A Parade of Churches

For our third full day in Rome, I took Diana on a whirlwind tour of some of the finest churches in the city.  It's impossible to see all of the churches, although I hope to one day.  We had to skip scores of beautiful Early Christian, medieval, and Baroque churches, any one of which would draw thousands of American tourists if it were transported to a city in the United States.  We didn't even go inside the Church of La Maddelena, pictured above, although we ate some incredible gelato at a gelateria right across from it.  It was called San Crispino, and we had cream gelato with honey, peach, and fig.

We began with the great Basilica of S. Maria Maggiore.  Diana was wearing shorts that day, and you have to have long pants on to enter a pontifical basilica, so they gave her a sort of hospital-gown-type sheet to wrap around her waist!  This is the bronze holy door used during jubilee years.

S. Maria Maggiore has remarkable mosaics dating from the Early Christian period on the walls of the nave.  It is a mammoth church, and the altar is canopied with a porphyry baldacchino.  The mosaic in the apse behind is from the Middle Ages, but the mosaics you can just barely see along the arch are also Early Christian.

Here is a view looking up from the altar at the dove of the Holy Ghost rendered in gold on the underside of the baldacchino.  You can see the elaborately coffered ceiling above.  On my first trip to Rome, S. Maria Maggiore was one of our first stops.  It was like nothing I'd ever seen before--the mosaics sparkling in the dim interior and a cardinal celebrating Latin mass beneath Rome's most famous miraculous image of the Virgin and Child in a side chapel.

Diana and I stopped at Bernini's tomb and then went to the side chapels that were open for visitors.  A short flight of stairs in front of the altar leads down to the most precious relic housed in this ancient church dedicated to the Virgin Mary--planks of wood believed to come from the manger of the Christ Child.

Just across the street from S. Maria Maggiore is the Early Christian Church of S. Prassede with more wonderful mosaics.  The apse and the two arches soaring above the baldacchino are covered with images of Christ, angels, and saints painstakingly created from tiny pieces of stone and glass.  St. Valentine, along with many other Early Christian martyrs, is buried near the stone sarcophagi of the church's patrons in a cool, dank passageway beneath the altar.  Pope Paschal I emptied the Roman catacombs of many of their bones during the early Middle Ages and transferred quite a few here.

One of the treasures of S. Prassede is the little side chapel dedicated to St. Zenone.  It is covered in mosaics, and the ceiling and walls are so close to you that you can see how the thousands of pieces have been angled in order to create a shimmering affect in the candlelight.

Seen up close, mosaic looks like bead work to me--like the beading you'd find on a Native American belt or moccasin.  I've always loved mosaics, and Rome has a magnificent collection of them because the popes had enough money to continue commissioning them, even after the medium had become rare in other places.

The chapel of S. Zenone also has a relic that has been venerated for hundreds of years--a piece of carved stone believed to be the column where Christ was tied and beaten before his Crucifixion.

From S. Prassede we walked to the cavernous Church of S. Maria degli Angeli, built into the ruins of an ancient bath complex constructed by the Emperor Caracalla.  The interior of the church gives a nice impression for what the space of a Roman bath house would have been like.  Then we continued on to S. Maria della Vittoria.  This is a picture of the high altar with its miracle-working painting of the Madonna and Child surrounded in a sunburst of gilt bronze rays.

In the left transept of S. Maria della Vittoria is Bernini's famous sculpture of St. Teresa of Avilà, a Spanish nun from the sixteenth century who reformed the Carmelite order.  Less than a century after her death, Bernini had immortalized her life with a multicolored marble shrine, stucco angels, and bronze rays lit by real sunlight from a hidden window, making the sculpted figures appear to be suspended in heavenly light.

Bernini's works of art were often like theater sets, with all kinds of materials woven together in three-dimensional space.  In the Cornaro Chapel of St. Teresa, even the dead buried in the ground participate in the heavenly scene sculpted above the altar--marble mosaics show the skeletons lifting their hands in wonder.

According to Bernini's biographies, the sculptor's favorite of his works was the Jesuit novitiate church of Sant'Andrea al Quirinale, which he designed.  Diana and I had walked by the outside on our first day in Rome, but this time we could see the interior.  It is a small, oval shaped church, and this is a picture of the high altar.  My camera washed out the colors terribly--the columns are supposed to be reddish-pink.

The altarpiece depicts St. Andrew dying as a martyr on a cross.  Outside the picture frame, gilded angels carry his soul to heaven.

Above the architecture enshrining the altar, St. Andrew appears again, this time as a white, stucco figure floating on clouds towards the dome of the church.  The sculpture represents his soul, which, as a spirit, can now pass unimpeded through the heavy stone architecture on its ascent to God.

Bernini was a remarkable artist, and so was his rival, Borromini.  Borromini, however, was much more daring and eccentric.  His monastic church of S. Carlo alle Quattro Fontane just down the street uses an abundance of optical illusions, strange shapes, and dramatic configurations for a fantastically baroque sanctuary.  This is the honeycomb dome with the dove of the Holy Spirit at the peak.  It looks much higher than it really is due to the foreshortened shapes decorating it.

Sunlight from the dome illuminating the curving walls of the church.

Optical illusion continued at our next stop--the Church of Sant'Ignazio, built in the first quarter of the seventeenth century in honor of the newly canonized founder of the Jesuit order, St. Ignatius of Loyola.  Diana was particularly impressed with the beautiful little piazza outside the church.  It is such a shallow piazza that, as you can see, it's impossible to get a full picture of the church!

