrilegious voyeurism. His "Beata Ludovica Albertoni" at San Francesco a Ripa is also afflicted with the same throes of, er, something as Teresa. Giovanni Maini must have found that one inspiring as, if you run over to Sant'Andrea Della Fratte (2 Bernini angels originally meant for Ponte Sant’Angelo are there), you can see a blatant copy in his sculpture of a dying St. Anne. :O)
Kathy , Thanks for your post . The Cornaro figures are indeed addressed later in the essay . Bernini essentially designed the whole of the ensemble as a sort of stage set , to accentuate the drama of St Teresa . You will see , as you view the rest , how he conceived the impact of the total work . It is interesting to see , in light of this , how other artists who came later used concepts like this in their own work . One stage like example is Klimt's 1896 painting " Medicine " originally executed as one of four paintings he did for the University of Vienna . It created a firestorm at the time and he withdrew the work . We did see Ludovica Albertoni last September , but I was unaware of Maini 's St Anne . It certainly bears a striking resemblance to Ludovica . Hard to decide if it is homage to Bernini , or plagiarism . Which of the Davids is number four ? I can only think of Michaelangelo , Bernini , and Donatello ?
Bernini essentially designed the whole of the ensemble as a sort of
stage set
Yep, it pretty much looked like that. You still have to admit that all those fellas ogling Teresa's 'ecstasy' is a little irreverent? Poor little saint can't have a moment to herself. 😳
Which of the Davids is number four ? I can only think of Michaelangelo
, Bernini , and Donatello ?
The fourth is Verrocchio's, at the Bargello. Probably my least fave of the 4 but still an important work. While there are more Davids out there, these are the ones which tend to see the most exposure/discussion/comparisons.
Kathy , just looking over my pictures from last September , I realize that I did see the Verrochio after all . What did surprise me though is that there was also a fifth David ( all at the Bargello ) by Donatello This one , in marble , is his first work . further information here - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_(Donatello)
Yep, I've seen that 5th one too but, well, wasn't impressed? His other version was much better although Bernini's still rocks all over it. Dang, I'm sooo homesick for Italy....
(Enjoying the conversation! Thank you for starting an interesting discussion, and you too, Mona, for allowing us to natter on a bit inside your thread!)
Not nattering at all I’m enjoying this discussion too and taking notes, just 8 days away for us...
This is great fun for me as well , to get into the depths of the major reason I travel . At the risk of being overbearing , I would like to add something further - This PBS Nova special from 2015 was thoroughly fascinating . The mysteries surrounding the construction of the dome of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence are legion , and this goes far to explain how Brunelleschi accomplished it . I was so taken with this , that we went out to the park ( about three miles from town , along the Arno ) to see the model that Massimo Ricci has been working on for thirty years , Enjoy this program ! - https://youtu.be/3VZ7ETFG_FY
I am insanely jealous, Mona, but will send you and those grandkids off with the very warmest of wishes for a killer trip! You will fill us in when you get back, yes? Maybe you'll give us art geeks more to natter on about? 😉
Can't remember for sure but you're going to Florence, right? I've a feeling you've been there before and if so, have you done the Sassetti Chapel at Santa Trinita? I thought those frescoes were fascinating; def. one for art and history geeks.
Steven, I'll give that link a looksee! 👍
Yes Kathy we are going to the big 3 with them. It’s our 6-7 time but it will be the first time for them. The focus of the trip are cooking classes (their request) but they love art and so we’re prepping for that too.
Haven’t been to that church, that I remember..., so I’ll make a note for myself. I had the talk yesterday about clothes in Italian churches in the midst of 95° heat so I hope they pack something they can throw on.
After 2 weeks in Italy we go to Paris for a week. They’ve been to Paris before but there’s always so much more to see and they are enrolled in a half day cooking class there.
I’ll try to do a little trip report when we get back if anyone is interested.
Managed to score 2 tickets for September. It was actually challenging to suss out what was going on since I didn't find any page in English. I understood most of the Italian, and used Google Translate to "read" the translated text from the screen of my iPhone.
It seemed to prefer my Amex card.
Glad that you were able to get tickets, Mona. I've been watching daily also but I'm waiting for dates in October. The links that steven and Kathy shared are excellent. I keep adding to my list of things to see in Rome and I know I will never have enough time. Don't even ask me about Florence. I may never sleep on this trip. Enjoy your trip and especially sharing it with your granddaughters.
Good news that you were able to get tickets in September. I don’t know what the pattern will be for the October release but persistence pays off. I was only checking about once a week until it got to the 2 month window, then I checked daily.
Kathy describes where the English drop down menu is located. It’s within the lower right hand side of the page as part of the MENU widget/box.
Yo, Leslie! Welcome to Mona's Nattering-on Thread!
OK, just 'cause I went on about it, here's some stuff on the Sassetti. I'm copy-pasting from info I'd given someone earlier this week:
The Sassetti Chapel in this church (Santa Trinita) is a must for art and history lovers as Ghirlandaio painted his patron, patron's family and other citizens of the time into the frescoes as they really looked; photographic illustration. He even inserted an image of himself into the far right edge of the "Resurrection of the Boy" fresco. Take special note of the clothing, and the scenes which are set in 15th-century Florence, even if the events pictured didn't occur there.
http://www.travelingintuscany.com/art/ghirlandaio/sassettichapel.htm
http://readingrenaissanceart.blogspot.com/2015/12/the-sassetti-chapel.html
https://www.wga.hu/html_m/g/ghirland/domenico/5sassett/index.html
It's near the next bridge west of Ponte Vecchio. Free for the lookin'!
Quick update this morning. I received an email from the ticketing agency this morning saying:
“Dear customer,
we inform you that the invoice n. Xxxxx is sent again, as the previous sending was not successful due to technical problems.”
It went on to say to click for a PDF. It was a much more official looking invoice/voucher that still needs to be taken to the ticket office and redeemed for actual tickets.
So if you buy tickets and then have this glitch and a few days later get an email in Italian from Milan ticketone, read through to the translation and print out the normal voucher from the link.
A final technicality. When we showed up at the Borghese it wasn’t the official looking invoice that they wanted at all. They needed the emailed reservation #. Luckily I had taken both pieces of paper with me. They were very kind and quickly exchanged the emailed # for our tickets.
We found out that we have two very different granddaughters when it comes to art museums. One granddaughter spent 1 1/2 hours on the second floor alone and had to be prodded to leave that floor for what remained on the first floor. The other granddaughter was “done” with both floors in <30 minutes. I kept giving her missions to go find something else; mosaics, a specific painting, her favorite decorative room, her favorite Bernini, her favorite Caravaggio, the patio room, her sister. Finally I gave her money for the gift shop and told her we’d meet her on the hour. A book and a cafe are always a good backup plan too.
I got that second email too, Mona.
Good to know it was a glitch. I’ve got the res. Number, so it should be good enough.
Are you still there?
How hot is it in Rome? Bearable, or.........?!
I arrive next week.
We got home last week. It was in the 90s most days but we packed for that kind of weather and had AC where we were staying. If it’s still that warm walk in the shade, drink lots of water and rest in the heat of the day if you can. Churches are somewhat cool and museums like the Borghese are nicely air conditioned. Enjoy your time there!
Welcome back, Mona! Along with the tips about heat, I imagine you'll have even more of those vaulable firsthand insights for the gang here!
A chuckle about the granddaughters; just different strokes for different folks, eh?
Oh, did you make it to Santa Trinita? Looking forward to your promised trip report!
