Zoo Story

I am not a big fan of zoos - not even Madagascar could convince me that animals are happy in captivity, no matter that they are fed and looked after. It is probably that whole Disney anthromorphical thing but to me creatures just don't look happy in zoos. The zoo at the Villa Borghese - our great city park - has been renamed Il Bioparc and retooled from a zoo of cages to a biological garden of natural habitat enclosures primarily housing endangered species and injured animals.
Of course being Roma the entrance has to have a certain grandeur if not the out and out air of the grandiose.

The baroque entrance ways are typical columns, vine-entwined capitals and marble balustrades replete with stucco elephants and draperies.

The elephants on the cartouche are certainly not of the Disney variety. In fact this one looks mighty perturbed - perhaps at the thought of captivity. And I'm not sure that mythological heroes slaying creatures great and small is quite the message a modern zoo bioparc wants to convey. But then I'm prejudiced - I've never really liked zoos.

27 gennaio - Sant' Angela Merici

Parlo del Piu del Meno

• Saturday morning we were strolling down Via dell’Obelisco discovering the wonders of Villa Borghese when a young couple approached us and asked, in English, the way to the Borghese Palace. Thinking they wanted the Galleria Borghese we gave them directions. Misunderstanding the next question Laurent assured them that indeed this was the same Borghese family who had been the movers, shakers, Popes, Princes and Politicos of Roman history. “Yeah, kewl” said the young man “but is that the place where they filmed The Bachelor?”*
  Sic Transit Gloria!

• Our friend Stephen was in an Italian hospital waiting for surgery. His Surgeon explained the procedure to him then asked him to sign the waiver prior to going under anesthetic. The good Doctor explained that he had two versions: the hospital’s version in Italian and an English version he had downloaded from an Australian website. He urged Stephen to sign the Italian one because he thought the Australian one “really too dramatic!”
  
  “Why they even talk about death,” he said with some astonishment! Stephen figured why tempt fate and signed the Italian one.

• Many of the streets in the centre of the city are still paved with cobblestone which looks romantic but is hell on suspension systems – of the automotive variety and those supported by high- heeled shoes. In wet weather those smooth black stones become slick, slippery and treacherous for anyone to walk on and bloody dangerous for moto drivers. In the more heavily traveled areas they are being removed – by machines that peel them off the surface in a matter of minutes – and replaced by asphalt. As cobblestone is becoming impossible to find these days the old cobblestones are being recycled in the more historic, pedestrian areas of the city. When new cobblestone is needed it is being brought in from…… China!

*And before anybody jumps to conclusions they were, I blush to admit, Canadians.

19 agosto – San Italo