This is the high altar surrounded by paintings set in gray marble.

The most stunning portion of the church is the immense ceiling fresco by Father Andrea Pozzo, a Jesuit painter.  If you stand right at the correct spot in the nave and look up, suddenly the ceiling comes into focus, and it looks like the walls of the church are extending multiple stories up into the heavens.  Angels and allegories fly through the sky, and St. Ignatius rises in the blinding light to greet the Lord.

Here are the tombs of the patrons of the church, Pope Gregory XV and his nephew, the powerful cardinal Ludovico Ludovisi.

And here is another one of those glass Snow White sarcophagi.  This one contains an image of the dead St. Roberto Bellarmino, rather than the actual body.

A short walk from Sant'Ignazio brought us to the Pantheon, where we had been the evening before.  Interestingly, this tremendous landmark of ancient Rome is also a Christian church.  The Emperor Hadrian dedicated it to all the gods, and during the Middle Ages it was reconsecrated to all the saints.

We walked through the massive columns supporting the heavy porch of the Pantheon and into the rotunda.  It was amazing to stand there in such a phenomenal feat of architecture and engineering--one of the greatest wonders of ancient Rome and the inspiration and model for countless buildings over the centuries.  The light from the oculus made a spotlight on the marble floor.  I think it would be quite something to be in the Pantheon during a storm and watch the rain fall through the oculus and pool on the ground, the way it has for nearly two thousand years.

We walked past the high altar dedicated to Our Lady of the Martyrs, the tomb of King Vittorio Emanuele II, and the tomb of the Renaissance painter, Raphael.

Diana and I walked to Piazza Navona, and then I continued on to the Vatican to use the Jesuit Archive again.  Later in the afternoon we met at the Ponte Sant'Angelo and walked to Piazza del Popolo, by way of a famous gelateria.  I ate some cake and focaccia that Diana had bought as we walked.  It was a long walk and very out of the way, but the gelateria was worth it!  It was beyond the tourist areas, and so it was patronized mostly by locals.  We had pistachio, apple-mint, and peach-caramel.  Gelato flavors all taste like glorified versions of fresh fruit, herbs, and nuts.  This is a picture of the Egyptian obelisk in the center of Piazza del Popolo with the twin churches of S. Maria dei Miracoli and S. Maria di Montesanto.  They guard three grand avenues leading into the heart of Rome.

Here is a closeup of the obelisk, sphinx fountains, and one of the twin churches.

And here is the Church of S. Maria del Popolo, right next to one of the most popular gateways for pilgrims entering the city.

The church is named for a poplar tree that once marked the grave of the Emperor Nero and was said to be inhabited by evil black crows.  It was cut down and this church built on the spot.

I thought this was a pretty amazing tomb memorial with a marble skeleton behind a metal grating.  Diana and I stopped at S. Maria del Popolo to see Caravaggio's famous Conversion of St. Paul, which is still in its original location in a side chapel.

We walked down the Via del Corso, past the Column of Marcus Aurelius, which is very similar to the Column of Trajan by the Forum.

We continued on a long circuit past the Vittorio Emuanuele monument and down to the Church of S. Maria in Cosmedin, near a southern bend in the Tiber.

The porch of S. Maria in Cosmedin attracts crowds of tourists during the day who come to see the Bocca della Verità, or "Mouth of Truth."  According to folk belief, the Bocca della Verità will bite off your fingers if you tell a lie!  The church was locked, and Diana and I had to look through metal bars to see it.

Across the way from S. Maria in Cosmedin are two nicely preserved Roman temples.  The Temple of Fortuna Verilis was covered with scaffolding, but we got to see the round, Greek-style Temple of Vesta.

The evening light was really beautiful as we continued up the Aventine Hill.  I had never been there before.  It is a quiet part of the city with large houses hidden in overgrown gardens and monasteries and Early Christian basilicas standing among cypress and palm trees.  This is a view of the Piazza dei Cavalieri di Malta.

The door to the priory of the Cavalieri di Malta has a famous key hole, which perfectly frames the dome of St. Peter's Basilica through a little garden.  It is absolutely remarkable!  It gives you the sense that you are looking at a diorama rather than the real city of Rome.

Unless you've been following Diana's and my day-long trek through Rome on a map, you will not have realized that by this point in the day, we had walked a tremendous distance.  And amazingly, we kept going.  We went down a twisting road by the Pyramid of Cestius to see the Protestant Cemetery where John Keats is buried.  It was closed, so we decided to walk back to our hotel and look for something to eat on the way.  We had left the northern gate to the city at Piazza del Popolo a few hours earlier, and now we were at the southern gate leading to the Basilica of S. Paolo outside the city walls.  Needless to say, we started to become exhausted and very hungry!  We made it back all the way to the Coliseum.  This is a picture of the Arch of Constantine, close by the  Coliseum, lit up at night.

And here is the Coliseum itself with the darkening sky shining through the arcade.  It was here that we decided to get on the metro!  Fortunately we also found a supermarket in the main train station by S. Maria Maggiore where we stocked up on bread, soft-packed mozzarella cheese, pesto, tomatoes, and a cantaloupe.  It had been a marvelous day but quite a strenuous parade route!