Marina's Bloggariffic

Hello!

Cart and I were at the Rose Garden in Circo Massimo last weekend. It has been slightly over a year since we’ve last been there, so we thought that we’d pay a visit before it closes its entry in mid June.

The rose garden, or the Roseto Comunale in Italian, is a municipal rose garden here in Rome which is open to all from the 10th of May to the 10th of June. There are a huge variety of roses here and personally for me, is a lovely place to visit if you are in Rome during these times. The temperature is comfortable and being spring time, flowers are blossoming.

The Roseto Comunale is probably not a very touristy destination, but like Parco Laghetto, it’s another side of Rome which I find very charming.

Unfortunately, we’ve been having a rather bad weather for the past few weeks with it raining incessantly. And I think that it affected how the roses looked. For lack of a better word, they didn’t look so “fresh”. Nevertheless, it was very picturesque here with the huge variety of roses of different colours and kinds and with the iconic Vittorio Emanuele Monument and some Roman ruins in the background.

One of the easiest way to get here is by taking the subway and exiting the “Circo Massimo” stop. One of the first thing you should see, is this large FAO building. Follow the road, have a slow stroll and before you know it, you’re already at the Rose garden.

There were a healthy amount of people already there when Cart and I arrived. I spotted out families, groups of kids, even monks, priests and nuns.

All of them looking around excitedly, smelling, touching each rose. Many of them camwhoring with the roses. There was a couple who snapped pictures of themselves before we arrived there, and they were still camwhoring when Cart and I left the place. There were even people picnicking and making out. Which is understandable, since it *was* a romantic looking place.

There were so many kinds of roses here, it was quite mind boggling! The area is divided into several segments, one part where there are the original roses as well as the modern cultivated ones.

There were signs every few steps or so where we could read up more information about the roses. And there were a lot of things which I didn’t realise till now.

Like, did you know that there is no such thing as blue roses? Even with modern cultivation, roses do not have the right cells to carry the colour. The closest colours that it could carry are lilac and purple. So even if you do see a blue rose, it was probably dyed.

And it was interesting for me to read that in ancient roman times, the emperor would have frequent orgies where one of the highlights were a false ceiling would open to drop down rose petals. And there was once, a drunk guest who got trapped and suffocated under the rose petals.

Did you know that it takes 900 kg of rose petals to make about 5 grams of attar of rose? That was one of the reasons why ancient romans decided to cultivate their own roses rather than importing it from Africa since it was such a lucrative business.

To me, what was interesting was that there were a lot of roses which didn’t look like how a “typical” rose was supposed to look like – multiple layers petals, starting from a long bud. Like this flower below.

So I was quite surprised to see these flowers below categorized as roses too. They don’t look like roses since they had only one layer of petals. But Cart pointed out that they had thorns which was a strong sign that they were.

The name of this rose below is “Queen Mother” by the way, and I like the shade of pink. It doesn’t look very rose-like but the shape of the leaves and the thorns are a dead give away!

And speaking of names, there were loads of interesting named roses, like ‘Aspirin’ (!) ‘Aladdin’, ‘Purple Rain’, ‘Isn’t she lovely’ and others you could check out from the video at the end of this post. I really wonder how they named their roses. some of them are really curious.

Here is a video I took while in the rose garden. Check out the crazy names that the roses have! And please excuse my ramblings.

So if you’re in Rome during springtime, don’t forget to visit the lovely and charming rose garden near Circo Massimo and get lost in all it’s beauty.

Just in case you were wondering, my favourite flowers are yellow roses 🙂

If you liked this post, you might enjoy

• A day Circo Massimo
• The rest of the Italy category

Sidenote : Sha’s post totally reminds me back of my days in IRC. I used to spend hours in them and my nick used to be |rose| and then spyrulina. A little corny huh?

After visiting a couple of museums in Rome during the last week of April, Cart and I were looking forward to visiting more museums. By chance, I got to know about the La Notte Dei Musei event through a friend.

La Notte Dei Musei is held in conjunction with the international museum day where there will be events in museums along 40 other participating countries worldwide. Cart and I were browsing through the Rome museum website, where we finally decided to visit the Musei Strumenti Musicali.

It was a dreary and cold Saturday in Rome. It has been raining the entire day and it felt really cold despite the fact that it was already the middle of May. I was amazed to see that temperature dropped down to 13 degrees celsius as if winter was back again. Nevertheless, that didn’t seem to stop the throngs of people, including us, from visiting the participating museums. When we reached the museum of musical instruments at about 10 pm, there was a healthy crowd walking around already.

There was only one floor that was being displayed, but there were loads to see anyway.

One of the first displays that I saw was the harpsichord. It was interesting to see how it evolved from a harpsichord to the modern piano that we have today. What I noticed was that all of them looked very ornate and richly decorated – probably meant for upper class society.

But what was more intriguing to me was how tiny it was. The size of an 18th century harpsichord looked as if it was meant for children instead of adults.

We then walked past the harps, the stringed instruments and others and we found ourselves in the musical box room.

This is very old. It goes back to old technology where they used parchments with holes in them to create the sound. Not sure if you could see in the picture, but there is a roll with little metal bit that looked a lot like staplers which is part of a music box too. But regardless of it being old technology, it was decorated very beautifully.

Later on, Cart and I walked over to the area where there on display were instruments from all over the world. It was interesting to me how instruments were influenced. Much like the display from the medieval times that impressed me, like Sawfish sword and the puffer fish hat, I was amazed at the use of accessible items. There was a Chinese Er Hu wrapped with snakeskin, a South America horn made of Donkey jawbone and then we saw this.

Guitars made of Armadillo. Its kind of bitter sweet that a cute armadillo ends up as an entertaining device.

There were also other segments such as the military musical instruments, hunting musical instruments and art based on musical instruments but the highlight of the night was the concert.

I thought that we could be smart and head there about 10 minutes before it started so that we’d have seats. But when we reached the performance room, it was almost full house and we realised that only those pre-registered with a blue sticker had priority.

Fortunately for us, the caretaker looked at our pitiful faces and found two empty seats for us at the back.

It was impressive how beautiful and full the group sounded like, even with just three instruments – There was a pianist, a violinist and a horn player. And they were so good! It was so lovely to see how expressive they were.

Here is recording of one of the pieces that the played. I hope you stay till the end of the video, it’s worth listening to 🙂

Concert in Rome

Don’t they sound lovely? It didn’t seem too long after that the concert was over. Nevertheless Cart and I were thrilled to have been able to have the opportunity to watch it and we are looking forward to visiting another event such as this.

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