The Vatican

Monday, September 16

Today was our earliest morning so far. We needed to meet Jon, our tour guide, at 7:15 near the Vatican Museum, which is perhaps a five-minute walk from Casa Santo Spirito. We’ve enjoyed 8:00 breakfasts with the sisters each morning, but no time for that today!
Our tour includes the Sistine Chapel, the Vatican Museum, and the Basilica of St. Peter. We were in the Sistine Chapel first. Everyone’s seen pictures of the Chapel, of course, but there is something special about seeing it in person. Entry is metered, so we shared the space with perhaps another forty people; and you’re expected to be quiet. The lights are off for these tours, but your eyes gradually adjust to the natural light admitted from a few windows. I found myself contemplating the “statue” of Jonah at one end of the ceiling, and was startled to discover that what I first thought was a statue is a painting. That’s how realistic the three-dimensional painting is.
The Sistine Chapel was to be just the first example of many today in which the art can’t be properly appreciated from pictures. Jon had a great knack for explaining the differences between periods and styles of art, and startled all of us by pointing out a painting whose perspective shifts as you cross from the right to the left, creating an optical illusion. We saw so many perfectly-painted imitations of 3D that by the end of the morning we weren’t sure which windows, coffered ceilings, and cornices were real and which were painted. 
From the Sistine Chapel we moved on to the Vatican Museum and the Belvedere Palace, and from there we returned to St. Peter’s. We had been to St. Peter’s for Mass yesterday, but now the place was ready for tourists, so we could get closer to some of the works of art; and also, we now had Jon with us to explain some of the things we were seeing. There is much more to see and do at the Vatican–the tour of the vaults below, the ascent to the top of St. Peter’s dome, some time to sit and take it all in–but by this time we were on overload and ready to rest for a bit at Casa Santo Spirito.
After a short break, we regrouped for a trip into the heart of Rome again. Within the next few hours, we visited the Spanish Steps, the Trevi Fountain, and the Pantheon. The Spanish Steps were not particularly inspiring, although for this English teacher it was fun to duck into the doorway of the Keats and Shelley Museum next door. The Trevi Fountain is very impressive; I was expecting something in the middle of a piazza, but it is actually an edifice on its own. From there a few of us went to the Pantheon, which is one of the most influential buildings in the history of western architecture. Like many internal space, this one is hard to communicate with pictures, so I was glad to have the opportunity to visit it and take it all in.
This was our last night in Rome. We travel to Cicagna tomorrow by way of Florence, so we needed some packing time. After dinner it was time to get on with that for tomorrow’s drive. 

The Roman Forum and Colosseum

Sunday, September 15

The convent where we are staying is in the Borgo Santo Spirito. A “borgo” appears to be a very small village, and this one seems to consist of two parts: a hospital and the convent of the Sisters of the Sorrowful Mother, where we are staying. If I understand the relationship correctly, we are on Vatican property outside the actual walls of Vatican City. When we walk out the door, we are a few yards from St. Peter’s Square.
Several of us walked over to St. Peter’s for morning Mass. There must be dozens of side altars, and on the hour dozens of priests fan out to say Mass at them. Congregations vary in size from zero to a few dozen, and the languages vary as well. Several of us joined an elderly priest for the “Daily Mass for World Peace” in Italian; John’s daughter Lauren found an English-language Mass. Afterwards, we strolled around St. Peter’s, which at this time had many sections roped off. Most of the ropes would come off for tomorrow’s tours; today gave us a preview of what we would see tomorrow.
Today’s tour covered the Roman Forum on Palatine Hill and the Colosseum. For me, the Forum was too much too fast, but that’s probably unavoidable: I hadn’t done any preparation for the tour, and so from the beginning it was hard to connect the parts together. And parts there were: our tour guide Maria took us up and down more steps than we could count. I first encountered the story of Julius Caesar’s assassination as a kid, probably from Classics Illustrated comic books; and now, many years later, it was pretty neat standing in the very spot where all those events took place.
From there we went to the Colosseum. I was surprised to hear that modern scholars think that the Colosseum was used more for sports and spectacles than for the torture and killing of Christians. We took the underground tour, which offers the opportunity to walk in some of the spaces underneath the Colosseum floor. There are no “locker rooms” here for gladiators: instead, they came in from offsite training rooms through an underground passage, and were probably issued their weapons just before their contest. The whole area under the floor is honeycombed with passageways, and the current thinking is that the passageways held elevators that could deliver gladiators, animals, etc., to specific parts of the floor. As a former drama teacher, I could appreciate the technology.
This was a rainy day, and we were constantly surrounded by men trying to sell us ponchos and umbrellas. We resisted the temptation at first–most of us had hats or umbrellas–but eventually it became clear that we were going to need a bit more protection. The pictures will show several of us in (insert irony here) lovely fashion-forward plastic ponchos.

