I’m a great fan of impressionism. Everywhere I go I would seek out exhibitions of impressionist works. So I was very excited to find out that there was an exhibition of Manet and his contemporaries at Palazzo Reale at Piazza del Duomo.
Palazzo Reale, the Royal Palace, has stood in its grounds in various forms for over 10 centuries. It was the palace of the House of Savoy, and Napoleon, when he was King of Italy.
Grazia and I went on a Tuesday afternoon. As it was mid-week there weren’t a lot of visitors and we got in easily.
The palace was already a museum in itself. We walked through halls with stuccoed vaulted ceilings and chandeliers, while at the same time admiring their Renaissance beauty. In one of them was a huge portrait of Napoleon.
Eventually we made our way to the rooms where the exhibition was held. The main works were those of Manet but there was a good collection from his contemporaries such as Monet, Cezanne, Renoir, Degas and Berthe Morisot. We picked up a headset with description of the works, but after the first couple of recordings we both decided to forget it and just let our imagination do its work.
A crowd gathered in front of the famous Le Fifre, the Fife Player, which is normally housed in Musée d’Orsay. I walked round to look at it from different angles. A guard came from behind barking at us not to take photographs. Luckily I had already sneaked in a snap well beforehand. A few visitors looked at him as if he was mad.
We entered another room with more magnificent paintings. One portrayed a high-society party, and another a waitress in a beer house, captured in immortality by her fleeting glance towards the artist.
In the same room was a memorable painting of Berthe Morisot, who was one of a handful of female artists at the time. It was also one of the few works of Morisot by Manet.
We left the exhibition through a bookshop. Downstairs in the courtyard chairs were laid out for an open-air cinema. In warm summer nights it is a perfect venue for such an event.
There was no better way to finish the afternoon than a coffee. So we left the Duomo area for San Babila, just a few minutes’ walk away. It was good to sit down for a bit.
As my “private tutor”, Grazia has been helping me with my Italian. So as we were walking along Corso Venezia we practised the tongue twister she devised for me the other day: Forse io domani andrò dal parrucchiere perché di sera andrò al ristorante con Grazia. Apparently, the key is to sing it out (oops, sorry for the pun 😊). Ok, let’s start again, forse io domani andrò……
me in milan 