The Library Rome

Home Car Rental Hotels Vacation Packages Free Brochure Cruises Cruise Line Details

The Library

Having reached the supreme work, as it were, of the whole Vatican Museum, it seems an anticlimax to try to describe anything else. On the way out we'll see the Sancta Sanctorum, containing most precious relics (from the Lateran) and in one room part of the Treasury, consisting mainly of presents to the Church from all parts of the world; note the fine ivories and enamels from Limoges. Contained in the Christian Museum are gold painted glasses and bronze lamps from the Catacombs. Rather hurriedly we pass through the Sistine Hall, completed in 1588, by Sixtus V which is two hundred and twenty feet long; we'll note the contents, at least some of them, in the glass cases: the Vatican Codex B, the Gutemberg Bible, the autographed letters of Raphael, Michelangelo, Martin Luther, Galileo and two love letters from Henry VIII to Anne Boleyn, thereby losing the title of Defender of the Faith, conferred to him by the Pope for his book on the Sacraments. It was Nicolas V who was the real founder of the Vatican Library; when he was elected, there were in the Vatican 340 books, when he died there were 12100. He employed hundreds of scholars and copyists.

We leave the Museum and you are recommended to make a return visit to see the Pinacoteca (the Picture Gallery of the Vatican), which has the advantage of not being large, but it contains Raphael's great picture of the Transfiguration and his Madonna di Foligno. Besides, you may be interested in visiting the Etruscan Museum, the Egyptian collection and the historically and artistically most interesting Borgia Apartment, decorated by Pinturiechio, where there are several portraits of the Borgia and Farnese families.

Piazza della Repubblica is better know as Piazza Esedra because of its shape, which retraces the architectural shape of the ancient exedra of the Baths of Diocletian. On the site of this monument there now stands the fine fountain of the Naiads, the work of he sculptor Rutelli, inaugurated in 1901.

library On one side of this piazza stand the remains of the largest Baths built during the whole Roman Empire the Baths of Diocletian, which were completed in 305 A.D. In the sixteenth century, Michelangelo transformed the tepidarium (the chamber in which the water was kept at a tepid temperature) into the Church of Santa Maria degli Angeli. The rest of the Baths is taken up by the Roman National Museum, or Museo delle Terme, where sculpture of the greatest interest and well known masterpieces of the Greek and Roman artists can be found.

A few yards away from Piazza della Repubblica is the busy cross roads of the Largo Santa Susanna, together with Piazza San Bernardo which stands next to it. The church of Santa Susanna was originally built in the eighth century on the site of the saint's martyrdom, and after a number or restorations, a fine facade by Carlo Maderno was completed at the beginning of the seventeenth century. The Church is now the national church of American Catholics in Rome.

The Church of San Bernardo was built by converting a round building from the Baths of Diocletian, at the end of the sixteenth century.

On one side of Largo Santa Susanna stands the picturesque Moses Fountain, the work of Domenico Fontana in the sixteenth century. It was built to celebrate the restoration of the Acqueduct of the

Acqua Felice, under Pope Sixtus V. The huge and much criticised statue of Moses was traditionally ascribed to Prospero da Brescia, but in fact it is the work of L. Sormani.



		Sponsored Links