Adventures in Rome: The Vatican City

Previously on Adventures in Rome...

Jamie and Henri journeyed through ancient Rome, wondering all the while why history hadn't been that interesting when they were pre-teens in a classroom. Now, they venture to a new country, Vatican City.

Day 3: The Vatican
Henri and I structured our third day in Rome exactly the same way we had the previous two, with one goal at the end of a long wander. This time, however, the goal was physically much closer to our hotel and in many other ways much farther away; The Vatican City.

The Vatican City was declared an independent state in 1929, when the Holy See signed the Lateran Treaty with fascist Italy. (I'm not clear on exactly what is represented by the Holy See, but I do know that it has existed since the fourteenth century and it is not a country.)The Vatican has a population of about eight hundred and is about 110 acres big, making it the smallest country in the world in terms of both population and area. You could fit the entire population of the Vatican into Folsom Field almost seventy times, if you could get them to leave all of their treasures behind. And I do think treasure, in every sense, is the perfect word to describe the things in the Vatican.

The Vatican City has always seemed a little strange to me-a country just slightly larger than my high school, in the middle of another city-and a little mysterious. Maybe it has to do with my lack of knowledge about Christianity and Catholicism, or with popular culture creations a la Dan Brown (The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons, neither of which I've actually read). When you have a wall (a big wall, believe me) surrounding your city and a secret archive, I guess it's just a matter of course that there will be legends and rumors and conspiracy theories galore. I spent a whole day in the Vatican, and I still feel like I just scratched the surface of the stories and the treasures the city holds.

Henri and I started our day by wandering our way to Castel Sant'Angelo, or in English, the Castle of the Holy Angel. It was originally the mausoleum of Hadrian (the same guy who commissioned the Pantheon) in the second century, but was converted to a castle and fortress in the beginning of the fourteenth century. This is another example of the overlap between ancient and modern Roman history. In its modern history, it's served as the Papal apartments, a prison, and a fortress; Pope Clement VII survived the siege of Charles V's Landsknechte during the Sack of Rome in 1527.

It certainly looks like a castle to me! The statue on the top is of the Archangel Michael, who (according to legend) appeared on top of the castle and sheathed his sword to end the plague of 590; it's from this legend and statue that the castle gets its name.

The castle is now a museum, and Henri and I spent the next two and a half hours exploring. Inside is a spiral corridor that is original from when the castle was a mausoleum; it rises to the level of the circular ramparts. Henri and I also saw the entrance to the (no longer) secret tunnel from the castle to St. Peter's Basilica the Popes used to ensure their safety. Inside the square part are the Papal apartments, though most of the furniture and decorations have been moved to the Vatican Museum.

We also found several very narrow twisty stairways that led to the very top of the castle, where the statue of the Archangel is. I, of course, was delighted to be up high again, and took this picture looking south east. That's the River Tiber below us, which curves out east to run below the castle and then back south just past where you can see in this picture.

This is looking directly east and the dome of St. Peter's Basilica. I could tell, even from this distance, that St. Peter's would be very, very high on the list of incredible things I'd ever seen. We had a long journey before we got there, though. After lunch (bolognese americano, delicious) Henri and I met up with a tour guide from the same company that we'd found at the Colosseum. Our tour guide's name was Elena, and after gathering a group of about twelve we headed into the Vatican Museum.

The Vatican Museum is the second largest museum in the world, after the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. The Smithsonian Museums in Washington D.C. would be the biggest museum if you combined them, but Elena was of the opinion that they were a chain of related museums so they didn't count. I found this somewhat amusing. I've heard several different versions of this statistic, but the middle one is that if you spent one minute looking at every piece in the Vatican Museum you would be there for fourteen years.

FOURTEEN YEARS.

Yeah, that's how I felt too.

After bypassing the queue and buying our student tickets (bring your student ID everywhere, by the way. There are almost always student discounts at museums and the like!) we headed up an escalator into a large square called the Pinecone Courtyard.

There's the pinecone the courtyard is named after. It's a bronze statue of Greek origin, and at one point it was part of a fountain. You'll have to forgive me; I don't remember the rest of the story about this piece. I claim information overload in the fifteen minutes following this picture.

This is looking the other direction from the same point. The golden globe in the center was a gift to one of the more modern Popes. If you look very closely, you can see information panels behind the globe. There are six sets of two panels around the edges of the courtyard, all showing the same thing; images of the Sistine Chapel.

