A Tale of Two Museums

(Alternate title: Museums are boring)

Often what I look forward to most in a museum is the gift shop and, if they have one, the restaurant. I still remember the beautiful restaurant in the Musée d’Orsay and the meal I shared there with a friend…and now that I think of it, the huge pink macaron I had for dessert…but I digress.

Maybe it’s because I have a short attention span, but I have never enjoyed spending time in museums. I still go since I want to appear cultured or well-rounded or whatever, and who knows, maybe this museum will be different.

In this post I want to tell you about two museums I visited on my recent trip to Rome (my first time in Italy!).

The first is technically a collection of museums named the Vatican Museums. According to Wikipedia, these museums “display works from the immense collection amassed by popes throughout the centuries.” It’s #3 on Lonely Planet’s Rome Top 10 list, and includes the Sistine Chapel at the end.

My main problems with this museum are as follows:

1. There are masses of tourists everywhere you turn, and it’s hard not to feel like cattle as you try to maneuver your way to the Sistine Chapel. It kind of feels like an IKEA.
2. There’s nowhere to sit and enjoy the art. Okay, who am I kidding, it’s impossible to enjoy the art with so many people pushing into you, I just wanted to sit since you walk A LOT in Rome and you will walk A LOT in this museum.
3. The imperialistic feel of the museums (look at everything we’ve looted from everywhere else in the world over the last several hundred years!) feels odd given its location inside what’s arguably the holiest city-state in the world. Does nobody else find this off-putting?

Suffice it to say that I wasn’t a fan. Maybe the worst part of enduring this museum was that I was too tired to visit St. Peter’s Basilica afterwards, which by all accounts was a better experience than the Vatican Museums. Regardless, I am glad I went so I could have experienced it for myself, write this blog post, and discourage the rest of you from going.

The second museum I want to tell you about is the Borghese Gallery, dubbed by the Lonely Planet as “the greatest gallery you’ve never heard of,” and #2 on the Rome Top 10 list (just above the Vatican Museums). I had certainly never heard of it, and would not have been there if not for my friend Chiawen, who I had visited in London and was one of my traveling companions in Rome.

The Borghese Gallery is located just outside the old Roman city walls, and is in the middle of a peaceful and beautiful garden. In other words, it was a totally different experience than being with a million tourists inside the walls of Vatican City. We had accidentally gotten there over an hour early for our guided tour, and when we asked if we could go in early and look around, the Italian woman responded in curt fashion, “Absolutely not.”

We found out later that it was because the museum strictly controlled how many people were in the building at the same time, and in fact, our tickets allowed us to only be in the museum for 2 hours (the tour lasted 1.5 hours, so you’d have 30 more minutes to walk around on your own).

Our guided tour had an inauspicious start, with an American mother and her two young kids chugging water before entering the museum (liquids not allowed), missing the beginning of the tour since they couldn’t find us, and then criticizing the guide for not shepherding them to the right location before beginning. (Cue heavy eye roll.)

Despite that, our guide continued without missing a beat, and (spoiler alert) the tour was the best experience I have ever had in a museum by far. I think it was because she addressed my main two problems with museums in general: not knowing what to look at, and not knowing the history and context of what I’m looking at. On this tour we weren’t just looking at art; we were experiencing history and learning about what was happening during that era, and what happened before that time. Her storytelling made the art come alive and made me appreciate and understand its place in history.

Let me share a little about this Caravaggio painting that made an impression on me during the tour. First, Caravaggio wasn’t the artist’s real name; his name was Michelangelo (not THE Michelangelo), and he was from Caravaggio. It was a similar naming convention to Leonardo da Vinci, who was from Vinci. Caravaggio was born ~100 years after Renaissance masters Leonardo and Michelangelo, and was considered quite a revolutionary artist of his time.

His below painting, named “The Madonna of the Grooms,” was shocking because his depictions reflected more real life (#nofilter) than the Renaissance artists that came before him. Baby Jesus is completely naked, there is dirt underneath Virgin Mary’s fingernails, and Mary’s mother, Saint Anne, is visibly old and wrinkled. It was something that the people of that time could see and relate to. Not everybody could read then, so the paintings of that day were used to communicate stories from the Bible.

As the tour guide was explaining all of this it felt like a spiritual experience along with an education in art history / politics / religion. All museum experiences should be like this! I’ve been doing it wrong all these years…a guided tour is the only way to go. I appreciated the art so much more, and can actually remember what I’ve seen and what’s significant about it.

In conclusion, thank you, Borghese Gallery for changing how I think about museums…I shall be back.