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EN CASO DI INCENDIO
when you on fire
haben sie mal feuer
si vous en feu
cuando tiene fuego

you not forgetta no clothing
you keepa you napkin to cover you parts
you helpe olda people
you alarma de public
you listen de flight attendant ragazza
you not loosa you head

Church of Sant'Ignazio, piazza Sant'Ignazio, via di Seminario, a block from the Corso, and near the Pantheon.

All ceilings are decorated most baroquely with jubilant saints and angelic nudies fluttering a-travers the painted sky, and what's special here is that the proportions are "bent" to compensate for perspectival foreshortening. The plan for the painting was laid out on the floor with a grid on it, then strings were dropped from above to map it onto the arched ceiling. This means elements on the sides are actually distorted and elongated, but appear realistic when seen from a central point below. As soon as you move to the sides or corners, the painted "trompe l'oeil" architecture starts to twist and slant in the wrong direction... quite a trip in "2.5-D".

If you're female and under 50, you might be approached by a friendly little senior gentleman, who will enjoy dragging you by the arm to the best viewing spots and explain them in words like "tutto verticale" etc. Don't worry, he's harmless -- it's just his retirement pastime.

Crypt of the Cimitero dei Cappucini, via Vittorio Veneto 27, metro Barberini (they will insist on a 'voluntary' donation).

In a flight of six small underground chapels, an unknown late-18th-century monk (who was banned from France) composed a decorative Gesamtkunstwerk that's out of this world in so many ways... walls and ceilings are adorned in full-coverage with the bones of 4000 Jesuit monks: Lovely floral patterns arranged out of jaws, vertebrae and clavicles, pretty daisywheels of shoulderblades and pelvises, and other creative explorations of ossified anatomy cover walls and ceilings. Three whimsical children skeletons (nephews of a pope of the era) are having the most fun, playing 'grim reaper' with a darling scythe and fragile scales, equally fashioned from you-know-what. What's more, a pageant of dry-preserved corpses in hooded duds (friar jerky?) smirk their parched gums sans dentures from underneath bone-piled arches: "What we were, you are -- what we are, you will become". Thanks for sharing, brothers.