The walk into the Villa Borghese's beauty and the discovery of amazing places goes on in a splendid sunny end of November.
If almost everybody, in Rome, knows the Museum of the Galleria Borghese and his beautiful occupant, Pauline Bonaparte, there are a very few people that have ever heard of the much smaller but nevertheless precious Carlo Bilotti Museum (from 10h to 16h and from 10 to 19h on saturday and sunday. Monday closed), just near the lake of the park. 
The museum gathers a part of the collection Carlo Bilotti that was not only a successful   business man who lived between Italy and the States (until his death in 2006) and operated in the branch of cosmetics and perfumes, but also a lover of arts and a friend of Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Niki de Saint Phalle and many others. Bilotti gave to the city of Rome a particularly beautiful and unusual (two portraits together) Warhol, the portrait of his wife and his daughter and, amongst other works, 18 paintings and sculptures signed Giorgio De Chirico.

A very strange place, this little museum called also the "Orangery" (before it became a museum it was a store house where the citrus trees were protected during the winter). In the eighteenth century, it had another name: the "Casino dei Giochi d'Acqua", the "House of the Water Games" and was a place dedicated to social events and parties that were the talk of the town. In 1849, during a French military intervention to reestablish the temporal power of the Pope, the "Casino" was destructed. But not entirely. When you enter in the rooms of the temporary exhibitions, an extraordinary surprise expects you: the wall of one of the rooms is a magnificent fountain, surrounded by two antique roman statues, forgotten for more than one and a half century!

Strangely, in the front of this unexpected treasure from the past, the exhibition "Urbs Picta" that is on in this moment (until the 17th January) is related to street art: graffiti and murals painted on the grey walls and boring facades of the poorest suburbs of Rome. Sometimes, there are just sunny colors and comic's humor, but in these last years, violence, anger and even desperation are present always more often. 
 Thanks to the photograph Mimmo Frassineti we can see well and even better (when they are in difficult places as inside tunnels or very high on the walls) these very strong interventions of artists as Blu, Borondo, Malala and many others that are perhaps the most interesting in this moment. Much more, probably, than many of those whose "installations" are exhibit in contemporary art galleries and museums...

But there is another jewel at the other side of the villa Borghese, at the Pincio hill (with a magnificent panoramic view above piazza del Popolo) where you can go walking from the "Orangery", passing through via delle Magnolie. In these days, more than ever, you cannot miss the splendid Villa Medici (open every day except monday from 10 to 19). Constructed in the middle of the 16th century by the Medici from Florence, the villa became, in 1803, thanks to Napoleon, the French Academy of Rome. This institution founded by the king Louis XIV (but in another place, in palazzo Capranica) houses young French artists from all disciplines (painters, musicians, writers...) who, getting a scholarship, come to stay in Rome for six month or a year. The Villa Medici organizes also concerts and exhibitions.  In this moment, until the 31 January, there is a particularly fascinating exhibition of an artist who had a very important part in the restructuration of the villa Medici in the sixties and seventies of last century, the painter Balthus (Balthazar Klossowski de Rola) who was the director of the villa from 1961 to 1977. 
It is possible not only to see his paintings and drawings, very often nudes of very young girls, delicate and vanishing as a dream, but also the apartments where he lived and worked and the rooms that inspired his paintings like the famous "Chambre Turque" that is exceptionally possible to visit with a guided tour.
And after you have seen the magic Balthus in the villa you will probably want to go and see the other exhibition that is dedicated to the great artist in another beautiful place of Rome: the "Scuderie del Quirinale".

But before, you have to go just beside the French Academy, to have at least a coffee at the Casina Valadier, a splendid café-restaurant from the beginning of the nineteenth century, recently renewed. 

"The beauty will save the world", said Dostoevsky. 
 
In this dark moment of the History, the best antidote is probably that: the beauty. And, in Rome, there is a magic place with an incredible concentration of natural beauty and art:  the Villa Borghese park.
 
This huge park in the hearth of the city is probably unique in the whole world. Here you can not only walk amongst the golden trees of an extraordinary Indian summer, or rent a row boat on a peaceful lake surrounded by roman pines and other trees and bushes, with a roman temple in the middle, in a purest romantic English Garden style, but also discover so many master pieces from all periods.

