Wednesday revealed itself to be another beautiful, crisp winter day. Clear skies and sunshine, with highs around 9-10 degrees (and lows around 0 – eek!), great for seeing the sights. Unfortunately, Lisa woke up in the grips of that travel cold we mentioned last time. Desperate not to let it get into her lungs and sabotage yet another trip to Italy, she decided to stay in, take aaaalll the drugs (the legal kind, relax) and stay warm and rested. (Spoiler alert: she gets better in a day or two, don’t worry.) So, John set out to explore some of Rome on his own and maybe even get lost a little; a latter day, grown-up, Italian Macaulay Culkin.* More or less.

In a certain kind of museum (which is most of them) there is a long stretch of the collection that covers roughly the 13th-17th centuries and includes almost exclusively Christian religious imagery. Icons, portable devotionals, altar pieces, organ doors… the list of things that someone would paint a martyr on is practically endless. Now, we never begrudge these things, especially since every major museum has to presume that for at least some of their visitors this is the first, maybe only, exposure to fine art that they will get and so it is worth an exhaustive walk through the centuries. If you have been to more than a handful of these significant museums (and if you’ve been following along you get the idea…) then yet another walk through a few centuries of art where, in all honesty, quality took a back seat to subject matter is just not that exciting.

Thus it was that John strolled through the early portions of the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, or “National Gallery of Ancient Art”, at a pretty brisk pace muttering “Jesus… Jesus… Saint John… Jesus… Saint Sebastian? [reads card] yep… Jesus…” I am by no means anti-religion, but I’ve also never sought (nor have I achieved by accident) religious ecstasy in a museum. For a lapsed Presbyterian I have developed a pretty good eye for saints, although sadly it’s mostly in the form of a catalog of how they were killed rather than any miracles they may have performed. (Paintings of saints are almost exclusively depictions of their martyrdoms, at least in my experience.) Fortunately, most of these museums take the time to place some kind of context on some of their collection, if only to slow smart-asses like me down.

Here in the Palazzo Barberini (home of the Nat Gal of Ancient Art) the lesson involved these two crucifixes. As you can see, the one on the right depicts a stoic Jesus who seems less to be suffering the cross and more to be putting up with it. On the left, on the other hand, we’ve got a fully suffering Christ figure. In my naivety I had always taken this as artistic license, but in fact it is a depiction of a serious theological debate that was going on (and maybe still does? Not my forte…) concerning the nature of Jesus. [Editor’s note: this is going to be a combination of keeping things simple so as not to write a book, and also probably not knowing everything about the subject at hand. Go easy, ok?] The cross on the right represents the belief that Jesus was God en-robed in flesh but still God – thus, nailed to a tree is more of an inconvenience than anything else. The cross on the left, on the other hand, posits a fully human Jesus (son of God questions aside for a moment) who thus had the full human experience when tortured and crucified. I don’t really have a dog in this fight, not trying to convince anybody of anything, I just thought it was interesting that these depictions had more going on behind them than artistic whim.

As the centuries progress, these collections inevitably get more interesting. For one thing, perspective stops being considered the work of the devil, so things stop being quite so flat. Allegorical stories from other traditions likewise come into vogue even amongst the Christian devout, so that pictures of Greek gods (for example) start appearing. Portraiture becomes acceptable a little later, and unsurprisingly an interest in the quality of the art rises once people care whether or not a painting looks like Uncle Bart or just some random homunculus.

And all of these trends converge on pieces like this one by Raphael:

The collection in the Palazzo Barberini is largely comprised of donations from various Church fathers down the years, and so even in the 16th and 17th centuries you get more Biblical stories than a more random sampling. However, that does mean you’re more likely to get entries into our favorite art collection: Judiths!

After a day of art and wandering through the Forum, dinner was decidedly low-key. Lisa found a review for a cut-above trattoria called Li Rioni, which does many things well but specializes in Roman style pizza. One mushroom pizza and one diavola (spicy sausage, the default European equivalent to pepperoni) pizza later, we were ensconced in our cozy room once more, nibbling on ‘za and writing about the day; hi.

