Second Go-Round in Lima This Trip

The Monument to Miguel Grau Seminario not only is impressive,
but it's right outside of my hotel in the Centro Historico of Lima

I am back in Lima for a few more days of R&R, with the main goal being to recover from the sleepless nights and long days of traveling, which seems to debilitate me worse and worse as I get older. I could respond to this age-related development. Option 1: Travel less. Option 2: Travel for longer periods of time each adventure to allow for R&R time. I plan to utilize Option 2 as long as I remain on this side of the soil. Surprised?

I seem to have caught a bug in Cusco which, at first, I thought was just a symptom of altitude sickness. But altitude sickness does not typically wait for three days to manifest itself. More likely, I caught the bug awhile back, but with all the travel-related issues involving too many days starting way too early and too many sleepless nights, I think I just lost the ability to fight it off. 

This is the Palacio de Poder Judicial. The Palace of Judicial Power. Don't you think that U.S. judges would love for their courthouses to have such a name. Even the U.S. Supreme Court sits in the modestly named United States Supreme Court Building. Think its opinions would carry more weight if they were issued from the Palace of Judicial Power in Washington, D.C.?

Apparently, and I just googled this, you can tour the Palace of Judicial Power, but tours are offered only twice a month and must be booked far in advance. I often seem to do insufficient tourism pre-planning.

Fuente de Neptuno, Neptune Fountain, in Parque Juana Alarco de Dammert, just south of my hotel. I am trying to visit this:

There's lots of construction going on in this area, so finding the entrance to the Centro de Estudios Historico Militares del Perú is proving to be exceedingly difficult.

Cool tree and nice looking vegetation at its base.

Finally, I get to the entrance:

This is listed as the Military Museum of Peru. And it was. Emphasis on that last word: "was." According to google, it still is. According to the soldiers at the entrance, it's not. I will defer to the soldiers guarding the entrance, especially given the fact that they are armed.

I was asking if this was the "Museo Militar," and they pointed across the way to the MALI, which is a museum -- a major museum -- but it's not a military museum. It's the Museo de Arte de Lima, the Lima Museum of Art. Which is sort of the polar opposite of a military museum. When I got back to the hotel, the front desk clerk told me it used to be a military museum open to the public, but it's not anymore. Perhaps the soldiers were trying to tell me that but since none spoke even a few words of English, I did not understand anything other than that this was not a functioning museum at this point in time.

I visited the MALI on my last trip. It's a perfectly nice museum. But it's not worth a second visit. There is only one museum in Lima worthy of repeated visits and it is one of my favorite museums anywhere: the Museo Larco, which has an extraordinary collection of pre-hispanic era antiquities. Well, given that the pre-hispanic era ended over 500 years ago, anything from that era would be an "antiquity" by definition, wouldn't it. (I think I just talked myself into going back to the awesome Museo Larco before this trip ends.)

So, instead, to get my museum fix o' the day, I visited the Museo de Arte Italiano.

No photographs allowed inside. So none were taken. The collection is small, and no major Italian artists are represented. This is not Renaissance-era Italian art. It's generally works for the latter half of the 19th Century. However, admission was a mere three soles, which is a little less than a buck. Well worth it.

In particular, I like two paintings on display far far more than any of others. The first was "Fuerza e inocencia," by Beppe Ciardi. The other one was "The Convalescent," by Alberto Zardo. I've embedded links to on-line photos of these works since I don't want to post anything I don't have license to use. These two jumped out at me from the rest of the collection. I don't know art well enough to explain why I felt these two had an extra added "oomph" in my estimation, but they did.