After dinner and a gelato, we found ourselves in what is sometimes called the Heart of Rome, which is about two miles from Vatican City. Some in our group walked back, but after walking all over the Capitoline hill and from the bottom to the top of the Colosseum, I was among those ready to take a bus back to the Vatican. There was the usual chat in room 201 at the convent, and then we were all ready to head to bed, because tomorrow’s tour starts at the Vatican Museum at 8:15.
Buonanotte from Roma!

Our First Tour

Saturday, September 14

We have had some difficulty establishing consistent data connections on this trip, and so I will be posting observations as I can rather than trying to spread them out one per day as I normally might do.
I suppose I should explain a bit about who we are and how we got here. The organizer and instigator of this trip is my sister Judy, who has made several visits to Europe. One of those trips included three teenaged grandchildren, which establishes her as an accomplished and resourceful traveler. It was she who, about a year ago, began to promote the idea of a family trip.
Our group includes two branches of the Lavezzi family tree. Our third cousin John, his wife Elaine, and members of their family group make up six of us; the other five are Judy, her daughter Kelley, her husband Lew, my daughter Noël, and me.
We are linked by Costantino Lavezzi and Rosa Raggio, the great-great-grandparents of John, Judy, and me. He came from Soglio, she from Romaggi, and eventually they settled in Bettola. All three towns are north of Genoa: Romaggi is the smallest, Bettola the most remote. We will start in Rome, go north to the ancestral cities, and spend a few days in Genoa itself.
While in Rome, We have tours scheduled; and not just tours, but serious walking tours. (How else does one earn one’s gelato?)
We are staying in a convent, and the sisters have Mass a few days a week. Several of us joined them for this morning’s Mass. They have a little chapel with an electronic keyboard. They weren’t using the keyboard, but Sister Rosa plays a pretty good guitar.

Today’s tour took us to three sites that emphasize Rome as both an ancient capital and the heart of what was then an undivided Christianity. None of these spots allowed photographs, so this will be the least-photographed part of the trip. And that’s unfortunate, because photos would be striking. I’ll try to make up for that with some weblinks.

Judy made the arrangements for all our tours, all with Walks of Italy; they offer fluent English-language guides and priority entry before the lines that accumulate at most places. Our guide for today was Mike, who was born in the States to an American father and an Italian mother and has spent most of his life in Rome.
The first part of the tour was a visit to the Priscilla Catacombs, which derive their name from the family that donated the grounds to the Church in the second century. Now the entrance is part of a convent, and we had a chance to meet Mother Superior, a sprightly 92-year-old who doubles as the gift shop clerk.
It’s estimated that these catacombs include burial places for about 40,000 early Christians. Many of them are on  the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th levels down, which are still being excavated and explored; only the first (top) level is on the tour. Still, there are plenty of catacombs there to be seen.
Evidently, archaeologists discern three stages in the uses of the catacombs as burial grounds. In the first, everyone  was  equal (mostly poor) and burial spaces were pretty much the same, and plain. In the second, Christians with more money were able to arrange preferential spaces and perhaps a bit better markings. In the third, the more well-off Christians were able to arrange fairly substantial spaces and  commission works of art for their spaces.
It was this third stage that produced some of the earliest Christian art. Among the interesting items are what is thought to be the earliest existing image of the Virgin Mary and a picture of what appears to be a female priest or minister. Obviously, this second one is of some interest today, as Catholicism considers the role of women in the modern church.

