The Spanish footprint in Rome, from Cervantes to Carlos IV

Rome, danger for walkers.

Oliver Thansan
Oliver Thansan
31 March 2023 Friday 23:07
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The Spanish footprint in Rome, from Cervantes to Carlos IV

Rome, danger for walkers. This is how Rafael Alberti titled the book that he dedicated in 1968 to the city that welcomed him between 1963 and 1977, the year in which he was finally able to return to Spain to launch a new democracy. Always a walker, he kicked it thoroughly, until he knew her very well, with her vitality, her stray cats and her beauty (the imposing one, and the discreet and neighborhood one, her favorite); with its filth, its neglected ruins and its anarchic traffic (hence the title of the collection of poems), which he feared and which survives: there, crossing a pedestrian crossing? it is an adventure.

Since 1965, Alberti has lived with his wife, the writer María Teresa León, in a bright apartment in a convent with a reddish façade from the early 18th century, converted into a tenement house. Address: Vía Garibaldi, 88, in the popular, old and bohemian neighborhood of Trastevere, where you can follow the poet's footsteps through narrow cobbled streets and emblematic places such as Plaza de Santamaría in Trastevere; there continues the Caffè di Marzio, habitual stop of our man. Its terrace gives us the view of the basilica that gives its name to the Piazza. Founded in the 3rd century and rebuilt in the mid-12th century, its medieval Byzantine-style mosaics amaze the visitor, believer or not.

Another place frequented by the one from the port of Santamaría: the Settimiano bar. “That corner of Garibaldi and Via Riari where I used to meet my friends at dusk is still today, even after so many years, an unforgettable place”. This is how Alberti remembered him in the fifth book of The Lost Grove (1996), his memoirs written over several decades. About a ten-minute walk from Settimiano stands a focus of Hispanicity: the Academy of Spain in Rome.

According to tradition, the Apostle Peter (“the rock on which I will found my Church”, as the Gospels say that Jesus Christ said of him) was crucified upside down on a hill in what is now Trastevere. The first written reference to the monastery that was built there in honor of the most famous disciple in history dates from the first half of the 9th century; Already in the 13th century, the place began to be known as San Pietro in Montorio, derived from the Latin Mons Aureo (Golden Mount), due to the color of the terrain.

At the end of the 15th century, the monastery had passed into the hands of the Franciscans and was in a dilapidated state. Who put more money for its reconstruction? Isabel and Fernando, the Catholic Monarchs. The gold florins from the Crown of Aragon were used to build a new convent complex, expanded over the centuries. The Academy of Spain in Rome extends through the second cloister or north cloister; since 1873, the year it was created, it has supported the humanistic training of Spanish artists, intellectuals and researchers, and disseminated our culture through exhibitions, concerts, seminars and conferences.

The most outstanding work in the enclosure is the Bramante temple, erected in one of the convent courtyards by the painter and architect Donato Bramante between 1502 and 1509. The temple, circular and surrounded by sixteen columns, was considered from the outset an example perfect for Renaissance architecture inspired by the canons of Antiquity. Its origin was commissioned by the Catholic Monarchs, an architectural offering to thank God for the birth in 1478 of Juan, his second son and destined to be his heir, had he not died prematurely, in 1497.

Rome was at least since the mid-15th century a place of pilgrimage for European artists seeking to soak up the new Renaissance airs and the classical works that inspired them. This is the case of Velázquez, who made two stays in the city, the first between 1629 and 1631 (to complete his training and with royal permission); and the second between 1649 and 1651, with the aim of hiring fresco artists to decorate the Alcázar in Madrid and buying old sculptures and paintings for the art collection of Felipe IV.

On his first trip, the Sevillian painter, a favorite of the Spanish Court at the age of 30, spent a summer at the Villa Medici, a palace with gardens that is a pleasure to visit. There he painted the only two pure and hard landscapes of his work, exhibited in the Museo del Prado: View of the garden of the Villa Medici in Rome, and View of the garden of the Villa Medici in Rome with the statue of Ariadne.

On his second visit, Velázquez, already being the king's valet, painted marvels such as the portrait of Pope Innocent X, who today looks at us frowning, intimidating and full of life from one of the walls of the Doria Pamphili Gallery, part of the palace. of the same name, an imposing Baroque building close to Piazza Navona. He also immortalized Juan de Pareja, a Moorish who was his slave (something common at the time), whom he freed in Rome itself, a few months after portraying him. This work is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, but it is well known that it was hung on the portico of the famous Roman Pantheon on March 19, 1650, on the occasion of a city festival.

The Pantheon is the best preserved building of ancient Rome, thanks to the fact that it was converted into a church. Built in the first quarter of the 2nd century on the remains of another burned temple, it influenced Western architecture like few other constructions; its dome (43 meters in diameter and 22 meters high) is larger than that of St. Peter's Basilica. Cervantes was able to admire him in the year (1570) that he spent in Rome in the service of Cardinal Giulio Acquaviva.

