This picture displays the facade of one of the historical palaces of Rome, a typical way to built a noble home mainly during the XVI and the XIX century. It is another way to understand how sometimes you have just to look around, when you walk in Rome, to see beauties. Walking in Rome is easy to see those unusual buildings, and being a local tour guide I try to indicate to my tourists something that, maybe, is unexpected.

For example this XIX century building, located in Via dei due Macelli, has the typical decorations of the renaissance age: the grotesques, mythological figurines, monstrous and natural elements. It was in the XIX century that this fashion came back strongly, in a modern reproduction of what happened centuries before. The decorated buildings, which have painted decorations on the facade are still present in Rome, in almost all the districts of the central. Especially at the beginning of XVI century, the great and noble families were desirous to show off all their wealth, even to the populace, who would never have been able to cross the entrance doors and admiring the glitz, the frescoes and the stuccoes of the halls (click here to read about another and special frescoed building of Rome). Many of the artists started to specialize themsleves in the decorations on the outside of the buildings, which proliferated like mushrooms.

Unfortunately, however, the weather conditions irreparably deteriorate paintings, so much so that very few are today the examples of decorated buildings the romans. A real shame, although the conditions improved in the XIX century when, as written before, many people tried to resume a tradition now lost in time. And this palace of Rome is the proof: we see small inscriptions, frames, exotic elements and taste for the mythological. The facade is completely filled by the figures, there is no space left empty. A filling that is reminiscent of the roman sarcophagi or of the pediments of the Greek temples, in which all the background had to be filled. A mix of thin figures and fake architecture that, at a distance of two centuries, still manages to excite...