The Holy See

For our first full day in the "Eternal City," Diana and I went to the most fabulous place in Rome--the Vatican, also known as the Holy See.  The Vatican is located outside the city walls, across the Tiber River via the Ponte Sant'Angelo, or "Bridge of the Holy Angel."  Anciently there was a circus here where, according to legend, the Apostle Peter was crucified upside down and later buried.  The central altar in the crossing of St. Peter's Basilica is directly over his tomb.

This is the old bronze pine cone that once crowned a fountain in the atrium in front of St. Peter's.  It is one of the few ornaments that survives from the old church before it was completely redone during the Renaissance and Baroque periods.  The Vatican is such an interesting place.  It is its own city within the city of Rome.  In fact, it is also its own country, ruled by the Roman pontiff, who once controlled many more lands than just the grounds surrounding St. Peter's.  It has its own stamps and even its own money, although Euros are accepted if you want to buy a souvenir!  We saw nuns on pilgrimage, priests showing their parents around, and of course many, many tourists.

Unfortunately, Pope Benedict XVI was at his summer residence, and so we didn't get to see him!  I think, though, that the third window from the right on the lower story is his study.

We waited a long, long time in line to get into the Vatican Museum.  I think it's hard to find a time when you don't have to wait in line to see the painted corridors of the old papal palace, magnificent paintings, precious liturgical treasures, tapestries, some of the most famous ancient Roman statues and sarcophagi, and the Sistine Chapel.  Diana got us some gelato to eat while we waited in line, standing against the massive fortress walls of the Vatican.  The walls slope inward, which is pretty comfortable for the back!  This is a picture of the largest courtyard in the museum.

An ancient carving in the collection.

This sarcophagus carved from porphyry once held the remains of St. Helena, the mother of the Emperor Constantine.

Here I am with Emperor Augustus.

One of the most stunning things about the Vatican Museum is the painted barrel vaults over long palace hallways illuminated with windows.  The Baroque era loved optical illusion, and sometimes we would come to archways that were twisted at strange angles, hung with fake curtains, or which made a flight of stairs look longer than it really was.

One corridor was painted with maps of different sections of Italy and other parts of the world.

The Renaissance popes had various rooms in the palace painted with fresco by artists like Raphael.  Here is his famous School of Athens.  After walking through what seemed like miles of rooms and galleries, Diana mused on the injustice of museums.  How unfair, she thought, that a magnificent museum like the Vatican has so much art that it has to relegate hundreds of paintings to basement rooms that no one ever visits.  She pointed out that there are tiny museums in other parts of the world that would give anything to have just a few of the Vatican's rejects!

We eventually got to the Sistine Chapel where there were guards that continually hissed at the packed crowd of tourists to be quiet and not take pictures.  Yet this never seems to stop the tourists.  Diana and I saw many people secretly taking snap shots of the ceiling when the guards weren't looking.  I'm proud to say that we admired the brilliant colors of the chapel without taking a single picture!  Your neck sure starts to hurt after looking up at the ceiling for so long, though!  We walked to the museum exit by way of cabinets filled with medieval ivory carvings, chalices, and the painted vaults of the Vatican Archives.  We saw paintings by Raphael, Leonardo, Caravaggio, Fra Angelico, as well as beautiful, gold-leafed devotional panels.  Then after leaving the museum, we entered the piazza of St. Peter's through Bernini's colonnade. 

This colonnade, crowned with images of the saints, extends from either side of St. Peter's facade like the arms of the Church, reaching out to embrace the faithful.  That was Bernini's idea in designing the structure--it was like an invitation to all those Protestants who had defected from the Roman Church during the century before.  When Diana and I were there, the piazza was decorated with images of Pope John Paul II, who had been beatified just two months before.

There was a fabulous exhibit chronicling the life of this heroic pope.  I've always admired John Paul II very much.  Diana and I saw memorabilia from his childhood, drama posters from the plays he was in back in Poland, vestments he wore during his papacy, a video of the assassination attempt on him in St. Peter's Piazza, and videos of the "pilgrim pope" visiting the nations of the world and kissing the ground of each country as he exited the airplane.  I was especially moved by a series of video clips showing the last of his weekly blessings from the balcony above the main entrance to St. Peter's.  John Paul II would never miss these weekly blessings, but towards the end of his life he was so infirm that he had to be taken to the balcony in a wheelchair where he would look out at the people and try to speak.  Often he would just move his mouth, unable to form words and obviously in great pain.