Because the Sistine Chapel is a house of God, the Vatican officials ask that you maintain silence while visiting it. This requirement, however, makes it difficult for tour guides to point out the more interesting points of the artwork or tell stories about Pope Julius II, who commissioned Michelangelo to paint it. To solve this problem, they provided replicas in the courtyard so the tour guides could tell their stories and point to the pictures before we went in. And oh, are there stories.

Elena started with a brief explanation of what a fresco is, and how it's different from a painting. A painting is the application of a colored substance (acrylic, oil, water) to a surface (canvas, paper, drywall). A fresco is actually a chemical reaction between a coloring agent and the plaster; the coloring agent carbonizes, changing the color of the plaster. There is no color overlaid on a surface, because the surface itself is colored. That's why frescoes last forever. This also makes frescoes really tricky to do; you apply the plaster to the wall or ceiling, and then you have to wait for it to dry to just the right moisture content before you apply the coloring agent. If you get it wrong, the plaster won't carbonize and you have to chip it off and start over. We can then conclude that good fresco artists were extremely skilled.

So when Pope Julius II decided he wanted frescoes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, he wanted the best fresco painter he could find, and he asked his cardinals to find such a man and recommend him. One of the cardinals had a young cousin studying to be a fresco painter named Raphael, but the cardinal didn't think Raphael would get the job because no one knew if he'd be any good (yet). So he instead recommended Michelangelo, knowing that Michelangelo would refuse the commission.

Michelangelo was a bit of a character in Renaissance Italy. He was known not only for is incredible artwork but also for his stubborn temper. He was primarily a sculptor (who carved arguably the most famous sculpture ever, The David) who was fascinated with classical Greek art. He was not, however, a painter, and he considered painting as not even a true art form. Painting was work for those who wished to be artists but didn't have the talent. He was quite vocal in this opinion, which is why the cardinal was sure he would refuse the commission. The cardinal was right; Michelangelo told the Pope no. The cardinal hadn't, however, counted on Pope Julius II.

Telling the Pope no was not something many people in that day and age did, and Pope Julius II was just as stubborn as Michelangelo. The Pope's next message was something along the lines of, "That wasn't a request, Michelangelo. You will paint the Sistine Chapel." Michelangelo refused again, and moved back to his hometown, Florence, to avoid the Pope and the Church. Pope Julius II was not deterred in the slightest. His next message read something like, "Paint the Sistine Chapel or I'll burn Florence to the ground."

So Michelangelo returned to Rome to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, on two conditions. He could paint whatever he wanted, and he would never be asked to paint a fresco again. (Twenty-four years later he got wrangled into painting The Last Judgement on the wall of the Sistine Chapel, but he did get to paint whatever he wanted both times.)It took him four years of sitting on scaffolding to do it. The ceiling consists of nine panels depicting scenes from the Book of Genesis surrounded by images of the prophets and sybils who predicted the coming of Christ. Even with my extremely limited knowledge of Christianity, I recognized most of the nine scenes.

Probably the most famous is the painting of God giving life to Adam, both with their arm outstretched to the other. The other scene Elena took extra time to describe was the panel showing God creating the heavenly bodies, the sun and the moon. God is painted twice, once facing out and once facing into the scene. There are two theories about this. One is that God's work was so great he had to turn all the way around to see it properly. The other theory (the one that centers on the fact that God's pants are painted firmly around his upper thighs when He's turned to look back at his creation) is that Michelangelo wanted the Pope to be able to enjoy both moons from the altar. *wink*

The irreverent, immature part of my brain was giggling hopelessly at this point, saying to me, "Michelangelo painted God mooning the Pope!" Ah...yeah. Potentially, he did. He also painted one of the little angels hiding behind a sybil flipping the bird (the British equivalent of flipping someone off) so it's not completely insane to think that was exactly what he meant by painting it the way he did. Either way, God's bum has been forever immortalized on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

Elena also explained several of the important features of The Last Judgement, pointing out Saint Peter with the key to heaven, Saint Bartholomew with his own skin in hand, and Saint Catherine with her wheel. (There are others, but my lack of background knowledge proved too much for my memory.) She pointed out Charon ferrying his boat across the River Styx into hell, which I thought was rather interesting. I didn't expect to find a Greek mythological character in the same painting as Jesus, Mary, and various saints.

