Impressions

    After more than two millennia we have the feeling that it is not faded the splendor of the Empire, which sees in the centrality of Rome its heart conceived and realized.
    The enormity of the cultural and artistic of the Eternal City overtops any other center in the world, so much that even the slightest comparison cannot be proposed.
    Each realization of man here seems to have reached its apex, and with such abundance that the extraordinariness seems normality.
    The size of St. Peter dominates not only the idea of Christianity, but also the human capacity for realization, inspired by a sense of the divine.
    The magnificent dome is the summit of spiritual power, and is thematically related to the perpetual immensity of the Pantheon's dome, in the prosecution of temporal power, stripped and converted superficially, but yet intact.
    An ideal continuity with the ancient world whose fabric expands beyond the walls, to pervade all the land.
    The gigantism of the architecture, the magnificence of the artistic expressions, which are enhanced in the exuberance of thought and art by Michelangelo, seem dictated by the need to be suitable to the monumentality that becomes model, overwhelming but without deranging, thanks to the miraculous harmony and the perfect balance of its expressions.
    Inside and outside the circle of the city, the interpenetration between masonry and sculpture of man and exuberance of nature is expressed more over in the luxuriance of villas, parks, among the hills, up to towns crystallized over time, dotting of history the landscapes of boundless beauty.
    Glimpses of valleys and ravines, in which the eye plunges crossing the reality, in search of an ideal of absolute, of immense and of heavenly.
   

Borghese Gallery in Rome

    Villa Pinciana, destined to the gallery, was wanted by Cardinal Scipione Borghese, nephew of Pope Paul V, and built into beautiful forms by the architect Flaminio Ponzio early seventeenth century.
    The intention was to make it a place of art, music, study and culture, and especially for the exhibition of objects and specimens not only of ancient and modern art, of which the cardinal was a passionate collector, but also of nature, with rare plants, animals and fossils, and even of contemporary technology, with various inventions, gear and watches.
    Many works were assigned to the cardinal nephew by the Pope, including confiscations and even robberies, such as the famous Deposition by Raphael, originally in the church of St. Francesco in Perugia.
    In 1807 the collection was broken by Camillo Borghese who sold to Napoleon a large quantity of objects, which are today in the Borghese Collection at Louvre.
    Subsequently, however, these gaps were filled by new finds from recent excavations and further works recovered from other aristocratic houses.
    In 1827 also, was purchased in Paris the famous Correggio's Danae.
    Today the Gallery preserves sculptures, reliefs and ancient mosaics, and an extraordinary collection of paintings and sculptures from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century.
    The collection boasts works by Antonello da Messina, Giovanni Bellini, Pinturicchio, Botticelli, Raphael, Titian, Correggio, Caravaggio, Lotto, Rubens, and some famous sculptures by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, including the amazing group of Apollo and Daphne, and Antonio Canova, with the famous Portrait of Pauline Bonaparte Borghese, executed between 1805 and 1808.