Last Day of Perusing Peru

A man and his camelid. Which, in Peru, usually means a llama or an alpaca.

As I drift deeper and deeper into my dotage, travel has become less and less about seeing sights. It's more about soaking in the atmosphere of a place and learning more about the place's history and its current state. Today was the day to soak in Lima on the last weekend before Christmas 2025.

Yesterday I headed north from my hotel. Today I head south. Where there are museums aplenty.

Such as this. El Museo de Arte Italiano. The Museum of Italian Art.

Lets look at the big murals on either side of the entrance.

This, however, was not among the museums I intend to visit. I don't want to sound like an art snob here, but one does not travel to Lima to see the major works from major Italian artists. And I have a limit of two museums per day. The Italian Art did not make the cut.

So let's keep on walking.

This is the Fuente de Neptuno, the Fountain of Neptune, in Parque Juana Alarco de Dammert. I do not know who Señora Alarco de Dammert. And I don't why she has a Neptune in her park.

She also has a former president of Peru in her parque, too.

Meet Don Manuel Candamo.

Her park is right on the other side of Avenida Paseo de la República from the Monumento a Miguel Grau.

I have finally learned that Señor Grau's monument is not accessible to pedestrians. It is on a traffic island between two extremely crowded of the divided Avenida Paseo de la República. Even if you were to survive crossing all the lanes of crowded traffic, you would have to navigate over the barriers blocking pedestrian access to Señor Grau's monument on Señor Grau's traffic island, which is called Plaza Miguel Grau even though you cannot access it.

And speaking of things I learned, if you remember, I have been looking unsuccessfully for ceviche in Lima. Well I found it:

I found it and I won't eat it. A ceviche cart. Given that ceviche is raw fish "cooked" in an acid bath of lime juice, I want my ceviche fish to have been stored at refrigerator temperatures. I don't trust a street cart to maintain proper fish cooling temperatures. You know how they say never to get sushi from a gas station? I would add: never order ceviche from a street cart. Churros, yes. Especially in Lima. Ceviche?  That would be a hard pass.

And once again we run into Christopher Columbus. 

Finally, after a grueling walk of around 550 kilometers, which is nearly the length of five football fields back to back to back to back to back, I arrived at my intended museum destination.

MALI. Not the country in Africa with Timbuktu in it. That would requiring walking much more than 550 km, including walking over open ocean for a significant part of the walk. The MALI is an acronym for Museum of Art of LIma.

From the second floor of the MALI, I could see the Pabellón Bizantino, the Byzantine Pavilion.

I could get no closer because it's behind massive barricades. A large section of the park is walled off, and an admission fee is being charged. I am guessing it is some large celebratory gathering related to this being the last weekend before Christmas. There's a lot of that going around in Lima. This is a town that takes its Christmas seriously, albeit with a massive amount of fun.

Let's tour the museum collection, shall we?

You walk through the collection of Peruvian art in chronological order. This means you start with pottery and, more specifically, the pottery of the pre-Incan cultures in the land that is modern-era Peru.

There are two things about this collection that absolutely defies how I ordinarily view art museums.

That is a hairless dog. The Peruvian hairless dog is a recognized breed of dog.  This, however, looks more like a Chihuahua. Or maybe one of those hideously ugly Chinese Crested hairless dogs which are the size of chihuahuas, but hideous. And the owners dress them up in pajamas because that's what you do when you have a hideously ugly hairless dog.

Anyway, when I go to an art museum and they display handicrafts from ancient cultures, or any less "sophisticated" cultures, I always think it is grossly condescending to equate a woven basket from some indigenous tribe with a painting from the Italian Renaissance or French impressionism. They are not equivalent. Here, the pre-Inca pottery is the star of the museum show. And deservedly so.

I mean, c'mon, just look at that cat. I have totally seen cats strike that pose in my lifetime. It's not shock they were doing that 1300 years ago or whatever.

The thing about the pre-Incan pottery on display here is that these are not handicrafts. These are not the equivalent of the "everyday china" that was unearthed at an archaeological site and declared to be fine art. This is art.

As are these.

There also are pre-Inca textiles on display.

And, of course, we have the obligatory wall of pottery.

Every museum with pre-Inca pottery always has at least one wall of pottery. The MALI is not exception.

