Rome – Day 32 – Monday
A lot of things in Rome are closed on Monday, but the
Vatican is open, having been closed on Sunday.
I chose Monday to visit the Vatican for this reason. Mama mia!
The line to get into the Vatican Museum was about four blocks long. It took me four hours and forty five minutes
to reach the entrance. I got in line at
10:30 in the morning and was starting to worry that I would not be admitted
before the deadline of 4:00.
It was a long wait. I had water, but no food, since I hadn’t planned on being in line for more than a few hours. It was alternately hot and raining. Umbrellas came in handy for both conditions, but the presence of supermodel tall Eastern European women made it hard for me to hold the umbrella high enough to clear their heads. It’s been a long time since I felt that short. It was like being in sixth grade again. No one around me spoke English or Italian, so I waited and listened to my entire library of Rick Steves podcasts about Rome.
Tour operators were constantly hassling us to purchase 45
Euro tours that insured no waiting. I
might have considered it after a few hours in line, but I didn’t have 45 Euros
on me and didn’t want to be rushed through the museum by a guide. Hah!
When I finally did get into the museum it was so packed that they herded
us through like cattle. I couldn’t see
much of anything below ceiling level.
The Vatican Museum is like some hall of treasures in a
fantasy novel. There are four miles of
corridors, most of which were roped off so they could herd us through
faster. There were two large halls
filled with just animal sculptures.
Picture taking was almost impossible since exposures were slow in the
low light and I was constantly jostled.
I did get one nice shot of a stained glass window illuminated by the
late afternoon sun.
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| Caravaggio |
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| Sistene Chapel |
Notable highlights were the hall of maps, Raphael rooms and
collection of paintings, although many fine works were out of sight in roped
off galleries. Wait a minute. Was that a Pisarro? A Seurat?
The one thing that really struck me was a painting of Jesus being
entombed by Caravaggio. Next to that, everything
else seemed lifeless, except maybe Leonardo Da Vinci’s San Girolamo. The highlight of the museum is supposed to be
the Sistene Chapel, but I found in disappointing. The ceiling is so far away that the figures
seem very small and I couldn’t see them clearly. There was one figure painted where the
ceiling curved upward that impressed me because he was so 3-D that I thought he
was going to jump down at any moment.
THAT was an artistic achievement for any century.
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| St. Peter's |
By the time I limped out of the museum, I had been standing
for seven and a half hours. I could
barely drag myself over to St. Peters, but I consoled myself with the fact that
everything I had read said that St. Peter’s was nearly empty at 6:00 and that
was when I would be arriving. By the
time I stepped through the forest of columns and into the huge oval piazza, I
felt like a pilgrim who had walked all the way from Spain. What did I see? Why, another long line, of course! I was worried that I wouldn’t get in before
they closed at 7:00, but the line moved quickly and I had enough time to see
the inside of the church. I had wanted
to climb the dome, but I had neither the time nor the energy to do so.
St. Peter’s is large.
You could fit two football fields inside of it. The dome is a football field tall. Everything is so well proportioned that it
doesn’t seem that big, but the canopy over the altar, put there to keep the
worshipers from losing sight of the priest in the vast space, is itself seven
stories tall. The artistry of the
sculptures is exceptional. They are much
more animated and lifelike than most church statuary. Bernini’s sculpture of St. Peter arches over
a doorway, the marble of its base seemingly draped casually. I have never seen a marble sculpture that
fluid. If there is any artist who can
make me see God, it is Bernini.
Michelangelo’s Pieta is no slouch, either.
It’s a long hike back to the metro station from St. Peter’s
and my feet were killing me. I decided
that a nice dinner in a sit down restaurant was in order, since I had never
eaten lunch. The Vatican crowds were
finally dispersing and I found a nice little pizzeria with empty tables. I treated myself to a glass of proseco and
had a pizza margherita so crispy and light that I was still hungry when I
finished it. Not in any hurry to get up
and walk anywhere, I ordered a lemon gelato and limoncello parfait. OMG.
