Thus, bright and early Sunday morning Nicholas and I roused ourselves out of bed (by which I mean I roused myself out of bed, then spent twenty minutes alternating between getting ready and shaking him repeatedly to get him up), put on the nicest clothes we had and headed off to church. Considering the nicest clothes we had were looking kind of rough, my greatest worry was that they would look at us and decide that we weren't actually dressed for church and deny us on those grounds, despite having dressed in the best that we could manage under the circumstances.
We arrived at St. Peter's, sailed through the security lines, and promptly got really confused as to where we were supposed to go. The line funneled immediately into the crypt, actually a very nicely tiled, well lit area under the floor of the basilica, where you could view the graves of a handful of selected popes, including the most recent one. The Vatican has (apparently) gone minimalist in terms of graves in the past 50 years or so, but I thought the gravestone was classy, simple and elegant. They had an extra couple people at that particular spot facilitating traffic flow because there were a number of people that stopped to pray at the grave. Again, considering the difference between tourist attraction and religious site, they weren't hurrying people along that wanted to pray, there was just the praying area and the walking area, and people discreetly stationed there to make that happen.
Anyhow, we funneled through there, and finally got to the front door. From a handy dandy sign outside we ascertained that we were right on time for a mass, with chorus, in Latin, at the main alter. You would thing that mass at the main alter would be relatively easy to find. As we stepped into the Basilica, though, we realized that that task would be a little more difficult than we anticipated. This church is the great granddaddy of all churches everywhere. This church – we realized later – you can't properly see from St. Mark's square in front. This church is so big that to properly see the whole thing, and appreciate its magnitude, you have to be standing about a mile down the road, outside the Castel Sant'Angelo.
To give you an idea of the magnitude of this building, imagine your favorite cathedral. You know how it's really huge in the middle, but the sides are a little cramped? St. Peter's is huge in the middle, and then equally as huge on the sides. Take the space inside your average cathedral and multiply it by 3, or 5, or 12, and you might start to get an idea of how big this place is.
Anyhow, we ran around for probably 20 minutes trying to figure out how to get to mass, and learning that all of the helpful Vatican staff wandering around know several languages, none of which are English. Finally, after much angst, we figured out how to make it to the standing room only mass. The thing that annoys me is that if we would have known where to go to begin with, we would have been there well enough in advance that we could have sat down. But that's a minor annoyance compared to the annoyance I felt for the picture taking people. Now, the general rule in churches is that you can come to mass, and not have to pay and not have to wait in line, but you can't take pictures during mass. St. Peter's was a little different in that it's so big that you can be having mass up front, and no one at the back or even in the middle would have any idea that anything was going on, so random people just milling around are welcome to take pictures, but they've got a fairly large area for the mass and buffer zone roped off. They let people in freely if you know to ask, but they ask that you don't take pictures. My irritation is the people that obviously told the guy standing there that they were coming to mass, stayed for five minutes, surreptitiously took their pictures of the main alter and then left. That said, here's my picture of the window over the main alter (taken after the processional out).
The next day we headed to the Vatican Museums, home of the Sistine Chapel and everything else of artistic value the Vatican has managed to collect over the past, oh, 1700 years or so. The Museums are housed in the Papal Palace, a term that actually refers to a grouping of buildings rather than one contiguous building. So, worry not, we weren't in any danger of disturbing the pope in our wanderings around. Yet again, I spent a lot of time looking at floors, to the point where I managed to miss the School of Athens, which I'm still upset at myself about. But, I got some really good pictures of floors, this first one from one of the sculpture galleries:
Floor from the first of the Rapael rooms. There were several of these that were along the same style, but each unique. If I ever have about two months on my hands that I can do nothing but applique, I think it'd be cool to do a quilt with a dozen of these medallions on it.
Both of the floor in the room that I'm pretty sure housed the School of Athens. Thus, if you're at the Vatican Museums and see this floor, for goodness sake look at the walls too.
This was of a table, but it's along the same lines as the floors, so it's getting grouped in with them.
In my defense about the School of Athens thing, there were a ton of people at the museum, and you were pretty muchly herded along the entire time, with no real opportunity to stop and look at things. Trying to go against the tide of people was like trying to stay in one place while you're in the ocean. It's pretty much impossible to do, and even when you think you're doing it, you look up and realized you're 100 yards further down the beach than you thought you were.
One thing that I did not miss, however, was the Sistine Chapel. I have to say, it wasn't as shiny as I expected, though it was still really cool to be where the pope is chosen. No pictures, though, as pictures are forbidden in the Sistine Chapel. Apparently if you take pictures, you're approached and requested to delete them, and the Vatican people will stand over you until they're sure you've done so. We didn't learn this firsthand though, nor did we learn it until after the fact. We didn't even think about taking any pictures, because Nicholas hypothesized that probably we would be jailed for taking pictures. I didn't buy it, but neither did I take pictures.
One interesting architectural feature that I noticed, that I bet happened because someone was better at art than they were at math in school. Take a look at this arch:
Looks like a normal arch, right? To a casual observer, it looks like any of hundreds of other interior arches in the numerous palaces/museums we've visited. But take a look at this picture, taken from directly under the arch:
The whole thing is a carefully painted illusion, probably because someone miscalculated an addition to the palace and needed to make it blend. The illusion was amazing, though. If I hadn't been so used to looking at ceilings and floors by now, I probably wouldn't have noticed it at all, just as the majority of the thousands of people that move through that arch every day probably don't notice a thing.
At the end of the museum, as kind of part of the gift shop area, they had a Vatican Post office, so Nick and I bought a couple postcards and promptly sat down to write them to everyone who's address we knew off the top of our heads. Basically, we sent a postcard to ourselves and that was it. There's not much call these days to know anyone's address by heart but your own.
And, as usual, a couple pictures from our walking around just to round things out.
I really liked this window in particular because you could tell it was more modern, and just really pretty. And this car:
I want one. That's a my-size car.
Now tomorrow, off to Pompeii. Ciao!
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