Rome puns! Who doesn’t love ’em? Anyway… by this point in the trip, I had my sea legs under me so I was ready to get out and about. Which was fortunate, because the whole point of the trip was coming up on the agenda. A Caravaggio exhibition is a tricky thing, it turns out. Between the muddy authenticity of some of his signature works and a PR machine that has been working steadily since the artist was first brought to prominence (which is not to say ‘discovered’, merely touted) by Roberto Longhi in the early 20th century, making sure that Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio remains installed amongst the artistic firmament, getting a grip on what exactly is going on with the artist can be tricky. After all, I’m no art historian; I’m a passionate amateur who has the dumb f#*@ luck to be indulging an art education with a so-far-endless series of A+++ field trips. So, ok amateur, what did you get out of your latest expedition?

There’s two ways to look at this, and I tend to prefer the second. The first, for completion’s sake, is that the exhibition is somewhat overblown. The exhibition contains 25 works ascribed to Caravaggio from all over Europe… but 25 is also the number of Caravaggio’s paintings that are permanently on exhibition in Rome. Not the same 25, but still… it is not an exhaustive undertaking. Compare it, for example, to the Donatello exhibition Lisa and I went to in Florence a number of years ago – that one took up two separate museums that worked together to curate the thing. This was four modest rooms. Then there was the thematic break-up of the rooms, which seemed a bit helter skelter. “Making a Name in Rome” seemed to set us on a historical look at his work, but then you had “the sacred and the tragic” for themes and “invigorating the darker shades” to highlight the techniques he is most admired for. All fine, but scattershot. Not that I’m an expert, but I will say that Lisa and I have been around the block enough times that we have actually had long discussions about the curation of some exhibitions we’ve been to. I’ve got some chops, at least. So, yes, there’s a case to be made that museums gonna museum, magnets aren’t going to sell themselves, and maybe this isn’t quite the generation-defining show that they want you to think it is.

The other way of looking at it, though, goes something like this: relax. It’s four rooms full of some truly amazing work. You had to go to Rome to see it. This is not a bad way to spend your time. So yeah, take it easy and enjoy yourself. And the truth is I did enjoy it. Experience-r of field trips or not, I hadn’t seen a lot of these paintings, and certainly not in the context they were in, placed next to each other as they were.

Of particular interest was one of the most iconic “Judiths” we’ve ever seen (although I had seen this one before, who cares?). We’ve talked about this before, but in brief: the biblical story of Judith and Holofernes has been the subject of numerous works of art through the years; given its position in the Bible, it has been “allowed” by most regimes and patrons, but it provides artists a pretty wide-open opportunity. Do you feature the demure wife taking on a burdensome task? Do you minimize the murder as almost besides the point? Or, as some artists have certainly done, do you take this as a chance to depict a woman exerting her power fully in a way they rarely ever get to do? Those are the best ones, including Caravaggio’s. And yes, I even bought the magnet.

The exhibiton happily consumed, I spent the rest of the day wandering my neighborhood which, as we were adjacent to the old Borghese estate, was not a bad place to kill an afternoon. I even made it over to the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, which is fairly modest as far as state-owned art galleries go, as they forsook a dialog between the artists of Europe to instead focus on Italian artists. Totally fine, obviously, and I was in Italy, but if you scratch your memory you’ll probably come up short on a lot of notable Italian artists who participated in, for example, the Impressionist movement. This is not an error of omission. (Ahem.) Not that everything in there was bland or anything, far from it.

Heat, art, and Italian food, not actually that bad a combination really. You will not be surprised to hear, however, that I was quite ready to return home to my bride after all of this, and so I did.

If you want to hear God laugh, tell him your plans. That’s what they say, right? (Don’t look it up, it’s a simultaneously deep and boring rabbit hole.) My darling bride once again hit my birthday out of the park, setting up not one but two quick getaways to places she knew I was really interested in. The first bit had been our trip to Évora, which you may already have read about. The second part was a real doozy. She’d heard me exclaim excitedly over an exhibition taking place in Rome this year; a gathering of Caravaggio masterworks from all over, congregating in the Palazzo Barberini for four months this spring and summer. Well, my bride isn’t one for idle dreams – goals and plans are more her speed. And so, along with a card announcing our Évora trip was another card explaining that we had three-ish days in Rome plotted out, with flights and lodging already sorted along with tickets to the exhibition. All that being said, do you remember how this paragraph started?

A couple of days before we were scheduled to depart, Lisa threw her back out. Nothing life-altering, but for the immediate future she would be in serious pain. Worse, the activities facing us would be exactly the sorts of things that would exacerbate the ouch – a Ryanair flight, public transit, an unfamiliar bed, and (if we were actually going to make it worth going) a fair amount of walking. It just didn’t sound feasible. It was a disappointment, sure, but life is pretty good here so if I just don’t get to Rome this time it isn’t that big of a –

“Why wouldn’t you go?” She asked. I have to admit I was surprised by the question. I wouldn’t go so far as to say we’re co-dependent, we do plenty of stuff on our own, but anything like this? This is a two-person venture if I’ve ever seen one, and Lisa and I are the two persons! She wasn’t kidding, though. The Caravggio adventure was my birthday present and she’d be darned if I didn’t get to see it just because she was incapacitated. It took me a pretty long time to get my head around it, but fundamentally there wasn’t any reason I couldn’t go. Sooooooo ok, I guess I’m going to Rome!

The trip itself was, if nothing else, confirmation that we’d made the right decision on Lisa staying home. Our Ryanair experiences haven’t been all bad whatever their reputation is, but this one was a humdinger, complete with standing-room-only holding pens where we stewed for an extra 45 minutes and a plane the image of which is printed next to “dilapidated” in Webster’s. It would have been an ordeal for somebody with severe back pain; I was fundamentally sound and I still came out of it with a limp. (I kid. Kind of.) So, what does a guy on his own do in Rome? Well for starters he goes the wrong direction on the metro and show up to his lodging at the crack of sleepy. I do like to keep myself on my toes. Still, the place was nice and comfortable and the bed served its purpose well.

Rome on my own awaited.