That had to be the most alcoholic dessert on the face of the
planet. It was also tart and delicious
and I enjoyed it thoroughly. It was the
highlight of my day.
Rome – Day 33 – Tuesday
May first is Labor Day in Italy and the reason that Rome has
been so exceptionally packed this weekend.
I didn’t see any demonstrations, but I did see lots of speeding
Carabinieri. Something was going on
somewhere. This was my day to take in
many, many minor sights and revisit a few major ones with a working
camera. Nothing was efficiently
accessible from public transportation, so it was another long day of
walking. Rome may be built on seven
hills, but at least they are nowhere as steep as Montepulciano.
I started close to the hotel with the National Museum. This museum features an extremely exhaustive
collection of Roman and later Italian coins displayed in a vault in the
basement. You’d have to be a numismatist
to want to carefully examine all the coins, but the narrative explaining how
and why the coins changed over time makes it clear that our current economic
troubles are nothing new. Say what you
will about the Federal Reserve, but I’d rather have monetary decisions in their
hands than in the hands of an emperor like, say, Caligula.
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| Rome Can Blow Your Mind |
There is a fine collection of statuary on the first floor
(which Americans would call the second floor), but I am frankly bored with
Roman statues after months of tramping through Turkey and Spain. There are some exceptional carved sarcophagi
and an almost perfect marble copy of The
Discus Thrower, the most popular subject of that age. The second or top floor (which Americans
would call the third floor and Italians would call the last floor) features a
fascinating collection of frescoes and mosaics from ancient Roman houses. How they manage to move these without
destroying them is a mystery to me, but they have done an artful job of
displaying them in such a way that visitors can get a real sense of what it was
like to occupy these rooms. They are
colorful and show scenes of everyday life.
One room depicts a garden with scenes of plants and fruit trees on all
four walls. Sitting in that room is
almost like being outdoors. I would
enjoy living there today. |
| Original Decoupage |
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| Green Screen |
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| Me "In" the Set |
The ground floor (at least we can all understand that one, even if Americans would also call it the first floor) had a special exhibit about the Danish film production of Hans Christian Anderson’s The Wild Swans. Apparently, Queen Margarethe has a hobby of making decoupage scenes. The film used her decoupages as sets and superimposed live actors using green screen technology. The result was very effective. The exhibit featured the decoupages themselves and the costumes from the film and also had a little studio where one could stand in front of the green screen and see oneself transported into the world of the film on a monitor. Photographing this was tricky, because I had to look at the camera while taking a photo of the monitor. If I look awfully serious in the photo, it’s because I was concentrating. This was something like trying to rub your belly and pat your head simultaneously.
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| For English Sins |
After the museum, I set off on a tour of early
churches. The first one I visited was
Santa Maria Maggiore. The rather homely
church was built during the fall of Rome and has some very cool early Christian
mosaics inside. The next stop was San
Pietro in Vincoli, known in English as St. Peter in Chains. This fifth century church was originally
built to house the chains that held St. Peter but, even though the chains are
still there, it is now more famous for its Michelangelo statue of Moses. I found the statue rather uninspired. I preferred the numerous confessional boxes,
offering absolution in several different languages.
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| San Clemente |
Of the churches I visited, San Clemente was the most
interesting. This 12th
century church, which sits well below street level today, is built on top of a
fourth century church, which was built on top of some Roman houses and a
Mithraic temple. You can descend through
all three levels. There isn’t much to
see in the Mithraic temple, but a spring provides the Roman houses with running
water. I had a nice chat in Italian with
a Dominican priest while I was waiting to buy my ticket. He was also a big fan of Montepulciano.
My longest walk between stops was from San Clemente to
Trastevere, passing the Circus Maximus.
It was a pretty walk through a lot of open space with blooming red
poppies. As I was skirting the Palatine
hill, it began to rain in earnest. By
the time I reached civilization on the other side of the open space of the
Circus, the only thing I could think of was finding a warm, dry place. I ducked into a cellar restaurant and had a
delicious spinach and cheese focaccia sandwich and a Guinness. The last focaccia I ordered was basically a
crispy thin pizza without tomato sauce, but this one was a more familiar bread,
baked in a wood fired oven and tasting faintly of salt and smoke. It was wonderful. Someone next to me ordered a cappuccino after
lunch (Oh, those tourists.) I raised my
foamy Guinness and told the barmaid that was my kind of cappuccino.
