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Well, it turns out there are a few little bits from the previous episode that need to be cleaned up before we move on. So let's get started, shall we?
The last little bits of Day Four
I arrived back at the flat on Via dei Capocci very late on Monday night, still slightly euphoric and completely exhausted. I'd eaten very little during the day - half a sandwich and some cookies, I think - and it was starting to show.
Francine had the only key, so I was a little unsure of how exactly I was going to get back into the flat. It turns out I needn't have worried. As I was walking up to the door, Francine stuck her head out of our third floor window to greet me.
She had food on the table, bless her.
A brief note about Roman embalming
I'm not sure why it is in the United States our embalmers try so hard to get corpses to look lifelike. When I attended my Grandfather's funeral some years ago, I was really kind of surprised at how good he looked.
This they do not do in Rome, or at least, this they did not do to the Pope.
He was very clearly dead. His skin was pale and drawn; his face looked almost skeletal it was so pallid. There could be no doubt. If you saw him, you knew. He was dead. D-E-A-D. Dead.
Of course, if you look at the cover of the current issue of Newsweek, they've PhotoShopped the corpse. That's right: virtual embalming.
Only in America.
Moving on now to the Borghese
Despite utter exhaustion, we had to get up early the next day. We had tickets, you see, to the Borghese Gallery. The Borghese is a peculiarly Roman institution. It contains some of the greatest sculpture and painting to be found anywhere in the world, including a great deal of Bernini's more "mobile" sculpture. Note: By mobile I mean "capable of being moved with great effort and great expense". This is as opposed to immobile, meaning "providing architectural support to an immense building, probably a church or palace".
Bernini's largest work is the colonnade surrounding Piazza San Pietro, consisting of 300 doric columns some 95 feet high and topped by larger than life-sized statues of Bernini's 108 favourite saints.
The Borghese collection was originally gathered by a Renaissance Cardinal. It's still in his villa, though the place has been museum-ised obviously. I mean, I'm pretty sure that Cardinal Borghese didn't have a gift shop in his basement originally.
The thing is, you've got to make an appointment to see the collection.
They only let in a certain amount of people at a time. You've got two hours, and then they shoo you out. If you're not there to collect your tickets on time, they sell them.
Our time slot was 9:00 to 11:00, meaning we had to be there at 8:30 to pick up our tickets or they'd be sold to the first person walking up sans reservation. It all made some sort of sense when I'd made the reservations back in February, I swear.
So there we were at the Cavour metro station at 8:00, bleary-eyed and fortified with caffeine. Cavour is on the B line and Borghese is on the A line, so we had to make a transfer at Termini.
And here, my friends, our woes began. In addition to going to Borghese, the A line goes to the Vatican.
The Rome Metro, as you will recall from a previous entry, is stupid crowded at the best of times. Today however, the day after the Pope's lying-in-state began, I began to understand what the mediaeval chroniclers might have meant when referring to Mongol "hordes".
There were volunteer security people from all over Italy, and they wouldn't let us onto the platform. It was so crowded, they were afraid that somebody might get jostled onto the tracks.
It was only at this point that I truly began to realize the magnitude of what was going on.
With nowhere to go, and the B line trains continuing to dump unsuspecting tourists and ordinary commuters at Termini station, the stairways and corridors of the station rapidly filled up. So now, in addition to wall-to-wall people on the A line platform, we had wall-to-wall people backed up all the way to the B line platform. And still, the people were coming.
Clearly, something had to give. The Metro officials put every train at their disposal into service on the A line. How they managed the scheduling, I've no idea, but trains were coming every two minutes. It was barely enough to keep up with the constant flow of people.
The train we finally entered was dark and empty when it pulled into the station. As fast as we could scramble aboard, it was so full they had trouble closing the doors. When we got off at Borghese station, it was like being squeezed out of a toothpaste tube.
The Borghese is set amidst a vast park. It's beautiful, but sadly I have no pictures. My camera hadn't come through the previous day with functioning batteries, and there was no time to get new ones. I'm sure Francine will post some... hopefully she'll include one of the giant equestrian statue of King Umberto. I was sort of obsessed with getting a decent photo (using her camera) of ole Humbert.
The wooded area immediately around the statue was littered with condom wrappers; apparently Humbert is more popular now than he was during his brief reign.
The sheer amount and variety of art at the Borghese is overwhelming, and I really doubt that twenty hours, never mind two, would be enough to take it all in. Take a look at the web site to get an inkling.
Always a bridesmaid
During the previous several days, we'd met up with Francine's cousin Leone any number of times. Always we met in the same place, the Piazza Maria Santa Maggiore. Up to this point, we'd never actually made it into the enormous basilica looming over the piazza.
This afternoon, we would finally go in.
Now, Rome has dozens of churches, maybe hundreds. There's a church on practically every street sooner or later. Some of them are tiny (like little San Lorenzo down the block from our flat), some of them are enormous (like the Pantheon), but only four of them are what they call Patriarchal Basilicas.