* Home Alone 2: Lost in New York is the reference/ joke being made here.

(Sometimes there just isn’t a clever title to be had.)

Day 3, and we’re really starting to feel the press of constant travel. Well, Lisa’s constant travel. She had been on a (family) business trip to the U.S. the previous week, with about a day between Italy and the leaving, and a day between arriving back and then heading back out to the U.K. We knew it could be tough, which is why we made sure to arrange for a great big juicy carrot dangling right in front of us: the National Gallery, London. We hadn’t even been thinking of this museum when we planned the trip, but as usual we did a scan for events in the locations we’d decided to travel to, and lo and behold the National Gallery is putting on The Credit Suisse Exhibition: Raphael. That’s right, in one month we’ll have seen exhibitions featuring 50% of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. And the art should be good, too.

Once again, the location of our hotel in Whitechapel paid dividends as we were moments away from multiple tube stops. And so, in about 20 minutes we were exiting the Embankment station – which prompted its own wave of nostalgia as we realized we’d been on this very street 15 years earlier. On our first trip off the continent (and really, except for a pop down to Cozumel, Mexico it was our first trip ofut of the country together) we had stuffed the itinerary to the point of breaking, so eager were we to take everything in. This included discovering that Ian McKellen was going to be in Stratford-Upon-Avon during our visit, fronting a Royal Shakespeare Company production of King Lear. Not surprisingly, the entire run had sold out moments after going on sale. But hey, that’s what eBay is for, right? (Or it was in 2007 at least.) Thus it was that we had been on that same street, at that same station entrance, to rendezvous with a nice young woman from whom we were purchasing tickets. She has always stu1ck in our memory for her bewildered/bemused “you must really want these tickets.” Neither of us remember how much we paid, our minds sensibly blanking out the horror like an encounter with Cthulhu.

In any case, we scooted up the little side street and, crossing that weekend’s river of bicyclists (part of some event or other for Her Majesty’s Platinum Jubilee) with the assistance of police officers, we go through a side entrance marked off specifically for the Raphael exhibition. An exhibition of his work is, by its nature, going to be robust; Raphael was incredibly productive both personally and through his extraordinary workshop which he oversaw. In other words, there is a lot of Raphael out in the world, and a major museum can call in a lot of favors (and spend a lot of Credit Suisse’s money) to fill out the exhibition. It was expansive. It was beautiful. It was also, I must admit, a little inscrutable. The Donatello exhibition we’d just been to did a magnificent job of contextualizing his place in the continuum of artistic development. What I can tell you from this exhibition is that Raphael sure was good at art. That said, he was very, very good at it and we did not feel like it was wasted time, at all.

After the Raphael we had a meal at “Muriel’s Kitchen”, a restaurant within the National Gallery. It must be said: our visit in 2007 left a lasting impression as far as museum food was concerned. To wit: we never had a good meal in one. Either the food was cheap cafeteria quality (mostly sandwiches in plastic containers), or else the service was atrocious. In London there is a common practice to include an “optional gratuity” on the bill, which seems even worse than just having a tipping culture, but whatever. At one of our meals on that trip, I actually went to the trouble of going up to the cashier and “requesting” a new bill with the optional service taken off. I honestly don’t remember if they asked why, but if they did I’m sure I told them; we were steamed. Honestly, neither of us recalls the details, other than being both slow and inattentive, and hopefully you’ve read enough of our posts by now to know that we full well understand the differences in European dining culture and it was bad even on their relaxed scale. Anyway. Muriel’s Kitchen cemented our feeling that, while still not food that you’d go out of your way to get to, if you eat at the museum you’re going to have an ok time. That may sound like damning with faint praise, but we were genuinely tickled. It meant that we could take a break within a museum (we did it a few times) without having to leave the premises and then dive back into another portion of the building. In this case we poked around in the permanent collections. The National Gallery is not actually that large a museum. Certainly it is dwarfed by the Louvre and the Uffizi Galleries, and I suspect even the Musee D’Orsay is bigger. However, what they’ve done is most excellently curated the collection so that it still impresses with both quality and diversity. Plus, they have most of the Waterhouses, which are worth a trip by themselves in my opinion.

