Great day... waking up after solid nap on train to Roman suburbs, taxi to get to the meeting point on time for a walking tour with a Cornell professor who truely owned his voice - fabulous story-teller, a little deliberate and uptight about the rain, but overly knowledgable and introduced me to several words i'd been afraid to say outloud due to pronounciation scares...
was introduced to Baroque churches through Il Gesu, Santa Maria Alochini (spelling?), St Ignatious, Sant'Ivo from the courtyard.... Il Gesu was rightly published as the most florid of them, beautiful though, painting ambiguously floating above/under the ceiling... incredibly convincing. i wasn't as overwhelmed and almost disgusted by the amount of ornaments as i thought i would be, it was definately all to an effect and there still was obviously solid structure behind it so it wasn't disturbing in that effect. the heaviness of the decoration was an interesting emotional/mental pressure, and almost freeing after the mentally-invoking only icons and stained glass symbolism of the previous styles.
also saw the Pantheon (underwhelming, they cleaned the ceiling of it's brooding mystery and polished it into a graphic arts exercise... huge beautiful space though), Palazzo Nuevo, and Bramante's courtyard in San Maria de la Pace. Jeffery gone, Randy lead us past the Coluseum to a little church, San Clemente, that had been built on top of the previous two churches, leaving them intact to 30 feet below grade and the first centure AD... pretty amazing, again the italian screw explaining attitude made it pretty unfufilling intelectually.
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