The Travel Bug: When Life Gives You Lemons, Make Art

Day 5 (8 May 2025)

Italy is the centre of Western art and culture, and today, we paid a visit to our first art gallery - Borghese Gallery. It's not a large gallery by European standards, but it houses lots of gems from big names like Caravaggio, Raphael, Titian and Bernini. There's even a painting by Leonardo da Vinci.

Adjacent to the gallery are the gardens which are beautiful. There's a lake with calm waters where people were boating and a harp player was busking (I'd never seen a harpist busker before, it must be hell draggin that harp across the sand and cobblestones!) No photo cos I only have a video and this antiquated Blogger format doesn't support videos well.

The art on the walls and ceilings is almost as mesmerising as the art itself!

The art is pretty amazing but it's the sculptures that are the star of the show. The amount of skill it takes to envision and mould figures out of a block of marble sculpture just captures my imagination. The one scupture that entranced me most was The Rape of Persephone by Bernini. There's so much movement in the sculpture and I just can't get over how he sculpted Pluto's hands digging into Persephone's skin. He managed to make marble look soft 😱

The paintings too, are pretty spectacular. From what I observed, most of the works tend to be either of Roman or Greek mythology, or Christian related. Lots of Mary and Jesus paintings (though the earlier the painting, the more "man-like" the baby tended to look). There are also many Bible story paintings eg. Solomon and the two mothers, David and Goliath, an angel releasing Peter from prison, Lot and his daughters, and paintings of the saints.

Funny story: Along the esplanade outside the Borghese Gallery are statues of famous writers. We passed by one of Goethe and Andre asked: "Who's Guetta?"

Me: "Goethe is the most famous German!"

Andre: "No, that's Hitler."

He's not wrong 🤷

We saw lemon trees at the beautiful Villa Borghese (the garden of the Borghese Gallery). The Italians love lemons - it's a staple in their food especially desserts, we even had it in risotto.

Speaking of lemons, we had gelato from a shop specialising in lemon flavoured gelato. What's special is that it's served in an actual lemon! We chose lemon sorbet and lemon cheesecake gelato. Both are zingy and absolutely delightful. In Italy, you generally get to choose two flavours even if you choose the smallest size cup or cone (which we tend to do as we want to taste more flavours).

It was a little tricky to eat without it dripping everywhere so we each just held one half of the lemon as a cup.

As I sat there enjoying my gelato, I decided to sketch a prop at the shop. Added colour back at the hotel. The silly thing is that when choosing the watercolour pans to put in my travel kit, I didn't pack lemon yellow cos I don't like the colour and almost never use it. Am realising that was a mistake in a country where lemons are everywhere! Hence my lemons are a more sunshiney warm yellow 😅

For dinner, we visited Hostaria Romana, an old school eatery run by elderly gentlemen. We wanted to try all the Roman specialities so we ordered cacio e pepe (cheese and pepper pasta), osso bucco (veal shank) and beef tripe. I couldn't really get into the last one but Andre loved it. I guess he's the food adventurer😋 Andre also ordered a glass of wine. It's quite funny - he looks really young so when he asks for the wine list, the waiter usually hands it to me instead. The gentleman tonight looked at him with concern and said, "Grappa?" (alcohol) like he might be indulging in some underaged drinking 😆

Dining out in Italy is expensive. One plate of pasta on average costs E13, meat dishes >E20. Wine isn't cheap either which was a surprise. One glass is typically E7 and above. We thought it would be closer to prices in Spain. The waiter will ask if you want still or sparkling water, and that costs up to E5 per bottle 😱 We learned to say no and drank from our own bottles since you can get free and very good tasting water from cisterns everywhere in Rome. Add to that, most restaurants impose a "coperto" (cover charge) which is E1.50-E3 per person.

Plus we found that Italians eat a lot. They will alway serve you a basket of bread with olive oil (no butter!) though the bread sometimes tastes stale. I suspect they recycle the bread. Pasta is often a first course, followed by a meat dish. At this restaurant, we saw a skinny Italian lady eating alone. She had a huge bowl of carbonara (Italian portions are large) followed by a plate of osso bucco. And coffee. And bread. Their metabolism must be through the roof. I don't know where they put it!