After another stuffed-full day of art, we rewound our commute to get back to our hotel, where we packed ourselves up and had something to eat. It was an amazing way to punctuate our first “quick” excursion to another country, but after that we were looking forward to coming to rest at home in Braga.

By which we mean our trip to London, natch.

When we were in the midst of planning for our move to Portugal, it could get hectic. Very, very hectic. To the point where more than once we’d ask ourselves just what the hell we were doing, and maybe let’s think this through again. So, to keep ourselves sane (by our standards, ok? no judgment), every now and then we’d revisit our reasons for wanting to move in the first place. As you might remember from our talking about our winter trip to Spain and France, we spent a lot of downtime planning out that “first trip” to other countries, and made a point of putting it early in the calendar so it would feel like something to look forward to. (In retrospect, Braga itself would have been the “something to look forward to”, but we hadn’t been here yet.) The other things we’d daydream about were the spontaneous trips that we didn’t even know about yet, but that we were certain would happen because it would be so much easier to accomplish.

(Again, foreshadowing. It can’t be over-used, can it?)

On many of our trips to cities both abroad and within the US, John would grab the local Time Out or similar publication and check out what was going on in the city that wasn’t big news. When we went to New York a few years ago, Lisa bought John a ticket to “Hamilton” while the original cast was still performing, and that was great. But John found out about a play called “The Woodsman” that is in the running for our favorite theatrical experience ever. It was something wondrous to behold, and it helped give rise to John’s working theory that amazing things are going on all the time, all over the world, and outside of their homes you hear very little about them. (It’s not much of a theory, more of a “no shit, Sherlock”, but still…) Case in point: “Hamilton” was a cultural phenomenon that managed to break through for the world’s attention, but “The Woodsman” was our favorite. On our honeymoon in 2012, we found a theatre housed behind a socialist bookstore in Dublin, a little black box with maybe 100 seats in it; but, we saw Love in the Title and haven’t forgotten about it in the 10 years since. (Although, to peek behind the curtain for a moment, we forgot the name of the play, and there’s been about two hours between those last two sentences as John went down the rabbit hole to find it. No, you probably wouldn’t have cared if we didn’t name it, but once he starts looking…) From events like these we (and John in particular) have latched on to the idea that if we had easier access to more places, and more time to go with it, we’d take advantage of interesting cultural events that would have passed us by in the past.

So, back in March, John had a review cross his feed from The Guardian newspaper about an exhibition at The British Museum titled “The world of Stonehenge” that was rapturous in its descriptions. Interesting, he thought. Then, the very next day, he say a different review for an exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum (and let’s not be coy here, he had no idea where that museum was until he looked it up) presenting Camille Pissarro in the context of his relationships with the Impressionists. That was very interesting, he thought. And then, no more than a couple of days later, he read about A Century of the Artist’s Studio: 1920-2020 at the Whitechapel Gallery and it was apparently really excellent. Once he confirmed that Whitechapel is, in fact, in England, this sealed the deal. He presented all of this to Lisa, and with no reluctance at all they decided to make a weekend out of it. And so it was that on very little notice we decided to make a quick trip to London, with a day trip to Oxford(!), to take in highlights of the artistic season. And to top it all off, we decided to add a delay for the National Gallery since we hadn’t been the last time we were there, and with no notice whatsoever we discovered an exhibition of Raphael’s work, giving us all the omen we needed, if we needed one, that this trip was a good idea. And so, coming up next, our long weekend in and around London.