Understanding Rome

This morning’s specially requested itinerary looked at the last of the Stuarts and took us from St Peter’s to Palazzo Muti. One of our stops was a foray to the church of the Venerable English College, usually not publicly accessible, there to contemplate the space where *maybe* Bonnie Prince Charlie was illicitly crowned as King Charles III in 1766. Twenty years after his defeat at Culloden we imagined him contemplating Durante Alberti’s 1580 Martyrs’ Altarpiece and the painted gate leading north to the throne that, surely he knew by then, would never be his. I feel another newsletter coming on about those—doomed, thwarted—Catholic “Kings over the Water”!

I’m a big fan of the eighteenth century penchant for a scrapbook aesthetic in museum displays. The Galleria Borghese looked like this today

More successful downpour dodging under mutable skies on today’s tours!