Rome part due

Rome has once again captured my heart, though it is of course a different  experience, both being joined by my mom and staying in the city itself, rather than at the home of Paolo and Alessandra.  We are at a converted convent within a 5 minute walk of St Peter’s Square.  It is a nice landmark to come ‘home’ to after wandering the town, we are generally making our way north along the Tiber river

Our second night in Rome was spent on lovely Aventine Hill, once again in the company of William.  I mentioned a few of the sights he shared with me but I’d like to clarify and flesh a few out.  The church of St Dominic, where he would lay prostrate to pray, where time passed in centuries rather than seconds, the church where we stood had been built in the 5^th century, which meant that when St Dominic (founder of the Dominicans) prayed there it was already 700 years old.  I took some photos, though they are on my Mom’s camera.  William also showed us a keyhole through which one could see the temple of the Knights of Malta, the Vatican dome, and of course Rome, which comprise three individual countries among them.  William called it the most famous keyhole in Rome. 

In the middle of our time here we visited the Villa Borghese, the house and now museum collected by the Pope’s nephew.  It most impressively contained several sculptures by Bernini, an absolute master of the form.  His pieces had a liveliness and movement to them, along with delicate features and craftsmanship.  His most impressive to me was his statue of Apollo and Daphne.  The story is that Apollo was chasing the less than willing Daphne, who prayed to her father the river god to save her from Apollo’s amorous clutches.  As Apollo catches her, she is turned into a laurel tree.  Bernini shows this in action, you can almost hear her limbs creaking into wooden branches, her toes plunging into the ground as roots.  Her outstretched fingers sprout twigs and leaves.  Apollo is just behind her, his cloak billowing behind him, his back leg suspended in the air.  The sculpture looks like a 3D photograph or a wax model, rather than carved marble.  His other pieces in the museum, his David, his god of the underworld carting off his captured bride, all had the same life like quality to them.  Check out some images here.  

We spent our last morning in Rome touring the obscene opulence of the Vatican Museum.  It at once housed great works of renaissance art and an overlarge collection of Greco-roman antiquities, seemingly collected for numbers alone.  To catalogue the latter, there were dozens of rooms and hallways filled, stacked with busts, statues and friezes depicting god knows what from ancient Rome.  I overheard a tour guide saying that to give each statue one minute would require a visit of 25 years.  While the Borghese museum had a few dozen statues, among them great works of Bernini mastery, the Vatican housed anonymous faces and scenes, uncurated and unapproachable. 

However, it also had rooms painted by two of the ninja turtles - Raphael and Michelangelo, including the Sistine chapel which was worth every accolade.  I’ll lodge one more complaint about the nature of the work they were commissioned to create, then admire the works themselves.  It seemed like every painting (indeed every facet of the Vatican that I noticed) seemed directed at salving a great ego crisis suffered by Pope after Pope after Pope – every one in his turn trying to establish his legitimacy in the history of the Bible and of the world.  The Sistine chapel is ceilinged by Michelangelo’s famous creation of Adam (and his less celebrated fall from innocence), but two of the walls contain mirroring scenes from the lives of Moses and Jesus, establishing Jesus in the Mosaic tradition of punishing disbelievers and wayward skeptics.  They seemed to say – I am the Pope, and if you don’t like it you can join that guy suffering in hell.  Raphael’s work in the Papal apartments included the ‘School of Athens’ where the Greek scholars resembled renaissance artists and holy folks, saying that even back then Christianity was just around the corner. 

Of course, the works themselves were beautiful.  Michaelangelo’s chapel was a masterpiece for its assimilation of so many images and themes, like a visual history of everything.  He painted the ceiling at 25, and the altar wall at the other end of his life at 66.  The altar wall depicts the last judgment and is a chaotic swirl or salvation and damnation.  All the familiar faces are present in one form of another, including one guy holding his own skin (having been flayed alive).  Yikes.  

Unfortunately for me (and indirectly you), the Vatican museum confirmed my deep skepticism of the Catholic church’s commitment to social justice, now and throughout history.  I’ve seen some opulent palaces in my day, and have done my share of inward head shaking at this or that king or queen who decided themselves worthy of everyone else’s livelihood (or life), but they never pretended to give a rat’s ass about the poor.  The Vatican library apparently housed one of the world’s greatest collection of literature and history – preserving for us texts and ideas that lend themselves to the foundation of our civilization, but that’s where it ends for me.  The Vatican is not directly responsible for the poverty of the world (though I think a case might be made), but it’s wealth could go a long way towards alleviating it.  “Until you give up everything you have, you cannot be my disciple.”  JC

When we weren’t touring the Coliseum, a famous museum or a church somewhere, we were wandering around  or eating or in transition from one to the other.  The city treated us well – our weather has been unreasonably lovely, sunny every day but one and no rain, and our walks have always been fruitful in one form or another.  It has been very different traveling in the comfort of Italy, particularly with my mother with me, and is serving as a lovely transition back to home for me after my time in the Arab states and India.  Tomorrow morning Mom heads back to the US, and I am off to Berlin where I will meet lovely Corinne.  I am eager to see her, eager to tour the north of Europe, and eager to head home, though the feeling is bittersweet.  I have reconciled many of the tensions I have encountered on my travels, and am at present much more adjusted to the road than to being in one spot.  Most likely the transition will be plenty smooth, and I’ll be feeling restless again in no time.  But for now, German here I come!  Thanks for reading!  

PS - here are some general images from the Coliseum and Vatican Museum:

Entrance to the Vatican Museum

Raphael's 'The School of Athens'

The famous exit