Diana and I made our way to the entrance of the largest church in the Christian world.

My pictures do a terrible job recreating the overwhelming space inside St. Peter's.  Everything is covered in colored marble and mosaic with massive statues and rays of light falling down from the dome.  Bernini's bronze baldacchino covers the altar over St. Peter's grave, where only the pope can celebrate mass.

Here is a view of the altar with the marble banister cordoning off the stairs leading down to St. Peter's tomb.

And here is the famous statue of St. Peter, supposedly made from the melted-down bronze of the cult statue of Jupiter that once stood in the god's main temple on the Capitoline Hill. 

Millions of people have reverently touched the foot of St. Peter over the centuries, and today the bronze is shiny and gold-colored, with all his toes worn away.

We heard about half of a Latin mass being celebrated at the high altar of St. Peter's.  Bernini's spectacular sculptural group was lit for the service, which was really nice.  The four fathers of the Western Church lift a bronze throne containing a real wooden chair that is venerated as St. Peter's original bishop's throne.  Above, golden clouds, angels, and rays of light stream down from heaven.  There is a stained glass image of the dove of the Holy Spirit at the apex of the composition, illuminated with real light from the sun.

We walked by the tomb of Pope John Paul II, now located under an altar in the nave of the basilica.  Nearby was the chapel containing Michelangelo's Pietà.  

Rome's churches contain the bodies of hundreds of saints.  Some of these are known as "uncorrupted saints" because their bodies have not decayed, a traditional sign of sanctity.  They are usually located under the altar in a glass sarcophagus.  Often, though, you find images of the saints under altars.  These are just supposed to remind you that the body of the saint is buried beneath.  Sometimes I find that it is difficult to tell if it is an image or an uncorrupted body of a saint!  This is one I can't tell on--it is Blessed John XXIII, who reigned as pope during the 1950s and early 1960s.

We saw some Swiss Army guards while we were in the Vatican.  They have been the guardians of the pope for centuries.

We left the Holy See by crossing over the Ponte Sant'Angelo.

Bernini designed the angels at the end of his career in the later part of the seventeenth century.

Here is Diana on the bridge, looking back toward Castel Sant-Angelo, the Roman emperor Hadrian's mausoleum. 

 It was later reconstructed into a papal fortress dedicated to St. Michael the Archangel.

And here is a nice view of the Ponte Vittorio Emmanuele II, another bridge leading across the Tiber to the Vatican.

We went walking through a typical Roman neighborhood along the Tiber with narrow cobblestone streets, tall buildings with large wooden shutters, mammoth doors, and with the walls painted deep gold and terracotta.

We got some phenomenal gelato at a little gelateria that Diana's friend had recommended--ginger, pistachio, fig, and white peach.  There is not desert like Italian gelato!

Continuing on, we walked by the tiny, but beautiful piazza of S. Maria della Pace, redesigned in the mid seventeenth century as part of Pope Alexander VII's massive urban renewal project.

And we stumbled into Pasquino, a terribly deteriorated piece of ancient sculpture that has been the "voice" of Rome for centuries.  People make anonymous criticisms of the city and engage in political debates by attaching notes to Pasquino.

It was getting to be evening when we arrived at Piazza Navona, a beautiful open space in the heart of Rome with Bernini's famous Fountain of the Four Rivers and Borromini's towering facade of Sant'Agnese in Agone.  Diana and I got some dinner at another little trattoria.  You can never go wrong with pasta in Rome, and that's what we got.

The fountain and the church were lit at night.

And on our way home, we walked by the Pantheon.  The unbelievable thing about Rome is that the same city that has the Vatican also has the Piazza Navona, the Pantheon, the Roman Forum, and a host of other things.  What city in the world can compete?  Diana was pretty amazed by the towering silhouette of Hadrian's temple dedicated to all the gods, and we stopped to take a picture in the dark porch of the Pantheon.  Here is Diana flanked by colossal Roman columns.