The website at catacombepriscilla.com/inglese has a nice slide show that shows what we saw. It doesn’t communicate how confined the space is, and the photos look brighter than the site looked to our eyes.

Although the catacombs were pretty somber, our next visit went beyond that to the macabre. We went to the monastery of the Capuchins, one of the Franciscan orders. The Capuchins believed that the Franciscans of the period were beginning to get soft, and they practiced a sort of no-holds-barred bodily denial. They buried their dead below ground until all that remained were bones, collected them, and then reused the space. (A practice not unique to them–remember Hamlet with Yorick’s skull in the graveyard?) In the mid-19th century, Rome officials decided that this was a health hazard and ordered the monks to clean up their act. The monks collected the bones of their deceased brothers and arranged them into artistic exhibits with religious themes. Odd, but interesting!

About 150 years ago, a young American reporter named Samuel Clemens visited Rome with some American compatriots; he published his observations as The Innocents Abroad under his pen name of Mark Twain. Of the Capuchin Crypts he wrote, “Here was a place for sensitive nerves! . . . There would be stirring times here for a while if the last trump should blow. Some of the brethren might get hold of the wrong leg, in the confusion, and the wrong skull, and find themselves limping, and looking through eyes that were wider apart or closer together that they were used to.”

It wasn’t so funny for us. It’s one thing to look at the crypts in photos. (There are many websites: search “Capuchin crypt Rome, or look at this website to get the general idea.) But for me, at least, being in the actual presence of so many bones was quite different from seeing the pictures.

One of the main displays in the Capuchin museum is a painting by Caravaggio of “St. Francis in Meditation,” in which he holds–of course–a skull. To these friars, all this is instructive rather than morbid, and I don’t mean to belittle it: thinking about our mortality can be good for us, and the crypts certainly promote it. Just in case you’ve missed the point, they even have a sign among the bones reminding you, “Quello che siete fummo, quello che siamo sarete”: “What you are we were, and what we are you will become.”

We were ready now for the  Basilica of St. Clement. Clement was the third Pope after Peter; many Catholics know his name from one of the Eucharistic Prayers used for Mass. The present basilica was built in the 12th century. Hundreds of years later, the rector of the basilica, hearing water running underneath, did some exploration and found that this more modern basilica had been built over another, from the fourth century. Once they got that space excavated, archaeologists dug down deeper and learned that the fourth-century basilica had been built over a second-century temple to the god Mithras, who was the subject of his own cult within the pagan religion of Rome.
Mithras was a Persian god who was the center of a cult within the Roman religion which was apparently pretty friendly to early Christians. (Like Christianity, Mithraism seems to have been centered around sacrifice and a ceremonial meal.) All religions use symbols, and Mithras had his own trademark image called the “tauroctony”: it shows Mithras cutting a bull’s throat as a serpent attacks the bull and a scorpion stings the bull’s privates. (You know the expression: some days you’re Mithras, and some days you’re the bull.) We were to encounter tauroctonies several times over the next few days.

To me, this combination of different eras in one place was fascinating and instructive. In the absence of any photos from me, you’ll have to make do with the excellent official website, which includes a brief summary video.

By the time we had tramped around these sites, we were ready to eat. So we headed to a restaurant near St. Clement’s for dinner. We had a very nice dinner, and the (all male) staff there especially liked the ladies in our group and were very friendly. We returned to the convent just before its 11:00 closing time. We made the necessary arrangements to use their WiFi connection and headed to our rooms.
We quickly found that the common room on the second floor was an ideal place for us to gather and talk over the events of one day and plan for the next. This also started a pattern that was to continue for the next several days: the late dinner, the evening gathering, and the early rising.
Which bring us to the next day, which I will post when I can.