The author of Don Quixote was struck by the city, and there are traces of that impression in his great work: in chapter VIII of its second part, the good Alonso Quijano simply describes the layout of the building to Sancho Panza: "(... ) is the shape of a half orange, very large in the extreme, and it is very clear, without any other light entering it than that granted by a window, or, better to say, a round skylight, which is at its top;”.

Rome left its mark on Cervantes and Velázquez, two of the greatest Spaniards in history, and they reciprocated with the best they had: their art.

In the early 16th century, European politics consisted of a handful of shifting alliances often resolved by force of arms. In this complex context, the famous "sack of Rome" is explained: Carlos I of Spain and V of Germany was the great defender of Catholicism, but that did not stop his troops (a mix of Spanish, Italian and German mercenaries with many back pay). ) attacked the city on May 6, 1527, arrested Pope Clement VII, who had committed the sin of allying with the French, and abandoned himself to a bloody sack that lasted days.

Hairs to the sea The supreme pontiff yielded to the wishes of the Habsburg, and the alliance between the Spanish throne and the papal throne was consolidated. So much so that Spain ended up establishing an embassy to the Holy See, which happens to be the oldest permanent diplomatic representation in the world. It is located in the Palacio de España (former Palacio Monaldeschi), a Baroque building that the Spanish Crown was expanding. It is worth visiting and admiring its rooms and the works of art that it houses, among them the fabulous bust sculpted in 1619 by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, which represents a young man who screams with an impressive expression of terror and fury.

The palace gave its name to the square where it is located: Piazza di Spagna, one of the most beautiful and visited spaces in Rome, with its iconic 135-step staircase that leads to the church of Trinità dei Monti, its baroque Barge fountain , the column of the Immaculate Conception and floods of tourists who remember the scene shot on the steps by Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant in Roman Holidays (1953).

The fact that Spain was for centuries the bulwark of Catholicism in Europe and spearheaded the efforts promoted by the papacy against Protestantism has left marks of stone and marble throughout Rome: churches on a par with the most demanding city in the world in terms of architecture. religious is concerned. Going from one to another also helps us to get to know the Eternal City better (it was a long time before the nickname came out).

This little traveler does not forget the church of the Gesù, mother church of the Society of Jesus, founded in 1534 in Rome by the Spanish Ignacio de Loyola. On a rainy January afternoon, I crossed its door (the precursor of the Baroque façade was the model for many of the Spanish temples in America) to enter a deserted area, with a single central nave, a cluster of side chapels like something out of a fantasy Catholic, lavish ornamentation wherever the eye lay, and a ceiling covered in the grandiose frescoes painted in the 1670s and 1680s by Giovanni Bautista Gaulli. Exhausted from my Roman wanderings and wet, I sat on a bench and fell asleep lulled by that explosion of shapes and colors. I was brought out of that sweet torpor by the murmur of the words in Italian of a priest who was explaining the wonders of the temple to two visitors.

Two other Hispanic churches await us. One is the Spanish National Church of Santiago and Montserrat, better known as Santa María de Montserrat de los Españoles. Built between the 16th and 17th centuries, its chapel of San Diego de Alcalá is the eternal resting place of Popes Calixto III (vicar of Christ between 1455 and 1458), and Alejandro VI (his own from 1492 to 1503), both from the Borgia family and born in Xàtiva, where the Borjas were from. The remains of Alfonso XIII, who died in exile in Rome in 1941, remained in that same chapel until his transfer to the El Escorial monastery in 1980.

In line with this: the city was always important to the Spanish monarchs, because it was the center of Christianity, and because some lived in it. After ceding the throne to his son Ferdinand VII, Charles IV lived in the Barberini palace with his wife, Maria Luisa de Parma, until his death in 1819. Today, this building is one of the two headquarters of the National Gallery of Ancient Art. (the other is the Corsini palace), a must for lovers of baroque painting. And, as is well known, Juan Carlos I was born in Rome on January 5, 1938.

We are left with the overwhelming Basilica of Santa Mayoría la Mayor, erected at the top of the Esquiline Hill. Its origin is in a basilica built in the fourth century. The successive extensions gave rise to a temple with an enormous Baroque façade from the mid-18th century, which contrasts with its 14th-century bell tower, the slenderest in Rome, at 75 meters high. Its interior harmoniously mixes elements from different periods: marble, frescoes, a medieval mosaic floor, sculptures, canvases, chapels and papal tombs... What does it have to do with Spain? In 1647, Pope Innocent X (great-great-grandson of a Borja/Borgia) named Felipe IV honorary proto-canon of the basilica (in exchange for help in its maintenance), a link that is maintained today.

We begin this itinerary through the Spanish traces with a poet in what was the capital of the world for centuries, and we close it with Francisco de Quevedo, who also walked through its streets. They inspired him with verses like these: “Oh Rome in your greatness, in your beauty, / what was firm and only fled / what is fugitive remains and lasts!”.