Rome is scattered with the most alluring ancient ruins in the world and more stashes of art masterpieces in its churches and palazzos than you can possibly appreciate even in several visits. Yet its history did not stop at the Renaissance, and some new and updated house museums provide intriguing wormholes into private Roman lives of more recent but equally fascinating eras. Everyone knows the best way to see a city is from the inside out, as a guest in the home of a friend, and here is a way to do it with no strings attached.
Moravia shared the apartment with his second wife, writer Dacia Maraini, and later his even younger Spanish companion, Carmen Llera; the vast library includes books dedicated by intimates Robert Penn Warren, Saul Bellow, and Pier Paolo Pasolini, with whom he shared a beach house in Sabaudia. He died here in the bathroom while shaving one September morning in Lungotevere della Vittoria 1; fondoalbertomoravia.
Museo Mario Praz This satellite museum of the National Gallery of Modern Art opened to the public in and has remained unchanged since the death of its owner, in Praz, who was knighted by Queen Elizabeth, was a celebrated scholar of English literature best known for The Romantic Agony , a book elaborating on the erotic and morbid themes of the Romantic authors and a collector of nineteenth-century art.
The meandering apartment is chock full of strange artifacts such as wax figures, period portraits, and precious objects like a dazzling micro-mosaic portraying an ancient gate of Milan in Via Zanardelli 1; museopraz.
The Keats Shelley House Open for over years, the Keats-Shelley house of which Praz was chairman of the board has just been expanded to include a new bookshop and memorabilia β as well as a period sleigh bed Vatican law dictated burning of the original, believed to be TB-infected. Above the bed is the touching portrait of the poet on his deathbed painted by Severn in the next room, where an evocative life-mask cast years earlier by painter Benjamin Robert Haydon is displayed.