She also pointed out one of the demons in hell, the one farthest in the lower right corner who is depicted with donkey ears and wrapped in the coils of the Serpent. That particular demon got his face from a cardinal who dared to criticize Michelangelo's work (too many naked people, and Jesus depicted as young (read-without a beard) for the first time). When the cardinal went to Pope Julius II, the Pope jokingly told him his jurisdiction did not extend to hell, so Michelangelo's painting would have to remain as it was.

When Elena was finished with the panels in the Pinecone Courtyard, we started in on the museum proper. The first thing you see are Greek statues and their Roman counterparts. Greek statues are almost always bronze (and hollow) while Roman statues are carved from marble.

I could show you a multitude of photos of the different statues, but since I've already written a small novel about the Sistine Chapel, I'll limit myself to the very best stories. This is a Roman copy of a Greek statue of the sun god Apollo. Not only is Apollo the god of gods in Greek mythology, this particular statue is the direct inspiration for how Jesus is depicted in the Last Judgement.

Alas, I am not tall enough to get a good angle at this particular Vatican treasure (though I don't think most people are). This is the bathtub of Roman emperor Nero, famous for being both the last emperor related to Julius Caesar and for being completely crazy. Like most things in Rome, the scale of the picture is deceptive; that bathtub is thirteen meters in diameter. (That's over forty feet.) It's a single block of marble, and it's made even more incredible by the type of marble it's made from.

Imperial porphyry was quarried from a single quarry in Egypt in the middle of the desert, nearly 160km from the Nile River. The Romans were so entranced with the unique color and grain of the marble that they exhausted the entire vein of marble. Other, similar veins have been found in modern times, but the extreme conditions of the quarry and the distance to the Nile make it nearly impossible to quarry. The other unique thing about this marble is its extreme hardness; with modern stone cutters it takes nearly an hour to cut three centimeters through the stuff. Can you imagine carving and sanding Nero's bathtub in the second century?

This is another example of porphyry marble. Again, I can't imagine the time and skill it took to carve the reliefs into the sides of this piece.

After the three dimensional pieces, Elena led us down two corridors of more artwork. This is the corridor of tapestries, many woven in the Netherlands in the Middle Ages. One of the things I noticed was the incredible moulding and painting on the ceiling of the hall. It was only at the other end that Elena told us the entire ceiling was flat; everything was painted. I was completely fooled, and I still couldn't tell the difference even after I knew it was painted instead of moulding.

This is the corridor of maps, made in the thirteenth and fourteenth century. What boggled my mind was that the greatest error on any of the maps to today's maps was eighty kilometers. That sounds like a long way, but think of the difference in technology between then and now. Somehow I can't imagine that modern people would do half as well since we've come to rely on technology so much.

After the corridor of maps we went into the Raphael Rooms, which were once the Papal apartments. Remember the cardinal who wanted his young cousin Raphael to paint the Sistine Chapel? Well, he'd learned his lesson about trying to manipulate Pope Julius II, so this time he just outright asked the Pope if Raphael could have just one wall in just one room. The Pope agreed, and when he saw Raphael's work kicked out all of the other painters and told Raphael to do the entire apartments. Many of the frescoes are biblical scenes, while others depict the Pope in an important historical or political moment. I don't remember most of the stories about the different frescoes, but I'll share the two stories I do remember.

These are bibles from all over Europe in different languages. One of the Popes (I unfortunately don't remember which one) sent copies of the Bible in Latin to bishops and cardinals in all of the different countries, who translated it to their native language and sent a translated copy back. The Bibles are wonderfully old and priceless just because of that, but they are also linguistic treasures because they're huge samples of languages for which we know the translations.

Alright, I know. Another interesting picture of...a wall. (My previous post about Rome also featured a wall picture.) But this is actually one of my favorite stories from the Vatican Museum. The last major Sack of Rome (Rome, being at the center of such a powerful Empire, has been sacked and looted many times) was in 1527 and came about because of a convoluted bit of politics. From what I understand, the Holy Roman Empire was fighting the Kingdom of France over control of the Papal States. The Imperial Army defeated the French, but when the Empire had nothing to pay with the soldiers mutinied and sacked Rome. German soldiers under Charles III, the Duke of Bourbon, ransacked the Papal apartments, forcing Pope Clements VII to flee to Castel Sant'Angelo. While in the Raphael Rooms, the German soldiers carved graffiti into the frescoes on the walls. If you look very closely at that picture, you can see VKM carved above an X in the plaster. (VKM, in old German, stands for long live the king.) Also carved into a different fresco: LUTHER. This was the time of the Reformation, when Martin Luther and his ideals became the roots of today's Protestant religions.

