Elliot Ritzema

Tag: Rome

  • Day 15 – Rome (part 2)

    On Wednesday, June 18, we got up in Rome and had breakfast at the little cafe next to our B&B – a creme-filled croissant and a cappucino. My kind of breakfast. Then we were off to the major sight in Rome that was geographically closest to us: the Basilica of St. John Lateran. The nun who spoke to us the day before at the Pontifical North American College had recommended that we get to the papal audience a couple of hours early, like 8 a.m. But we decided that we would leave the best seats for the actual Catholics, and show up at around 10 for the 10:30 audience.

    So at 8, instead of arriving in Vatican City, we were walking up to St. John Lateran. Of the four basilicas in Rome, it is oldest and ranks the highest. Even though the Pope lives right next to St. Peter’s in Vatican City, his cathedral church is this one – it’s older than St. Peter’s, and the popes even lived in a palace next door until 1309, when the papacy temporarily moved to Avignon, France.

    As you can see, the weather was wonderful. And once we got inside, there were very few other people there. There were a few other tourists like us, and a few people who apparently were just stopping in to pray on their way to work. After being in crowded churches for most of our first day in Rome, this was a welcome change.

    Even though the church is a very old one, its current construction is Baroque. One of my favorite things about it was the statues of apostles in the nave, like this one, of Philip:

    Here is the papal cathedra, located in the apse:

    Here is a picture of the nave, with the statues on either side:

    After St. John Lateran, we hopped on the metro and went to Vatican City for the papal audience. Whenever he is in town, Benedict gives papal audiences every Wednesday morning. Tickets are free, and we got ours from the Pontifical North American College in Rome. This was the second papal audience I’d been to. The first one, on the trip to Rome when I was 15, was when John Paul II was pope. He was not feeling well at the time, so instead of coming down into the square, he appeared in the window of his apartments above the square and gave his lesson and blessing from there.

    This time, it was different. At about 10:30, (the scheduled start time) lots of people began to stand up and look around for Benedict to appear. A few minutes later, he zoomed out from the left hand side of St. Peter’s in his Popemobile, waving and smiling. He goes through and around the crowd once or twice, but no one knows which way he’s going to go for security reasons. We didn’t have the best seats for seeing him when he came by (because we hadn’t gotten there at 8), and here is a picture I took from standing on my seat:

    After that, though, his route around the square took him to the very back of the area designated for papal audience spectators. There weren’t many people back there, obviously, so I was able to head back and get a couple of much closer pictures:

    After his trip around the square, he sat down under a canopy in front of St. Peter’s and proceeded with the audience. The scripture reading was from the book of Wisdom (sooooo Catholic), and the substance of his message dealt with the example of Isidore of Seville. He gave it first in Italian, then a shorter version of it in several different languages. I can’t remember exactly, but I think the order was German, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Polish. Do you want to read the whole thing? Of course you do. Here it is, courtesy of the Vatican Web site. We left after the English portion (and before the blessing of young people, sick people, newlyweds and objects), because we had a lot to do, beginning with the Vatican Museum.

    The Vatican Museum is one of those museums that seems too big to do justice to in one day. I’ve never been to the Louvre, but I have been to the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, and it took three visits before I felt like I had even seen everything. We couldn’t see everything in the Vatican Museum, so we had to make do with the highlights. We started off with the Pinacoteca (Art Museum), and got to see some great Raphael paintings as well as a Caravaggio, a da Vinci, and lots of other great stuff. Then we went to the Ancient Christian part of the museum, and saw a whole lotta tomb reliefs and a few statues. Then we wanted to see the Raphael Rooms, but couldn’t find them at first. We resigned ourselves to following the hordes of people surging toward the Sistine Chapel (the last thing anybody sees before they exit, and presumably the only thing many people come in to see)… We passed by a long corridor with maps on the wall, and a few other long corridors, and we were getting close to the end… But wait! Is that a sign for the Raphael Rooms? Why yes, it is!

    So we went into these rooms, and this was really the highlight of the museum for me. This is a series of rooms that Raphael and his school painted frescoes in, and they weren’t crowded at all. The most famous of these frescoes was the one that he painted second, in the room that was once the library of Julius II. It’s called The School of Athens, and depicts Plato and Aristotle in the middle of a crowd of philosophers.

    I couldn’t get a good shot of the whole thing head-on, but there are other pictures of it online.

    After the Raphael Rooms, we went through the museum’s collection of modern religious art. I thought this was quite good, too, even though I don’t go in much for modern art. But the reason why I don’t go in much for modern art is because so much of it comes across as being so meaningless to me. If it has a religious theme, as these works did, it has a meaning, so I thought it was good. This is me, the art critic.

    After that, we went into the Sistine Chapel. Beautiful, of course. But crowded. And the ceiling is high up, and the Last Judgment is too big to take in in less than a few minutes. When I was there, I was more impressed by thinking of all the papal enclaves that have taken place there over the years. But maybe that was because I’d seen the paintings before.

