When in Rome - do the laundry!

Yesterday [now three days ago] was another laundrette day. Don’t know why we’d run out of clothes so quickly again, but it was very necessary. Maybe we’ve left some behind somewhere. Anyway, we also supermarketed, which gave Celia a bit of a rush. In the afternoon we headed into the old part of town again, specifically to the Colosseum. Got ourselves conned into having our pictures taken with a couple of ‘Roman guards’ who then demanded ten euros for the privilege. Celia gave them two euros and they said she was stingy. The Colosseum, like much of the area in the old Roman forum, is being restored. Some of it looks quite new, in fact. Many of the old columns in the forum have been put back together, jigsaw fashion, and there’s a huge amount of restoration going on. I don’t know that we walked through this area last time we were in Rome, but it’s certainly getting a lot of attention.
As we came out of the forum we discovered the Paul Gauguin exhibition that we’d read about. It was being held in the back of a building which we’d passed several times and hadn’t been able to name. Turns out it’s the main Art Gallery - at least as far as I understand.
The Gauguin, interestingly enough, didn’t have many of his South Sea Islands paintings, which are mostly what I’ve known him for. But it did have a wide range of his pictures overall, including a lot of his early work, which is wonderfully coloured, and a delight to the eye. To the end he remained a superb colourist, and seeing these early works as well has confirmed he’s an artist I really enjoy. His life, like so many of the artists of his time, was a muddle, and the political statements that the write-ups on him in the exhibition claim he was making are not that obvious - to my eye, anyway.
And talking of painting: we made our way to the Piazza del Popolo towards evening (after having had an excellent and economic meal at the Railway Station). Celia wanted to go there because it was close to the place we stayed at last time we were here. But neither of us could remember exactly where we had stayed, unfortunately. Anyway, the Piazza, when we got there, didn’t look at all familiar (!) and neither did the surrounding streets. But halfway along the Corso we came across this boy, who couldn’t have been more than 15 or 16, and he was painting with spray cans. He’d flip each can out of the box, give it a twist and a shake (rather like those guys in bars who throw cocktails around to mix them - and show off), and then set to with complete understanding of what he was doing to produce a painting. The whole thing was performance art, really, because it was done at great speed, with utter confidence, using the cans, the hands, pieces of cardboard torn on the spot, an old pie dish (for part of a circle), mixes of colour done with ease, and a total concentration that was a bit scary for someone of his age. At the end of it he sold the painting on the spot to someone for ten euros (!) He was working by the light of the shop next door, and at one point someone came out and said he needed to move along because the crowd watching him was blocking the shop doorway. So he just upped his equipment and moved a metre further, and then got back onto the job. There was another painter doing something similar further along the road - actually working almost in the dark - but he none of the panache of the boy.