Vicolo del Divino Amore: The Painter and His Landlady
Why is it significant?
Walk into this quiet, slightly crooked alley and picture it around 1605: washing hung between the windows, mud underfoot, a few rented rooms, and somewhere along here, a painter's door. This is where Caravaggio rented a small house, with one room big enough to work in.
Key Facts
| Place | Vicolo del Divino Amore: The Painter and His Landlady |
|---|---|
| Address | Vicolo del Divino Amore, 00186 Roma RM, Italy |
| Geo Coordinates | 41.90330, 12.47610 |
| Part of Walk | Caravaggio's Rome: Masterpieces, Brawls and a Killing |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk into this quiet, slightly crooked alley and picture it around 1605: washing hung between the windows, mud underfoot, a few rented rooms, and somewhere along here, a painter's door. This is where Caravaggio rented a small house, with one room big enough to work in.
We know a surprising amount about that house because of an inventory drawn up in August 1605, when his landlady, Prudenzia Bruni, had his belongings seized for unpaid rent. The list is touchingly small: a few chairs and stools, a table, a guitar and a violin, swords and daggers, a handful of books, a large mirror, and a pile of canvases, some still blank. The most famous painter in Rome owned almost nothing.
Her loudest complaint was the ceiling. Caravaggio had cut a hole in it. Nobody knows exactly why: to fit a canvas too tall for the room, perhaps, or to let a shaft of light fall from above. Either way, it is hard not to think of his paintings, where a single hard beam cuts across a dark room and picks out a face, a hand, a shoulder.
Things went downhill fast. Locked out, Caravaggio came back at night and threw stones at her windows, and she filed a complaint against him. That same summer he wounded a notary, Mariano Pasqualone, in a quarrel over a woman named Lena, one of his models, and had to slip away to Genoa for a few weeks until the matter was patched up. His friends and patrons were spending more and more of their time getting him out of trouble.
Lena, it is believed, posed for one of his most beautiful Madonnas, and you are going to meet her face in a church in a few minutes. But first, a few steps south, there is a short street with a sporting name, where the worst evening of his life began. Follow the lane to Via di Pallacorda.