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| Trastevere |
Once the rain abated, I continued on across the river to
Trastevere. Trastevere literally means,
“across the Tiber.” It was undesirable
low lying land outside the city where immigrants lived. Many of the early residents were Jews who
came to Rome for business reasons a century or two before Christ. Having come to Rome directly from Jerusalem
before the diaspora, they are neither Sephardic, nor Ashkenazi. They speak their own dialect (or at least
used to) and practice their own variety of Judaism. They lived in Trastevere until the
Renaissance when the Pope moved them across the river to a ghetto because it
found it distasteful that Jews and Christians were living together in peace and
harmony.
Today, Trastevere is a lively and fascinating place. It is cramped and crooked, never having been
subjected to modernization. There are
many shops and restaurants. One shop
featured a door frame decorated with a mosaic made from pieces of plastic and
foam rubber. The tradition of mosaic art
lives on. Only the materials have
changed. I would recommend Trastevere as
a good place to stay in Rome if you’re not in the league of the fancy hotels
above the Spanish steps. |
| Santa Maria in Trastavere |
Santa Maria in Trastevere is an interesting church. Built in the fourth century, it was the first
church dedicated to the Virgin Mary. It
features a statue of St. Anthony nearly buried in a mountain of paper scraps
bearing prayer requests. Many of its
architectural features were borrowed from earlier buildings and some exhibit
pagan motifs.
After my visit to Trastevere, I crossed back over the Tiber
to stroll the Jewish ghetto. The Jews of
Rome were confined in this walled, four block square area for 400 years, from
the end of the 15th century to the end of the 19th
century. There was a Christian church at
every entrance to the ghetto and a convent within the walls. Every attempt was made to convert the Jews to
Christianity and they were forced to attend mass. Even with all the propaganda, few converts
were made. The ghetto was extremely
crowded. Two thousand Jews lived in this
small area. The buildings in the ghetto
are six stories tall. Just outside the
ghetto, they are three stories tall, although they appear almost as high
because the ceilings are much loftier.
The crowding in the ghetto dictated the dimensions of the buildings. Bernini, who was friendly with the Jewish
community, sculpted a fountain for the ghetto and decorated it with turtles
because they were ancient, tough creatures who carried all they owned on their
backs.
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| Synagogue |
After the unification of Italy, the Jews were allowed to
leave the ghetto and the walls were torn down.
In 1905, a new synagogue was built to celebrate this liberation. In 1986, Pope John Paul II visited this
synagogue, marking the first time a pope had ever visited a synagogue and
ushering in a new era of Catholic/Jewish relations. The Nazis told the Jews of Rome that they
would not be bothered if they could come up with 50 kilos of gold in 24
hours. Miraculously, with the help of
their Christian neighbors, they did so.
The Nazis took the gold and then proceeded to ship thousands of Roman
Jews to Auschwitz, anyway. Next to the
synagogue is the plaza where, in 1943, these victims were detained. Today, the ghetto has some of the highest
real estate prices in Rome. It is still
the heart of the Jewish community, although many of the original residents have
taken their windfall profits and moved elsewhere.
From the ghetto, I walked to Campo de’ Fiori. It is a small plaza and was crowded with a
market that was just shutting down when I arrived. My feet were hurting, so I settled into a
café and had a (decaf) espresso with whipped cream. This was a wonderful thing. It was sort of like hot coffee ice cream. I wonder if I could get one at
Starbuck’s? Since I was close, I
continued on to Plaza Navona to worship the Bernini fountains and then took
another look at the Trevi fountain before hopping on the metro for a ride back
to my neighborhood. I stopped in the
grocery store and got some cheese, crackers, wine, a pear and a white chocolate
bar for dinner. I was set.
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