What do you call a city with a jail
named Regina Coeli (Queen of Heaven)? For the last
3,000 years, you call it Rome.
Forty years had passed since I had last visited Rome, broke and
hitchhiking through Europe the summer after my college graduation.
Quite frankly, at the time, I wanted to see a few sites and head
north to what I thought were less crowded and expensive
destinations such as Florence. In truth, I did not give it the time
a city with so many layers of history, architecture, archaeology
and theology deserves. It was a once-through, lightly, trip.
My wife and I had resolved to commemorate the tenth anniversary
of my successful bone marrow transplant with a
pilgrimage-cum-celebration, a trip to the Eternal City
and, of course, Vatican City, which is embedded within it. We also
planned to tack on a few nights in Madrid on the way home since I
had never been to Spain and Mary had not been there since high
school.
The measure of how wonderful this trip was can be gauged by our
good luck in returning home on St. Patrick’s Day on Aer Lingus,
which United employed as its carrier for the return flight out of
Madrid. Call it the luck of the Irish-Germans.
Three things immediately strike the visitor coming into Rome
from Leonardo da Vinci Airport: the beauty of the city, the way
Romans drive and motor with abandon, and the graffiti —
omnipresent to an extent I did not recall from my previous visit
decades ago.
Coming into an intersection or traffic circle, one is swept up
in a literal swarm of Smart Cars, Fiats, motorcycles, and other
smallish vehicles for which traffic lanes are, well, optional.
Riding along in the cab in the left lane, I would often get a start
when a pair of motorcyclist appeared just out my left-hand window,
heading in my direction but in the lane for the oncoming traffic.
To adapt one of Bill Murray’s formulations in
Ghostbusters, traffic laws are guidelines, not rules, for
Romans.
This graffiti phenomenon seemed to me a kind of profanation,
given the treasures the city offers on almost every block. If you
Google up “graffiti in Rome,” you find 7,960,000 entries. So I am
not alone in this feeling. I was informed that some theorize that
this is an expression of a youth culture (I use the word
reluctantly) spread by the Internet. I do not mean to dwell on
this. After all, the Italians are master preservationists and
restorers of great art and architecture. So I would not want to
call this a dominant part of the Roman scene, but it was jarring
nevertheless.
Our hosts were renting a very fine apartment right across the
street from the walls of Vatican City. No graffiti here, just the
papal coat of arms affixed at various places along its great
length. Not only did our benefactors provide us with an ideal
location from which to explore both cities, but they were excellent
guides, generous with their time, and most informative on a range
of topics ranging from art history to fine dining. Our tourism
coefficient was improved immensely by their tireless attention to
our needs.
Since we were grateful pilgrims, we offered thanks at the
resting places of our favored saints whom we had often petitioned
for intercessory prayers to God the Father and his only Son during
my battle with cancer. And we prayed for that excellent institution
and staff at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore who were
instrumental in my recovery.
Like pilgrims dating back to at least the time of Chaucer, we
spent too much money at the shops selling pricey rosaries, prayer
cards, icons and the like so we could take them to St. Peter’s
Square at noon on Sunday to pray the noontime Angelus with Pope
Benedict XVIII, along with, oh, 25,000 of our closest friends and
co-religionists from around the world. We were pleased to help the
Roman economy in these difficult times.
The Holy Father blessed us and the entire throng of visitors
along with our sacramental items which we planned to distribute
back home to children, grandchildren, and friends. Like his
predecessor, John Paul II, he displayed his linguistic abilities by
addressing the assemblage in half a dozen languages to the
enthusiastic applause of the Italians, French, German, Polish,
Brazilian, and Spanish in attendance.
If any ghosts from the Roman Empire were in attendance, they
would have been very pleased with his fluent Latin, too.
For the visitor who dedicates him- or herself to exploring Rome,
the city presents an opportunity for time traveling back and forth
over several millennia and epochs, pagan and Christian, ancient,
medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, modern and contemporary.
The obvious case is St. Peter’s Basilica, starting with the
Excavations, including a second century pagan necropolis, once at
street level, now beneath the existing structure and culminating in
the present towering dome. Today’s Basilica replaced an earlier
church erected by Constantine after his conversion which resulted
in burying over the pagan burial sites, the necropolis, in the
process.
