Our day started by walking north to Piazza del Popolo, where we would take a tram further north to the area where we would spend our day.
Cool street art.
ZAHA WAS HERE. Our first stop was the Maxxi Museum by Zaha Hadid. Regular readers of the blog will recall the funicular system in Innsbruck, which was also designed by her.
Art! A cylinder with cones on the outside. Trippy.
This is the lobby. Pretty fantasytastic. Photography wasn't allowed in the galleries. But most of the first part was all about architecture, and a ton of projects an models were on display. I enjoyed it alot. There was also this trippy geometric room with huge printed images, that were distorted, and would only be clear from a certain viewpoint. Moving on there were some cool art and architecture projects, but after awhile, things got weird....... "Art?" I would call them disgusting manifestations of sexuality. It was awful. Some people's minds can be disgusting.... Another gallery was dedicated to this one 'artist'. In the front were these suits of armor, that resembled bugs. Kind of cool. Then progressing through, there would be stuff like weird messages written on dollar bills, then pieces of paper where the writing was done with the blood of his own cut finger. A weird video of some doctor screaming artsy propaganda while throwing fake body parts over a balcony. The worst was this one suit completely covered in gold tacks, and next to it was a video of the dude wearing it while taking sandpaper to his legs. Disgusting. I'm pretty sure hell would have been just like the content of that gallery.
Here are a the catwalks in the main lobby, that lead to various spaces of the museum.
Pretty crazy, eh? There was a gallery at the very top of the museum that had a 'view' to the outside, but it was covered by a thick curtain, so everything on the outside was obscured. The lighting plus the weird geometry of the building made for a pretty trippy effect. You can see where that top gallery is on the photo below, the part that cantilevers out.
This place was funny.... In architectural renderings, we always like to put images of people for scale, they are usually all doing things.... But in real life, modern architecture often tends to be dry and vacant. Exampe: the Akron Art Museum. I have yet to see that area be busy.... But here, it was the complete opposite. The space outside the museum was packed with people. Parents would bring their kids here. There would be four year old's riding bikes, or kicking soccer balls. So many tables were occupied with people meeting... Architects and architecture students like to talk about 'community'. It has gotten to the point where I want to roll my eyes every time someone uses that word as a concept, but it was clearly happening here. And I thought that was pretty cool.
Our next stop in the area was Parco Della Musica by Renzo Piano. It is a modern theatre complex that includes three different indoor theateres plus an outdoor amphitheatre. Each is a different size and volume, to be used for different purposes.
Brick.
The exteriors were pretty interesting. They are all similar forms but the only one where the exterior form relates to the interior is the biggest theatre, that was intended to be used for classical music, like orchestras. (We were told there was actually a performance that evening.)
Amphitheatre panorama.
Exterior shell of one of the three buildings.
One seen from another.
Exterior shell of the largest theatre. We were shown the interior of each theatre, but photography was prohibited. After our tour, we we decided it would be pretty awesome to see the show in the big theatre that evening. The person at the ticket booth told us it was a contemporary performance. Based on my impressions of contemporary music, I thought it would still be cool to see. So we bought tickets for the show anyway.
But the performance was not til much later, and we had some time to kill. And we were pretty close to the Rome Olympic complex.
Our first stop was to see the Palazzo Della Sport, a boxing/ basketball arena designed by Pier Luigi Nervi in 1958 for the 1960 Olympics.
The place was not open for visitors, but there was a group of workers moving things into the arena for an event the next evening. I valiantly tried to explain in Italian that we were architecture students studying here, and we would love to go inside and see the interior. But then the guy just started speaking fluent English. (I tried guys!) He said it would be fine if we stepped inside to take a look at the interior. The colors, the lighting, the space, the interlacing ribs especially, it was pretty fantastic. I could imagine that a basketball game in here would be a pretty good time.
Wondering toward the Olympic stadium, I found this sign that I thought was pretty awesome.
And there it is! The Olympic stadium that hosted the 1960 Olympics, and the 1990 World Cup.
This was now the second former Summer Olympic stadium we had visited while the Winter Olympics were taking place in Sochi. I thought that was a fun fact. Unfortunately this stadium is less of a museum piece than Barcelona's, being the home of two Serie A football teams, and hosts Italian national team games, so we could not see the inside.
But at least we were rewarded with this other adjacent stadium that was styled like the rest of ancient Rome. It was nicely busy. People running, playing football, and kids trying to skateboard. Oh, and in this photo is AJ running a few laps.
Run, AJ, Run!!
We then crossed the river by this awesome pedestrian bridge, and fount this place to eat, that was essentially a concession stand with a covered seating area. I got a salsiccia panino (Sausage sandwich). And we relaxed in there for a little bit. It was kind of cool because there was a big screen tv in the seating tent, and there was a Serie B football game on. We watched the entire second half before wondering back to the Parco Della Musica.
But on the way, we stopped to get some night photographs of Zaha's Maxxi Museum.
Well anyway, I didn't get any photographs of the theatre or performance. But it opened up with a violin solo piece. It was odd. Most of the notes the guy played were very harsh and deliberately with bad tone, giving it a tense effect. The best part of the piece was seeing the rosin dust fly from his bow. For the next part, the guy was part of a quartet. 2 violins, a viola and cello. They played a piece in a similar style, very tense tone, but the rhythm was very difficult to follow. It was more like a progression of sounds. I guess it had some cool moments, but it wasn't to my musical taste. The next part had nine different quartets of the same instrumental makeup arranged on stage in an interesting way. They started playing. Imagine this. Music. Remove rhythm. Remove understandable chords. Remove tone. Remove all sensible structure. And think of musicians spread across the stage, participating in coordinated madness. Randomly spewing sounds from their instruments. Randomly shooting their bows up the strings. That is how the piece of 'music' started. Except it never changed. It went on for an hour. An hour of coordinated madness. After a certain amount of time, all hope was lost, and it all just became white noise. To get an idea, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uunAPaxDEXg Please do not watch the entire thing... But understand me. I did not enjoy the performance at all, but it I was glad I experienced it. It was a pretty good evening all together!
But later that night, we found the Steelers bar in town. All kind of Pittsburgh stuff all over the walls.
Yinz guys goin' ta dahntahn Rome, ta get some ihrn ctiy, watch da stillers n'at. (Unfortunately they did not have any Iron City...)
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