    When we came out of the Sistine Chapel, we went through a long corridor back out of the museum, and stopped by the Archives.

    Once out of the museum, we went back to St. Peter’s Square and got in line to go into St. Peter’s. I didn’t remember a line to get in when I was there before, but when we got to the front of the line we saw what the hold up was: security. Once through, we got to stroll on in. The lighting was particularly beautiful on account of the sun setting:

    When we got back outside, I took another picture:

    Before we went home on our last day before we flew back, we decided to swing by the Spanish Steps – just because they’re a big tourist stop in Rome. We did. There were a lot of people there. It was OK, but not my favorite part of the day. Perhaps I was just tired.

  • Day 14 – Rome (part 1)

    This was the day we disembarked from the cruise ship – not at Rome, technically, but at Civitavecchia, a town on the coast. We ate breakfast, got off the ship, took a shuttle bus to the entrance of the port, and lugged our luggage up the street to the train station. We bought three tickets to the Termini station in Rome, and we were on our way in about an hour in a train packed with commuters and our fellow cruise ship passengers. We got to the train station, bought metro tickets, lugged our luggage down to the metro, and got to our B & B (at the Piazza Re di Roma, just south of the Basilica of St. John Lateran) without incident.

    After dropping off our suitcases, we got right back out there to see as much Rome as we could in two days. Our first stop: a church whose name I unfortunately can’t remember. I will have to confer with my fellow travelers, but I am pretty sure that we were looking for a church that was built on the site of a house church from the early days of the Christian movement. I am also pretty sure that we didn’t find it, but went into this church instead. At any rate, I do remember our second stop: the Basilica of St. Peter in Chains. Why this one first, you ask? Well, it is centrally located, just north of the Colosseum. And it has a great horned statue of Moses by Michelangelo.

    And of course, those chains, which are supposed to be the ones Peter was brought to Rome in:

    We headed south toward the Colosseum, and stopped for lunch along the way. By the time we got there, it was raining:

    It ended up raining on and off for the rest of the day, and it was pretty humid. After looking at the outside of the Colosseum, we went over to the Forum and tried to get inside. Turns out you had to get an expensive all-in-one ticket that included the Colosseum, the Forum and something else if you wanted to get in. I had already seen the inside of the Colosseum on a previous trip to Rome, and neither my dad nor Mary wanted to go inside all that badly (especially with the lines, and all we still wanted to do that day.) We ended up walking around and seeing all that we could see from the outside. And that was enough for us.

    Then we walked up the Via dei Fori Imperiali (I don’t speak Italian, but I know what that means) northwest. We saw Trajan’s Column:

    and we saw the (probably excessive) monument to Victor Emmanuel II, the first king of united Italy:

    We walked west from there and stopped by the Church of the Gesu, the mother church of the Jesuits:

    We headed further west and a little north and stepped inside the Pantheon for a while:

    and took a picture or two of the outside as well:

    Then we headed west toward Piazza Navona and stopped in the Church of San Luigi dei Francesi, which is the French national church in Rome. It was designed by Giacomo della Porta, the same guy who raised the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica:

    Then we continued on to Piazza Navona. As you can see, the weather was still a bit drab:

    Then we turned back east. After stopping to refresh ourselves with some gelato, we went on to the
    Church of St. Ignatius, known for its “false” (i.e., painted on the ceiling) dome. The first time I went to Rome, when I was 15, my mom and I sang in a pilgrimage choir sent by our local Catholic church. One evening, we performed a concert in this church.

    Then we kept going east and stopped at the Pontifical North American College to pick up the tickets that we had reserved for the papal audience the next day. They were very kind and friendly to us, and a nun explained to us and a few others who were visiting how the weekly papal audiences usually worked. Mary put it well when she said later about our experience there: “This was the first place on our trip that I really felt welcomed.”

    After our stop there, we turned north and went to the Trevi Fountain. Here is a cute couple standing in front of it:

    And here were a few of the other people there:

    Following our stop at the fountain, we decided to venture onto Rome’s bus system to see if we could make it to another church we wanted to see: St. Mary Major.

    We didn’t find it. At least not right away. We got off the bus a few stops too soon, but we did get to see a church at Piazza della Republica that we would not have seen otherwise: St. Mary of the Angels and the Martyrs, which was designed by Michelangelo and placed within the ruins of the baths of Diocletian.

    We did end up finding St. Mary Major, so we walked down there and got inside a few minutes before it closed for the night. There are often things you find out when you get inside one of these huge churches in Rome that you didn’t know before, and the one that we found out here was that Gianlorenzo Bernini is buried inside, to the right of the main altar.

    After that, we were spent. We had dinner (pizza and pasta, of course) at a restaurant near Termini, then took the metro back to our B&B. In the evening, we enjoyed watching Italy’s soccer team play France in Euro 2008 on TV. Whenever anything good happened for Italy, you could hear shouting and horns honking up and down the street. Since Italy won that game, there were horns honking well into the night.

    As you can see, we did a lot that day. If you’ve made it all the way to the end of this post, I commend you.