From the strange Mona Lisa smile of the Etruscan couple of the "Sarcophagus of the betrothed" that will welcome you in the "Museo Nazionale Etrusco di Villa Giulia" to the tiny but so alive Giacometti's sculptures and the solar Van Gogh's "Gardener" or Modigliani's "Reclining Nude" at the "Galleria Nazionale di Arte Moderna" (distant only a few minutes walking). 

Another very famous laying young lady, the beautiful Pauline Borghese, Napoleon's sister and prince Camillo Borghese's wife, sculptured by Antonio Canova as "Venus Victorious", will receive you in the first room, on the ground floor of the luminous "Galleria Borghese".
The Cardinal Scipione Borghese, an ancestor of the prince Camillo, built it for his magnificent collection of sculptures and paintings, at the beginning of the 17th century. You can still find there an important part of that extraordinary collection. Amongst all these treasures, The Bernini's "Rape of Proserpine" or his "Apollo and Daphne". But also a few Caravaggio:  "David with the head of Goliath", "Sick Bacchus", "St Jerome." A "Deposition" of Rubens or the famous Titian's "Sacred and Profane love"...

Not far from the Galleria, you can bring your children to the "Bioparco", a new word for the old Zoo, whit a population of 1.444 animals and 200 species. For the more curious, there is even a new little very avant-garde museum dedicated to the "Environmental Crimes". To regenerate yourself, you can find also a restaurant inside the Bioparco.

There are, however, in the Villa Borghese, other places, much more sophisticated, where you can have a lunch, a dinner or just a drink. One of them, a beautiful sunny terrace where you can sit outside in the middle of the winter if it doesn't rain, the "Caffé Delle Arti", is attached to the Museum of Modern Art (entrance Via Antonio Gramsci). The refined menu and the exquisite desserts seem to be just a natural continuation of the museum visit.
 
At the other side of the Villa Borghese Park, called the Pincio, other surprises wait for you. Coming up next... 

The famous Federico Fellini's film has already more than 55 years but the expression "La Dolce Vita", the sweet life, is more than ever lively in Rome. So many restaurants, bars, night- clubs in Rome and also in other Italian cities are named after it. And, in this moment, two important Roman events are related to it.

The first one is the inauguration of the renewed "Fontana di Trevi" where Marcello Mastroianni followed the beautiful blond Anita Ekberg, on the 3th of November. The restoration of the famous fountain (Nicola Salvi, 18th century, late baroque) began in June 2014 and was financed (2, 2 millions Euro) by the Fendi sisters. After one and a half year, the Romans and the tourists will be able to admire it again without any scaffolding and imagine having a part in the mythical scene of the film. And also, and this is not irrelevant, it will be again possible to drop some coins into the fountain just to be sure to come back to Rome.

Fellini's is also present, in a certain way, in another part of Rome. After Paris and the "Musée d'Orsay", the exhibition entitled "Una Dolce Vita? From Liberty to Italian design 1900-1940" is now in Rome, in the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, via Nazionale (not far from the railway station Termini), until the 17th of January.The title "Dolce Vita" has a question mark. In fact, in this exhibition we are not at all in the fellinian decadent Rome of the beginning of the sixties, but in a very young Italy, at the beginning of the twentieth century where artists and artisans worked together, full of enthusiasm, united by an optimistic vision of a world based on progress.
Everything started with the First Exhibition of Modern Decorative Art of Torino in 1902.  It was the period of floral patterns and interlaced curves of the "Liberty" style, but also the extravagant furniture of Carlo Bugatti, followed very soon  (1909, Marinetti' s "Futurism Manifesto") by the even more eccentric Futurists.
After the choc of the WWI, these lovers of progress, movement and speed will be ready to reconstruct the universe with their unlimited fantasy and their faith in the miracles of the contemporary world.

On the top floor of the huge "Palazzo delle Esposizioni" you can admire all that extraordinary creativity through a rich selection of furniture, glasses, lamps, ceramics, cloths, toys.... overflowed of fantasy and joy. The objects made by the futurist Fortunato Depero for his "House of the Magician" are particularly amazing.  You'll discover also the incredible modernity of the objects designed much before 1940. As, for instance, the table lamp "Bilia" (1931) of the great architect Gio Ponti, considered as the father of the Italian design.

As in the 1931 the lamp was considered too much avant-garde, the production of it started many years later. And today, Bilia is still produced under the brand name  "Fontana Arte" created by Gio Ponti in the thirties. The Dolce Vita is not over.