Paul Johnson in his slim, informative volume,
The Renaissance: A Short History, captures the sweep and
drama of the construction of this historic church:
Thus this great church took more than two centuries to be built,
and was the work of more than a dozen architects under thirty-two
Popes, some of whom interfered directly and imposed their own ideas
or vetoes, and it spanned the mid-fifteenth-century Renaissance,
the High Renaissance and the Baroque (I am ignoring the sacristy
and the clocks, the work of Rococo times.) This wonderful building,
closely examined, bears all the marks of its long evolution and
manifold progenitors. Yet, as with its dome, because we are used to
it, it looks right, as though the endless squabbles, changes of
plan and demolitions had never been.
Bramante and Michelangelo made important and necessary
contributions to St. Peter’s, but the entire process was
multi-generational and grounded in a religious and artistic
tradition transcending any one person.
I was struck by how much more archaeological work has been done
over the years and how well preserved and interpreted the sites of
Rome are today. Again, the Excavations under St. Peter’s, revealing
the former necropolis or city of the dead, along with the
painstaking work to authenticate the remains of St. Peter after his
crucifixion upside down, are well preserved under
climate-controlled conditions. Professional archaeologists of the
Ufficio
Scavi lead tours that accommodate 115 people per day versus the
15,000 that tour the Basilica above ground. The “Scavi” tour is
very impressive, but you need to make a reservation.
The story of how the excavation proceeded over decades and the
effort to verify the remains of St. Peter is well told, or so I am
informed by my wife and others, in John Evangelist Walsh’s
The Bones of St. Peter: The First Full Account of the Search
for the Apostle’s Body.
The Basilica of San Clemente, run by Irish Dominicans, is
another opportunity for time traveling in place. The current
church, or at least part of it, dates from the 13th century and has
a Baroque façade. Inside, the apse is resplendent with a stunning
12th century mosaic, The Triumph of the Cross, just one of
the priceless items in this house of worship where St. Cyril,
missionary to the Slavs, is buried.
The first archaeological level is about 4 meters below the
Basilica. Here the early Christian basilica dates from the mid
fourth to the early fifth century. You then descend stairs to the
second level, ten meters below current street level, first
excavated in 1857. Here there are remains of a first century
building that was turned into a Mithraeum, seat of an eastern pagan
cult of the god Mithras, between the second and third centuries,
and used up until the fourth century. There are walkways directing
the visitor and the lighting is very subtle by design. I could go
on.
The visitor with only limited time to savor the delights of the
Eternal City is inevitably frustrated or completely over-dosed on
the magnificence, say, of the Villa Borghese and its collection of
classical sculpture and other significant works of art. There are
also the standard tourist destinations, always worth a visit-the
Forum (there are several, actually), the Coliseum, the Vatican
Museum and Sistine Chapel and the Spanish Steps. But it is the
surprise of discovering yet another Caravaggio painting,
or other great artist, in yet another beautiful church or basilica
that makes Rome such an amazing place.
San Luigi dei Francesi, the French national church, is a
beautiful thing. It is named after the patron saint of my hometown,
St. Louis. In the last chapel on the left, just before the high
altar, are three of Caravaggio’s most beautiful works in Rome:
The Calling of St. Matthew, The Martyrdom of
St. Matthew and St. Matthew and the Angel.
Spectacular.
While viewing these painting, along with a sizeable number of
other visitors, the spotlights went out eliciting a collective
groan. We immediately scrambled for more change to put money in the
box to bring back the illumination before a holy riot broke
out.
For me the most impressive Caravaggio is
The Conversion of St. Paul. This is an
outstanding Baroque painting by an artist with a volcanic temper.
The famous scene depicted from the Bible displays a dramatic
interplay of light and darkness with Paul under his horse’s
uplifted leg looking at some distant source of illumination, hands
upraised. Caravaggio’s work “introduced his new and spectacular
epoch of realism and scattered the last, lingering leaves of the
Renaissance to the four winds,” writes Johnson.
The painting can be found in another lovely church, Santa Maria
del Popolo, nestled under the Aurelian Wall, along with another by
the same artist depicting The Crucifixion of St. Peter. It
is really an embarrassment of riches wherever one looks in
Rome.
Roman fever is contagious. The Eternal City is like no other. It
was painful to contemplate our departure. But Madrid beckoned, and
we left the Italian for the Iberian Peninsula with great
expectations.