And this is where I wish I was a history major again. It's so easy to imagine German boys, indoctrinated with the Reformation, seeing the splendor of the Vatican and wanting to make their mark on it before they had to go and fight again. It almost felt like Pope Clements VII had just vanished into the secret tunnel between the apartments and Castel Sant'Angelo.

After the Raphael Rooms we (finally!) got to see the Sistine Chapel for ourselves. I've heard stories about how the artwork truly seems to breath, and you half-expect Jesus to turn his head and judge you as well as the figures painted in The Last Judgement, but it never quite made sense to me. You don't get that feeling from looking at pictures of the artwork, and they're both two-dimensional representations of the same thing. Oh, I can appreciate the fact that the original is always better than a copy, and I've always felt the time and effort put into the art is astounding. I had no idea what I was missing.

I can only give you the same cliches I'd heard a million times and discounted: the figures painted on the ceilings and walls did seem to breathe, and the panel on the ceiling depicting God descending from the heavens? He's painted as if He's diving from the ceiling to the floor of the Chapel, and I kept glancing back to make sure He was still up there and not coming down to join us. There really aren't good words to describe the works of the genius that was Michelangelo. I can only tell you that if you ever have the slightest chance, go see it for yourself. The lines, the crowds, everything is worth it. The pictures don't do it justice.

We were given twenty-five minutes in the Sistine Chapel before we were supposed to meet at the back and continue on our way. It's not a particularly large room (comparatively) so I initially thought that would be a good of time to enjoy the frescoes. (Don't forget to look down, also; the marble work of the floor is beautiful too.) So when three minutes later Henri tapped my arm and told me we had to go, I was unpleasantly startled. Turns out it had been the full twenty-five minutes; good thing one of us kept track of time.

After the Sistine Chapel we went to St. Peter's Basilica. The old basilica was built in the fourth century, and it was rebuilt beginning in 1506. It was finished 120 years later in 1626. It has the largest interior of any church in the world; you could stand the Statue of Liberty up in the dome and have room to spare. Tradition and some historical evidence say that Saint Peter, one of the twelve apostles of Jesus, is buried under the alter. I knew from a very long way away that St. Peter's Basilica was really big, and really incredible, but I still had no idea what I was walking into.

I took three pictures once I was inside: this one, one to the right of it and one to the left of it. I'm only posting this one because my pictures don't do justice to what I really saw. I can tell you a few interesting stories about the Basilica; the circle of porphyry near the door is where Charlemagne was crowned, and to the right of this picture is Pietà, a statue carved by Michelangelo of Mary cradling Jesus after he'd been taken from the cross. It's the only work he ever signed.

There are a million more stories to be told about the basilica, and a million other pictures I could have taken, but after I took my three panoramic shots I just stopped. I stopped trying to cram my head as full of Roman and Christian history as I could, I stopped trying to take pictures, and in some ways I stopped thinking. I just wanted to look, and to be exactly where I was. I told you had no words for the Sistine Chapel; it's even more true for St. Peter's Basilica. I have no words.

As Henri and I exited the basilica, somewhat shell-shocked and awed, we were brought down to earth a little bit by the sight of one of the two hundred Swiss Guards who have served the Pope for hundreds of years. They were protecting Pope Clements VII when he was running to Castel Sant'Angelo, and they are most likely the reason he survived. Most of the two hundred at that time were killed. The Swiss Guards are known for their bravery and loyalty; they're also known for their rather...recognizable...uniform. Leonardo da Vinci designed it, and I think we can agree he had talents outside of fashion. Henri and I began our wander home, stopping for gelato and dinner (in that order!) on the way. Once we returned home, we again fell into our beds, exhausted, somewhat overwhelmed and incredibly glad we'd chosen to come to Rome.

Up next:
Day 4: Villa Borghese
Day 5: Esquilino and Trastevere neighborhoods
Day 6: The Journey Home