In Rome Caravaggio's itinerary to discover with Roma Guides and his small groups an artistic and cultural itinerary of Michelangelo Merisi, aka Caravaggio.
A Caravaggio, the city of his adolescence was close to him: a small Marian sanctuary, vast fields of melon and artisanal silkworm farms certainly could not calm his furious temperament.
And yet, that small and insignificant town had its name celebrated all over the world, with an exaltation that was certainly not directly geographic, but indirectly artistic.
The distance between Lombardy and Rome was hundreds of miles. It was necessary to cross the Apennines, sleep on dirty straw mattresses in crumbling inns along the road, refresh oneself with undrinkable broths, take the Via Cassia and descend towards Rome like a humble pilgrim on his way to Peter's tomb.
La Rome of 1592 it was still far from the splendor it will reach in the Baroque era. The sack of the Lanzichenecchi in 1527 had torn Rome from the inside, making it lose the aura of invincibility obtained with the artistic masterpieces of Michelangelo and Raphael. Now, however, Rome was being reborn, transforming itself into a butterfly from the chrysalis into which it had been transformed: Pope Sixtus V had opened the strings of the bag, determined to transform the Holy City into the most glorious stage in the known world, trampled only by those who had been able to rise from the crowd.
It is under the statue of Pasquino, one of the famous "talking statues" of Rome, that we know "our" Caravaggio. Vincenzo, Tourist Guide and President ofRome Guides Cultural Association, will tell the life and works of the great Lombard artist Michelangelo Merisi, in art Caravaggio from the name of the small village mentioned above, in which he spent his childhood. He is accompanied by the precious Martina, also a Tourist Guide, who takes care of the entire "administrative" part of the itinerary, from showing the license cards to the police to coordinating with the participants for quota entries in the churches.
It is a very gruff Caravaggio, the one played by Vincenzo: he does not speak to the viewer and, when he does, he is violent and disrespectful, with a sharp tongue and easy insult. Merisi was too, on the other hand, who several times ended up in jail for one word too many: Vincenzo himself tells us about it, when in the second act he wears anachronistic glasses for the first time on a beautiful costume of the time.
Glasses will be, in effect, the discriminating factor of this tour. Only when they are on his nose, Vincenzo carries out his profession as a guide, with a polite and refined speech, addressing the tour participants and answering any questions they may have. Without them, the stage is the exclusive property of Caravaggio, in symbolic places for the life of the great artist during his stay in Rome, such as Navona Square, Senate Church of San Luigi dei Francesi, Via della Pallacorda, Florence square or Church of Sant'Agostino.
Spectators see him wandering around, quivering with anger and passion, through the crowded Piazza Navona, following the stages of his Roman experience. Except for the churches, where four masterpieces by the great artist can be admired, the visit is outdoors, among the same crowd of people that Caravaggio studied every day on market days to absorb smells, movements and expressions, then proposing them in his works .
Caravaggio's works are an integral part of the tour, even those that are not accessible: Vincenzo / Caravaggio brings with him, in the form of canvases to show to the participants, the paintings preserved in the Museums of Rome and throughout Europe, to complete the explanation of the Roman artistic poetics of Cursed Painter. He tells her how a Guide would do it, thanks to the help of precious glasses, or how the Author himself would do it, filling them with foul words and bestiality, but making them live with the eye of those who hold the creative brush.
What Caravaggio proposes is not a walk among solemn buildings, noble attitudes and gurgling fountains. It is a descent into hell, into the ravine of failure, in a ruinous fall without brakes. Madonnas become prostitutes and prostitutes become Madonnas, in a vicious circle that shows Rome as a giant brothel with thousands of bed workers. There are professional jealousies, falls of style, artistic vendettas with Annibale Carracci and Giovanni Baglione, dirty songs, satirical verses unworthy of Alighieri, with an increasingly tired Caravaggio and an increasingly sweaty Vincenzo.
This long journey into the hell of Rome in the early seventeenth century, ends where it all really ended, in the middle of a game of tennis, with the “little guitars” transformed into swords, the blood flowing on the pavement and a daring escape to save his life.
Our history, duration two and a half hours, ends here. Caravaggio vanishes, like a ghost in the haze, and Vincenzo takes over for the finale, for a symbolic funeral oration, holding David's canvas with the head of Goliath in his hand. Only the final act is missing, the
A new Michelangelo.
Because, as Merisi himself once said, thanks to his homonymy, "it's not that art ended with Buonarroti".
In times of a pandemic, in a 2020 cursed, Rome Guides he has not ceased to represent his Caravaggio. The latter, cloaked in the dutiful black mask, has acquired a considerable resemblance to Zorro, and the groups have definitely shrunk to favor social distancing, but Michelangelo Merisi is always there, angry and furious, ready to tell his own Roman epic in the first person, the only way to understand it at best.