Here is an interesting piece. The design is not abstract.

It's a series of interlocking snakes and fish. We know who is going to win that battle.

What this staged to look like one of those Darwinian Descent of Man representations?

We move out of the "pre-hispanic" era and into the "post-hispanic." This is an interesting work from the late 1700's

 

Procesión de Corpus Christi en el Cusco. Corpus Christi procession in Cusco, attributed to an anonymous Cusqueño/

This one I found to be very disturbing:

Trinidad trifacial. The three-faced trinity. I don't think I've seen any prior representations of the Holy Trinity of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost as three faces on one body. Bring back to the cat and dog pottery, please, I say.

We then enter the gold room:

The display tried to indicate that gold was not valued by the indigenous people of Peru, pre-Pizarro and, instead, they valued spondylus shells more. Bullship, I declare. Bullship. We now for certain that the Inca valued gold more than seashells. That's why there was so much gold in Cusco to ship back to Spain. And so much gold in Moche culture. And Mayan culture. Yes, they may have liked the seashells, too. Some indigenous people valued particular feathers. But everybody everywhere has always loved the uncorruptible allure of gold. This was not a Spanish or even a European obsession. It was a global obsession.

This is the Funerales de Santa Rosa. The Funeral of St. Rose.

It is by Peruvian impressionist artist Teófilo Castillo, He completed it in 1918 a few years before his death. Given the popularity of Peruvian Saint Rose de Lima, of course her funeral would have been worth memorializing in a work of art. The use of the impressionist style is a worthy choice.

We now move into the "modern art" section.

And it's not all crap-tasmic, as I was expecting. This is "Portable Alter," a take on the the medieval era alter pieces that one design on the exterior and a different one in the interior to be opened on special occasions. It's by Peruvian artist Joaquín López Antay, It was completed in the 1970s or early 1980s.

I'm not sure why this was in with the "modern" era.

And then we get to something I should hated and didn't: Psicoanálisis del Lanzón de Chavín. The psychoanalysis of the Lanzón de Chavín by the artist Fernando Gutiérrez "Huanchaco." I've stopped labelling the artists now as "Peruvian artists" because all of the artists in this museum are Peruvian artists.

This is labelled an "installation." Normally, calling something an art installation is telling me I am going to hate it. But I don't hate this. It's inventive, clever and respectful of history while having a bit of fun with that history.

This is a recreation of an ancient artifact, the Lanzón de Chavín, a stela from the Chavín culture, which flourished from 900 to 200 B.C. It is an upright stela, but here it appears to be draped over a psychoanalyst's couch, with a loudspeaker blaring. Apparently, the Lanzón de Chavín is exhausted and "burned out" from all the years of being an important national symbol. It works. So I learned something today. Not all modern art sucks.

It's from this decade, which means we've reached the chronological end of the MALI tour. Time to find the next museum. And time to find what is going on in the space next door.

This is the Pabellon Morisco. Don't know much else about it other than it looks great and is behind chainlink fencing.

This is the Monumento a Ricardo Palma.

Ricardo Palma is an important figure in Peruvian literature. Which is why his monument is near an important national library. And that important national library is next to (or contained within) the next museum I intended to visit: El Museo Metropolitano de Lima, the Metropolitan Museum of Lima.

It seemed to be closed.

Why do I say that? In front of the entrance was a small house for children to talk to Santa Claus. And I wasn't about to elbow my way past Santa with a "get out of my way, Old Man, I got museum-ing to do.:

So, because of all of the various activities in Parque de la Exposición, I only could walk the perimeter.

It is, as we know, Christmas in Lima. The city is put on its Christmas finery. The police motorcycles are done up as reindeer (more or less). They are guarded by the Grinch because why not? Since it's still before Christmas Day, the Grinch's heart still would be two sizes too small. Which makes him perfect for police work. I kid. I kid.

There was a tourist train parked in the parking lot.

And the nativity scene had a very wide variety of animals in attendance.

And with that, my Lima and Peru tourism has come to an end. I never made it the Circuito Mágico del Agua, the incredible light and water show another half of a mile to the south because, with the Christmas crowds, it promised to be an absolute zoo there. Next time. And there will be a next time, if life continues down this path.