¶ We’ve just whiled away a few quarter hours staring at the Google Maps images of Rome. Up a certain magnification, the the images are satellite photos as usual, but when you zoom in, the view becomes decidedly more that from an airplane. Or a hot air balloon. You won’t believe it!

Zoom in until you find the Villa Medici, home of the Institut Français until fairly recent times. We were poking around this neighborhood because we thought we’d try to find the grotto that Velásquez painted in 1630. Michael Kimmelman prefers to spend time with this picture when he’s at the Prado, ignoring the vastly more famous Las Meninas around the corner. We think that the smaller picture is pretty neat, too; it would be nice to see it someday. We can’t quite make out the “workman looking down from a rooftop,” even though we’ve checked out several other images of the picture (which is how we learned that the arcade wall belongs to the Pavilion of Ariadne — a fact to which Kimmelman slyly alludes by describing the dangling rope’s glinting “like the silver thread of a spider’s web.” We couldn’t make out the rope, either, until we checked out the Times online. Maybe we were too busy envying Michael Kimmelman his youthful discovery of Italy, a world of “shady churches and neglected museums, cool, silent retreats from the hot days, and it was as if a whole universe opened up just to me.” Since he puts it so well, we’re glad of his good fortune.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Thursday, June 23rd, 2011 at 8:00 pm.