They are: St. Peter's in the Vatican (the largest church in the world, thankyouverymuch), St. Paul's Outside the Walls (where the body of St. Paul resides, minus his head), St. John Lateran (the Pope's episcopal seat), and Santa Maria Maggiore. The one thing they all share in common (other than their basilica floor plan) is their scale.
Simply, they're all frickin' huge.
In Santa Maria Maggiore, every possible interior surface is covered in fifteen centuries of art. The mosaics are from the Vth century, as well as the XIVth. There's sculpture from the XIIth century and the XVIth. While most of the current structure was built in the Vth century, it was expanded in the XIIIth, XIVth, and XVIIth centuries.
It's a time machine built of beauty.
The great sculptor Bernini, the man who invented the baroque, is buried within the church. Ironically, though other tombs in the building are decorated with the best sculpture the builder could manage, Bernini's tomb is marked only with a simple plaque on the floor.
All in all, a relatively easy day. Obviously, that won't last.
The Great Non-Vatican Adventure
Wednesday dawned. I consulted the Plan. It claimed we were going to the Vatican: basilica, museums, Sistine chapel, post office, and Papal audience.
The Plan was quite obviously off its rocker.
We spent the morning at the local market (where Francine bought shoes for a song and a dance.) We did some laundry. We hung out at a café and said "ciao!" a whole lot. It was quite the relaxing morning after the madness of previous days.
We'd watched a bit of Italian TV (featuring, I kid you not, a channel showing nothing but millions of people slowly filing past the Pope's body at St. Peter's, 24 hours a day). We knew that so far more than a million pilgrims had come to Rome, and more were on their way from every corner of Europe and the world.
There were a thousand special trains coming from Poland alone.
We would not be getting into the Vatican.
Against the evidence (and Francine's inexorable logic), I was nevertheless convinced that we could at least make it to the Vatican post office to mail the dozen or so postcards we'd written.
Every guidebook we had said something like this: "if you wish to mail anything from Italy, don't. Mail it from the Vatican. The Vatican City has an efficient, modern postal system. Italy doesn't."
Once again we braved the Metro, including the Termini bottleneck, and went all the way to the Vatican station. The crowds were even denser than before. The Romans had reorganized the lines of pilgrims. They now had barricaded queues that tentacled from the Piazza San Pietro in all directions. The queues were mazy and doubled back on themselves. It reminded me of Disneyland.
Except in this case, the mazy knots of humanity went on for kilometers in all directions. It only took me about an hour to realize that the post office outing was impossible. Not only could we not get to the Piazza without standing in line, we couldn't even get within visual range of the Piazza.
We finally entrusted the postcards to the Italian postal service. I'm told that most of the post cards arrived in about six weeks. From the Vatican, the average time for a letter to get to the States is six days.
So we went with Plan B: we'd walk east to Castel Sant'Angelo, cross the river at a convenient bridge, and continue with our sightseeing at Piazza Navona. We attempted to skirt the queue-streets and, as much as possible, the crowd.
This too proved impossible. Oh, the crowds did thin out eventually, but the queues continued east as far as Castel Sant'Angelo and then on to the bridges. Only on the other side of the river did we finally find their end.
Agnes in Agony and Others
We hung out in one of the centers of Roman life: Piazza Navona. We checked out the Church of Saint Agnes in Agony and even got a look at (most of) Agnes herself. She was not in a good way. The Romans had tried every imaginable way to kill her, including burning, but she just wouldn't die. Finally, somebody slit her throat in the night, which apparently did the trick. Darn Achilles' neck.
We had gelato. Golly, it was good. Gelato in hand, we wandered the streets of Rome, finally coming to a piazza near the Pantheon which featured a whimsical statue of an elephant carrying an obelisk on its back. It stood in front of a church, naturally.
This was the church of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva.
This church is stunningly beautiful. The vaulted ceiling of the basilica-style church is painted a royal blue with the stars of the night sky in (real) gold. The body of St. Catherine of Siena is here, as well as a wonderful tomb that features a very lifelike statue of a bishop rising from his funeral bier. Sadly, we didn't have so much time to explore here as we would have liked; there was an event of some sort scheduled later in the evening, and we were all chased out by a grumpy monk.
We finished our night walk by strolling up the out-of-my-price-range commercial centers of Via del Corso and Via Condotti. On Via Condotti, we passed the headquarters of the Sovereign Order of the Knights of St. John. Francine got pictures. Yes, the knights of Malta still exist, and the members of their order are issued passports by the Order, recognized all over the world.
From here it was a hop and a skip to the Metro station at Piazza de Spagna, and thence to home and the by-now traditional collapse into sleep.
Pictures from days five and six
Tune in next time for Saint Paul, Shelley, and Keats! (oh my)
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