Dear Rick Steves,
While I have enjoyed traveling the world for more than 50 years, only recently have I become familiar with your travel guides. I am very impressed.
Your popular books and TV show must give you a certain amount of clout, both with travelers and with the operators of various tourist venues. So, allow me to offer some free advice that you might pass along to the relevant authorities in Rome.
BORGHESE BLUES
While the Borghese Gallery has an excellent collection and is housed in a spectacular palazzo, there is so much wrong with it from a visitor’s perspective that I would hesitate to recommend it, especially in view of how many other wonderful museums, some of them delightfully uncrowded, Rome offers. Granted, the Borghese is so popular that those who run it may not be interested in any suggestions for improvement. But I’ll offer some anyway.
First, maybe it’s because the museum is so popular that a number of the staff we encountered felt no need to be polite or helpful to us. The process of getting into the museum and obtaining the audio guide was unnecessarily difficult.
Using the audio guides was frustrating for various reasons. The numbers of the rooms and of individual paintings and sculpture were difficult to find or, in some cases, just plain wrong. That meant that people (not just us) spent a long time looking for the relevant audio message. In addition, the messages tended to go on too long, especially in view of our 2-hour time limit.
The afternoon sunlight streaming through the museum windows made it very difficult to see some of the works. Surely museum science has advanced to the point that lighting problems can be addressed through some combination of artificial lighting and proper window shades.
Further detracting from our experience was that, despite limits on ticket sales, the museum was extremely crowded. Worse yet, we were constantly trying to glimpse a painting or sculpture over, around, or through a sea of outstretched arms of camera-wielding visitors. Since the urge to take a selfie with “The Rape of Proserpina” appears to be irresistible, I suggest that the Borghese ban the taking of photos. Or, possibly, guards could be told to curb the worse excesses. However, since I saw guards look the other way as people were feeling the marble of a Bernini masterpiece, they might not be up to the task.
ON A POSITIVE NOTE
No city on earth can match Rome’s historical and cultural richness. Yet Rome lags behind cities such as Paris and London in making the banks of its river a destination for tourists and residents alike. Granted, the Tiber does not run right through the heart of Rome, as the Seine does in Paris and the Thames in London. And the Tiber may never have as many splendid buildings alongside it as the Seine and the Thames.
Still, there are stretches of the Tiber, say from the Ponte Vittorio Emanuelle to the Ponte Sant’Angelo and on to the Ponte Umberto, where those three beautiful bridges and the dramatic Castel Sant’Angelo towering above would provide a spectacular backdrop for development along either or both sides of the river. I’m thinking of cafes, nightclubs, and casual restaurants set up on the riverbanks or on barges anchored alongside them. And, as on the left bank of the Seine, there could also be small parks and other free public spaces.
This section of the Tiber is not far from Piazza Navona and is adjacent to a neighborhood east of the Tiber that is becoming increasingly popular.
With Rome’s mild climate, well-designed development along the river would be popular most of the year and would generate new business and tax revenues for the city. I’m sure this has been suggested many times, but maybe this is an idea whose time has come.
What do you think, Rick and other readers?
David Kirkwood
New York, NY