Map detail, with circular Pantheon easily recognized at bottom left.
As I stared at No. 64 on the map hanging in the Knights of Columbus Museum, Il Gesu, I could hear the honking of the Roman drivers from the Largo di Torre Argentina, where our hotel was, and even taste the tang of the pistachio.
I thought back to a trip to Rome, when I hung out on the steps of Il Gesu. That’s the imposing mother church of the Jesuits with a marvelous baroque facade. Amid all the noisy traffic, it made me feel actually rather calm as I waited for my wife to finish her art historical research inside.
Oh, and there, across the street, for my patience I was treated to a gelato.
A whole array of such memories, visual, aural, and olfactory, came surprisingly back thanks to a visit to the Knights of Columbus Museum on State and George streets, where “Map of Rome” is on exhibit.
Photo provided by Knights of Columbus Museum
When I noticed online that Curator/Registrar Bethany Sheffer had selected as her “curator’s choice” the marvelous map of Rome etched by Giovanni Battista Falda in the late 17th century, I headed over to see it.
I wondered if cartographic art could provide me a trip back to Rome without my having to leave New Haven’s Nine Squares.
Call it my New Haven Roman stay-cation. I wasn’t disappointed.
It helps if you remember some of your high school Latin because that’s the language of the legible legends on the displayed map, with the churches and ancient monuments neatly listed and numbered.
Map detail with the rivers of Rome.
The map is also graced by decorative insets with personifications of the rivers of Rome on the left margin, well-known churches on the bottom, and other illustrations; the map is on display through the end of September.
Sheffer said she chose the map to show the diversity of the museum’s collections. Its approximately 3,500 objects do focus primarily on items related to the Knights, the world’s largest Catholic fraternal organization.
I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that a well-done map could time-travel me back to the Colosseum, the arches of Constantine and Titus, St. Peter’s, and No. 64, Il Gesu. Sheffer (pictured) and her assistant Gregory Jallat have written that such maps as Falda’s were extremely popular as mementos for European gentlemen, especially English ones, who had made their educational grand tour.
My grand tour was on this minuscule scale at the museum, but I was enjoying it.
Here, past the Gesu, was No. 112, Santa Maria sopra Minerva. That’s the quiet 16th-century church that retains much of the Gothic feeling before so many churches were redone in more sedate Renaissance style. With its Michelangelo statue and Filippino Lippi frescoes inside, this was a place where we detoured often during our sojourn there in 2010.
It’s on the block behind the very famous Pantheon, and directly on the route I walked almost every day to accompany my wife on her viewing rounds.
Jallat (pictured), who had worked with Sheffer in researching the Falda map, said he too could look at it and remember the Piazza Navona neighborhood where he spent four months during his junior year abroad as a student at Catholic University.
Although the map is not to scale and shows almost no topographical detail, like the hills of Rome, “the structures are recognizable,” Jallat said.
He surmised that was because Falda had made his mark with architectural views, perhaps doing them as an apprentice to the great architect of St. Peter’s, Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Even on the tiny scale he was working in, a kind of empathy for architecture and design seems to come through.
To my eye, the decorative vignette at the left on the map — Falda’s rivers of Rome personified — might be an homage to Bernini’s Fountain of the Four Rivers in Piazza Navona.
“It’s fun to find places I went to with my friends, and to see how they looked in the late 17th century,” he said.
One place definitely not on the map is the Abbey Theater Irish Pub, which Jallat said he frequented with friends to watch soccer games.
“Right about here,” he said, touching his finger on a block at the western edge of the Piazza Navona.
What also struck him was how much Rome has grown. In the Falda map, most of Rome is still contained within Roman-era walls. The area known now as Prati, but Prata on the map, is where Jallat said he went for most of his classes.
On the Falda map that’s way, way out in an area of fields or forests. If you look carefully, the artist has used a different kind of cross-hatching to indicate fields under cultivation. Prata, on the map, is in a zone that has far sparser etched lines indicating uncultivated landscapes in that era, yet bustling now.
“You’re looking at a Rome you’re not familiar with,” he concluded.
Still, he said, the map was a good reminder too of his own visit there, although you can’t relive it totally through putting your nose on Falda’s buildings, he said.
“The map helps. I like to quiz myself” on locations, he added.
Sheffer said the museum purchased the Falda map along with a set of prints of Roman views by Giovanni Battista Piranesi back in 2008 after they were exhibited
Since no visit to Rome for me was complete without hanging out a bit in the historic Jewish quarter, probably the oldest Jewish settlement in Europe, I looked for it on the map.
High and low, I moved my finger across the glass, looking for the neighborhood that I remembered was close to the islands in the Tiber.
By then, it was 4:45 pm., and Sheffer and Jallat had said goodbye and left for home.
I had 15 minutes before the museum closed. There suddenly it was: No. 239, “vicus judeorum,” the neighborhood of the Jews, or ghetto, dating since about the middle of the 16th century.
I saw it right there (pictured) at the bend in the Tiber River. By the evidence of the map in Falda’s time, the area appears far more geometric than I remembered from my visit.
I looked more closely: At the far right in the detail one of of the bridges is described as “nunc ruptus,” now broken, out of commission. You can see that Falda has the bridge, in an endearing graphic gesture, not touching either bank of the Tiber.
Infrastructure problems! That certainly was a call back to the present. Anyway, it was time to leave the museum.
As I headed home, I couldn’t quite re-taste the carciofi alla giudia, the Roman-Jewish-style artichokes, one of many dishes we dug into one long afternoon with friends.
But the garlic was coming back.
