Please don't think I'm bagging on Rome...

...but I just have to say it. This picture pretty much sums up the city's architecture:



LONG VERSION of underlined text:
"The Church of Saints Ambrose and Charles al Corso is one of the most representative monuments of Roman Baroque art. It was built on the site of the little church of San Nicola de Tofo (10th century) which, in 1471, Pope Sixtus IV granted to ... build a confranternity and an hospital under the protection of Saint Ambrose. Having demolished the old church the new church was built between 1513 and 1520; it was dedicated to San Ambrogio and decorated with frescoes by Baldassare Peruzzi, Perin del Vaga and Taddeo Zuccari."

SUMMARY VERSION:
"To make possible the installation of yet another baroque church in a city already teeming with them, the pope in the early sixteenth century authorized someone to knock down a (probably fascinating) 600-year-old structure so that the Romans might have space in which to install frescoes by some relatively anonymous and frankly inferior Baroque artists. Everything in this church looks just like everything in every other church in Rome, only perhaps shabbier or more poorly done."

Florence may be famous for being the home of the Renaissance (TM) but it is Rome that perfected it: mountains of ancient art and history, mountains of fifteenth- and post-fifteenth-century art and history, and absolutely nothing in between. The notice cited above exists in one form or another on almost every church you can find here in Rome. A few have medieval mosaics or frescoes, but only in corners where no one looks or up so high or in such a critical place (a dome over the nave, e.g.) that it would have been too difficult to tear them down.

Okay, fine, the Renaissance. All I'm saying is it (and everything that comes after it) starts to look like the artistic equivalent of track housing after a while. Perhaps I just haven't had the time to dig into Rome a bit more, get off the beaten path, and see something interesting from between 400 and 1500 AD. Then again, maybe there isn't anything left standing.