| Toroazul Painting and Fine Arts |
| It is not every day that one can find an Artist and lover of Philosophy and Art History -- like myself -- to give you a personal, guided tour of Rome. But this is what I do here, along with my artwork. This is my story. I am a graduate of St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, known for its unique “Great Books,” classical liberal arts curriculum. I also hold a master’s degree in art and Spanish literature from the University of Delaware in Newark. In 2004, I brought a small group of UMiami students to the Spinelli Institute of Art and Art Restoration, in Florence, Italy, and participated in the institute's classes on fresco painting, history, and restoration under the direction of professors Maria Grazia Badino, Rodolfo Bargelli, and Tiziano Lucchesi. In August 2008, I came to Rome as freehand drawing professor to the graduate students of the University of Miami School of Architecture, and decided to stay in Italy on a private sabbatical, to get to know the City, further develop on my own artwork, and also to write about my experiences and reflections here. These writings will one day become a book, and they are visible by clicking this diamond. As a lecturing professor at the University of Miami, besides architectural drawing, I have taught Western and non-Western art survey classes. Thanks to my Latin background (I was born in Camagüey, CUBA) and my upbringing and education in the northeast of the United States, I bring a broad and uniquely Latin-American focus to the art of touring of Rome. I am fluent in Italian, Spanish, English, and to some degree, French. Moreover, my tours are deepened by my sincere interest in MYTHOLOGY as an essential --but practically forgotten-- element inside the art and architecture of Rome. Too often in their explanations, guides leave the mythological unmentioned or else treat it rather flippantly, as an archaic curiosity in the context of the tour. Rome's beginnings, for example, owe as much to the legendary figures of Romulus and Remus as to those of Aeneas and his old father Anchises, fleeing Troy. Little do most tourists suspect that the hero Hercules also figures into the founding stories of the mythical Roma Quadrata, the earliest urban enclosure of the City, built by Romulus. The true Palatine Hill tour, as I understand it, must address these myths and others in order to truly introduce the traveler to that sacred historical area, patrimony of humanity! As a professor, too, I see all too often the dazed, oblivious look on the faces of study-abroad groups as their instructors point out -- for example -- that the figure of Plato in Raphael's School of Athens is holding in his hand a tome of his work, TIMAEUS. My background in the classics can open up a whole new appreciation of the fresco by explaining to students or adults exactly why this particular text is so important in the context of this Vatican mural, painted a few doors away from where Michelangelo was painting the Sistine Ceiling with images of Genesis in the Bible and the story of Noah and the Flood. Plato's TIMAEUS, it turns out, contains not only the Platonic (non-Judeo-Christian) version of the creation of the universe but also of the continent of Atlantis and its own destruction by a Flood-like cataclysm! In fact, in my tour I explain how Plato's account of the orbiting planets and of all life in the universe, an account both mythological and logical, yet based on the triangle, is as much a cosmogony as it is a description of how our mind works and how much thought, in its purest, most "classical" form, is a sort of sacred yet basic geometry of triangles, circles, and other such figures. |
Photo of high waters of the Tiber
(December 2008)....and of the guide
courtesy of Massimo Verdoliva
(December 2008)....and of the guide
courtesy of Massimo Verdoliva
| U.S. phone 786-417-6772 Rome 39+ 366 1940 507 |
