The Vatican

Thursday 15 October

The Vatican

Today was going to be big - yep really big – St Peter’s Basilica tour and Vatican Museums including the Sistine Chapel. And the bells are ringing.

Penny, our tour guide, originally hailed from England, has lived in Rome 45 years, worked as a Vatican tour guide for the past 20 years and was very polished and entertaining. As she told stories about secret passage-ways, where the pope sleeps and meets, the Swiss-guard and the histories behind many of the carvings, sculptures, images and fixtures. She could have been a resource for the Da Vinci code – umm.. probably not - just a tad too sweet & very catholic/ possibly nun-like . We were lucky for 2 reasons: the tour is free and only runs at 9.45am Tuesday and Thursday. The St Peter’s Basilica is the biggest church/cathedral/basilica/ whatever in the world but I did not ask if it could contain the La Famiglia Sagreda. Inside St Peter’s everything was enormous. Some statues were seven metres high, but they were 20 metres up, so that they did not look so enormous from the floor. Genius.

Unfortunately we had to leave about 15minutes before the end, as our reservation for the Sistine chapel - about a kilometre away, was for 12noon. And we were not at all prepared for the 45 minute labyrinthine trek once inside the Vatican Museums’ walls to get to the Sistine chapel – past a 50metre corridor called the map museum, or the 100 metres of tapestries (which were copies of famous paintings including scenes from the Sistine chapel). But the last 10 gallery spaces of modern art (say 60 years from 1930 – 1990s) was fascinating and totally unexpected – with a good representation of the big names (of course) , including Dali and Bacon. I was happy to see a Morandi still life – first one, just beautiful – made from unusual colours in strange darkly glowing soft tones. But when we finally entered the Chapel it was all worth it. As soon as I looked up I saw The Creation and for the next 40 minutes or so was fascinated and over awed about how complex the pattern and variations and skilful the tricks of perspective and colour and architectural paintings : layer on layer, paintings within paintings, meaning on top of meaning. And it dawned on me that Michelangelo is more modern and contemporary than all the artists’ works we had just seen – his creations and masterpieces should survive and retain their power and beauty in / as / all ways. It would have been easy to spend a few hours there just gradually shifting around the walls in order to see the work from the best possible angle and vantage point.

I did get close enough to touch a part of the Last Judgement(but didn’t) which was a good feeling but the milling crowds had to keep moving and we eventually got pulled along down through hundreds of metres of the Vatican’s collection of artifacts: going back to the first century – and it was interesting to note that many of the signs and symbols are still in use today. It made me think that maybe the Vatican has discovered the secret of perpetual energy – the circle of life which will ensure its existence forever – i.e., the words of God are timeless – the church says the power of the word of God to inspire great deeds out of love by people for the betterment of humanity is proven by the Vatican’s existence – and therefore because something as incredible as the Vatican does exist (and has for 2000 years) then – it must be because it has God’s blessing. And because it has God’s blessing then we must continue to live according to the church’s teachings. And if we continue to live according to the church’s teachings then the Vatican must continue to exist etc, etc – yep a round about long winded way of saying that the Vatican is a self perpetuating myth/reality. What was most amazing, though, was that Mary did not realise that the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is flat and it was Michelangelo’s genius that made it look curved and vaulted.

Then we enjoyed a short sustenance stop and shop before hitting the Pinacoteca to see what other paintings the Vatican had on display including: Raphael, Caraveggio, Titian, Veronese, Bellini, etc. Before finally exiting up and down corridors, spiral staircases , lifts, backwards and forwards, up and down, returning audio guides , recovering slips of identification, etc. in the funny Roman designed exit strategy which we are becoming used to now.

We are now looking forward to dinner and tomorrow we will go back to St Peter’s (and find out if the La Famiglia Sagreda will be bigger - that is if it ever gets finished) and the modern art galleries at the Villa Borghese.