Culture
Ariccia has a long history of welcoming artists and writers who have departed from Rome's heat and bustle for the breezy hillsides and groves overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea. Horace in one of his Satires notes that in "Escaping from great Rome, I'm welcomed in Ariccia at a reasonable inn."
The forested landscapes of Ariccia, which had given birth to the Latin-Roman cult of Diana, also had a special appeal to later writers and artists, especially those associated with Romanticism. Ariccia appears as a subject in noteworthy paintings by Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, George Inness, Ludwig Richter, Alexandre Calame, Friedrich Wilhelm Schirmer, Adrien Manglard, Franz Ludwig Catel, Hermann Winterhalter, Oswald Achenbach, J. M. W. Turner, Mikhail Lebedev, and Richard Wilson. Goethe visited in the 1780s, and Henrik Ibsen wrote his epic verse play Brand in Ariccia in 1865. In Italian Hours (essays collected in 1909), Henry James observed the natural beauty of Ariccia and the pleasantness of the "little piazza".
The Locanda Martorelli, the hotel which faced the palace in the Piazza di Corte, was a popular stop between Rome and Naples for those on the Grand Tour, and was frequented by artists and writers such as J.M. William Turner, Corot, Henrik Ibsen, Gogol, D'Azeglio, Richter, Hans Christian Andersen, and Henry Longfellow.
Today, the Palazzo Savelli Chigi often hosts exhibitions drawing from its own extensive collections as well as visiting exhibitions. The Palace is also the site of frequent public musical performances.
Much of the city's greatest art, Roman-era sculpture excavated by archaeologists, has been distributed to the world's collections of classical artwork, so one often sees the name "Ariccia" pinned next to statues of Augustus or Diana that are being displayed far from Latium.
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Famous quotes containing the word culture:
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“Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man,—a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.”
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