Day 78 ~ Rome, Part II

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. ~ Albert Einstein

The Tyrrhenian Sea (between the western coast of Italy and the islands of Corsica and Sardinia) has not been kind to us. It was too rough for us to make it Portofino, Italy last night. So today we are making a call at Genoa (Christopher Columbus’s birthplace) instead. However, it was still raining this morning and now that afternoon is upon us the sky is still lowering. We decided to treat today as if it were a sea day and remain on board. (Besides, our cabin is still ringed with the wet clothing we wore yesterday in Rome!)

And so back to the Eternal City…

That's our tour guide, Philipo, with his turquoise blue umbrella.

After lunch, we reboarded the bus, which took us to within a several block walk (in the rain!) from the entrance to the Vatican Museum. Because we had group tour tickets, we were able to jump the queue and walk past the soggy line of folks waiting to purchase individual passes. Once inside, we had to go through a TSA-style security search and then Philipo led us up to the third floor where our tour would begin. “Follow the blue umbrella” was our mantra because we’d been warned that it was not unusual to become separated from the group and lost in the Vatican.

It was hard to keep Philipo in sight, because (1) he moved pretty quickly, and (2) there was so much to look at up, down, and sideways. The Sistine Chapel is not the only room with painted ceiling. And the floors are incredible—inlaid marble tile or ornate mosaics too pretty to walk upon.

Sure enough, by the time we reached the entrance to a room filled with statuary, a member of our tour group had gone missing. It was Russ, one of our tablemates from lunch! His wife Laura had only looked away for a moment and he was gone. We waited at the head of the stairs while Philipo rushed back down, looking for his lost lamb. No joy. Russ was nowhere to be seen. But Philipo urged us not to be concerned. Before we started up the steps, he’d told us if we should happen to become separated from the group, our meeting place was the big wooden doors inside the Sistine Chapel. So we pressed on.

If it had been my husband who’d gone missing, I’d have pitched such a fit, the pope himself would hear me. But Laura, though clearly concerned, came along quietly. I admired her grace under pressure, but knew I wouldn’t have been able to emulate it.

In the sculpture room, there were a number of funerary urns and ossuaries. This highly decorated marble chest was a child’s coffin. The statue shows the child, not as he was, but as his parents hoped he’d become—note the open book before him, indicating that they’d wished for a scholar. There’s also a small dog scratching its ear, a well-loved pet, perhaps. When the coffin was first used, the marble would have been covered with a layer of plaster and painted in bright colors.

This unusual-looking statue shows the way a pagan goddess could metamorph into different incarnations depending on the needs of the worshipers. She began as Artemis, the Greek goddess of the hunt, sister of Apollo. The Romans turned her into Diana, a moon goddess who eventually became a fertility deity.

The next long chamber featured 14^th and 15^th century tapestries. The subject matter ranged from events of the life of Christ to the election of popes. I was a bit concerned that the works were displayed in a space with no temperature or humidity control. I have no idea why they aren’t hanging in moldering tatters.

  

The next gallery seemed to stretch on forever. The ceiling is divided into panels by ornate “frames.” Some of the figures seem to be three-dimensional, even to the point of throwing shadows, but these are all trompe l’eoil (probably misspelled since I didn’t google it and my spellchecker doesn’t know the word, but it means literally “fool the eye.”) The walls of this gallery feature maps of all the regions of Italy done by a major early cartographer, whose name escapes me.

After this, we descended a number of steps to enter the Sistine Chapel. Photography is not allowed, but I was glad for that. It allowed me to simply look up and drink it all in. Before leaving home, I’d studied a book with plates of all the major sections of the ceiling, so it was like seeing a group of old friends again.

Oh, there you are, Isaiah. Look at you, Delphic Oracle. I still don’t know what you’re doing here but you’re lovely and pensive while you’re doing it. And oh! Adam! You touched the finger of God!

The sense of a reunion was so strong, I was moved to tears. I knew these panels. I understood how they were arranged and how the story of Creation and the Fall was being played out overhead. But knowing about something and actually seeing it, are two very different things. I was deeply touched, my chest strangely warmed.

And then we were all elated, because we found Russ waiting for us at the rendezvous point! 
Turns out, another tour group leader had an umbrella the same shade of blue as Philipo’s and Russ had tagged along after them by accident.

“What took you so long?” he asked.

From the Sistine Chapel, we moved into St. Peter’s Basilica, the largest church in the world. (BTW, the word basilica didn’t always refer to a church. Romans used the world to describe a courthouse, place of judgment.) But before we entered, we stopped to view the Door of Indulgences. The bronze friezes feature events from the life of Christ. (Side note: The door is opened once every 25 years and entering the basilica in this manner is said to be an express ticket to heaven. I don’t know when it’s due to be opened again, but on the inside, the entrance is bricked over until then.) To get a sense of the scale of the sanctuary, those Latin letters ringing the walls are 5 meters tall (over 15 ft. for all my American friends.)

The basilica is shaped like a Latin cross. Leading off from the central beam, there are a number of good sized chapels. Some are used for daily mass because only the pope uses the altar in the main portion of St. Peter’s. Others are reserved for weddings (Expect at least a 2 year wait!). In another, children are christened. In the first one on the right, Michelangelo’s Pieta is protected by bullet-proof glass. Apparently some years ago, a crazy person tried to blow up this priceless treasure.

I felt as though we’d been hurried through the Vatican Museum, Sistine Chapel and St. Peter’s as if we were chocolates on an assembly line waiting for our wrappers. There wasn’t enough time to really look at what we were seeing and grasp the significance of it. Obviously, a week wouldn’t be enough time because we skipped over countless galleries.

But even though we were rushed, our tour was hopelessly behind schedule. The Pacific Princess was due to sail in an hour and we were still an hour and fifteen minutes away—if we didn’t run into any traffic. However, this is why we book our excursions through the ship. When we arrived back at the port in Civitavecchia, the PP was waiting for us. We were welcomed back and the crew pulled in the gangway after us.

I’d love to come back to Rome someday—hopefully on a sunnier day. But a word of warning to my fellow travelers. Pickpockets love tourist. On a different excursion from the PP, one lady slipped on a wet incline and when two other guests stopped to help her, someone from the crowd that gathered helped themselves to the contents of their pockets. No good deed goes unpunished, they say. So don’t keep anything in an outer pocket. Put your valuables in a money belt under your clothing or an inside zippered pocket.

Tomorrow, if all goes to plan, we’ll be in Monaco and touring the Rothschilds’ villa!