Galleria Nazionale D’Arte Moderna, Roma

From Rome, with love!

We have been walking all over the city and decided we would visit The National Gallery of Modern Art today.  We attempted to walk to the museum, which involved a walk across the Villa Borghese Gardens.  It all looked so simple after studying our map.  On the map, the roads look direct and easy to follow.  In reality, there are no direct roads in Rome.  Instead, roads have twists and turns and jogs in them because the city is ancient and the roads have to go around archaeological sites.  A road might start out as Via di Santa Anna and then quickly turn into Via Garibaldi at the blink of an eye.  The real problem was that our map only went as far as the entrance to the Villa Borghese Gardens.  Then, once off our map, we were dumbfounded and our nerves were wracked from walking along busy roads, crossing streets while dodging motorcycles, taxis, and fast moving cars.  At some point, we took an easy solution and grabbed a taxi for the remainder of the way and had a great experience at the museum.

The museum building itself is monumental and was designed by Cesare Bazzani in 1911 and the museum collection includes works from the 19th and 20th centuries.  The featured image for this blog post is a painting by Monet. If the only painting I saw were this Monet, I would have been completely satisfied! Luckily though, we saw the featured Monet masterpiece and much MORE!

We felt overwhelmed at the end of our 2 and a half  hours of taking in great art and then countered this feeling by sitting and enjoying a late lunch at the Gallery’s outdoor cafe.  We took a taxi ride home (because it was just too easy to do so!) and enjoyed the remainder of the day on the rooftop garden of our hotel, taking in the late September Roman sun and, later, enjoying the sunset, also from the rooftop, on our last day here in Italy.