Long as the line to the ladies room must be at an Indigo Girls concert, a swath of bodies standing in a winding queue wrapped itself around St. Peter's Square. In sharp contrast, the line moved pretty quickly. Within about twenty minutes, I was in front of the metal detectors nestled in between the square’s right flank of pillars. En route, signs colorfully and in diagram-form, prohibited the wearing of shorts and the showing of bare shoulders. Being the only state in the world with a semblance of a dress code, the Vatican cites religious reverence when concocting such peculiar guidelines. However, when scoping out the people in line around me - average age 60 – maybe it wasn’t such a bad rule after all.
Michael held up his plastic yellow folder, nonstop, as a beacon to be seen amidst the hordes of pilgrims and tourists filing past security. He and his aide had advertised a free English-speaking basilica tour to everyone in line. I soon found myself listening to him explain in his Irish brogue how St. Bartholomew had been skinned alive for his faith along with other fun Vatican facts. Michael had a dry wit, which instantly went against my usual skepticism with guided tours of any kind.
As he led us into St. Peter’s Basilica, clad with a hearing device allowing him to talk in a normal tone while the group listened through earphones, the opulence and the overwhelming scope of the church came into full view. Only I wasn’t really overwhelmed. Having seen a half-dozen or so stunning church interiors the day before, out of a town of over 900 of them, seeing more Biblical yarns cast in gold and bronze surrounding elaborate altars and lavish naves just didn’t seem to hold my attention as much. With the Coliseum, the Forum, The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, the Trevi Fountain and the Pantheon to exhaustively name just a few, Rome has more than its share of architectural and monumental oomph in overflowing abundance. Had we been in a slightly more low-key town; say Des Moines; the Basilica might have held my jaw closer to the ground for a while longer.
What was awe-inspiring was the sheer amount and variety of precious materials utilized to outfit the largest cathedral in the world. It seemed as if every pope, mystic and saint had been carved out of every rare, raw material the earth has produced. The family seals of powerful European families adorned many of the sculptures and pedestals given as Vatican tribute throughout, and of course every painted image and sculpted chunk had some sort of symbolic significance attached to it. Listening to Michael explain what they were, book-ended by rye comments became tiring after a short while and I began to suspect him of rehashing the same script for every new tour group.
The tour concluded with Michael stating his impressive tour guide credentials (including seven years in the seminary) in selling the later paid tour of the Vatican museums and the Sistine Chapel. Admittedly, I had learned plenty so I resigned myself to forking over the equivalent of $25 to allow my curious self to follow the man with the yellow folder around for another two hours.
After consuming a shitty Italian sandwich sold to me by an Indian guy and accompanying an American beverage back in Italy, I again crossed the international border into Vatican City. I maneuvered my tired Egyptian body past the unceasing hordes and waited by the eight hundred year old obelisk matching my ethnicity, for the tour to begin.
To be fair, there was no way not to be overwhelmed by the size and the reach of the Vatican museums. Each decadent hallway was followed by an even more outrageously ornate one. Three rooms in and they all began to blur, however. You’d think they would have thrown in a peak at the Vatican storage closet to at least break up the monotony. Trying to remember which hallway we were in and what Pope commissioned it steadily fell behind in importance to the toll exerted on my aching knees by unforgiving Roman cobblestone the previous few days. When entering a new, more elaborate room, I and the other hobblers rushed to one of the few open benches while Michael regurgitated his practiced remarks.
The mild Roman sun and a gentle breeze felt cathartic as we entered the courtyard enclosed by the museum. Michael stood by an up-close reproduction of the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling and explained every nuance in detail. Michaelangelo’s vision for the ceiling was extraordinary, bested only by his execution. The artist apparently spent over four years perched upon a scaffolding of sorts, painting on his back and refusing any assistance. It made my laborious fifteen-minute effort at trying to escape a locked bathroom in Milan the week before seem utterly lazy.
In the last gorgeously sculpted room before the chapel, the cumulative arrogance of it all really began to get at me. Pope after pope, particularly during the Renaissance, commissioned a vast array of works with the seemingly sole intent of glorifying their authority and/or to simply outdo their predecessors. Jesus Christ struck a pose so many times you would think we were on some sort of holy photo shoot. I chafed at the sympathetic way Michael mentioned that even after the roughly fifteen-dollar admission, the Vatican was still operating the museum at a loss. Fifteen bucks notwithstanding, the site of legions of beggars just outside the museum walls extending their hands for anything passing tourists would give them, put me at a loss. If only the needy could witness the glorious works of Bernini and Raphael they may realize how insignificant their plight was when there were frescoes to be painted! Then again, raising the meager fifteen dollars I’m sure required hard day of panhandling.
Still, the moment everyone came for, 2,500 year-old pagan sculpture aside, was a captivating experience nonetheless. An energetic Michael led a worn-out group up a flight of stairs and through the bottom left door at the front of the chapel. Jam-packed with dozens of tour groups, the Sistine, the exact dimensions of Solomon’s temple, had the atmosphere of a flea market. But when my eyes rose above the din to witness Michaelangelo’s masterful strokes, I easily was able to block out all the commotion. I even blocked out the abrupt “Shhhh” issued over the loud speaker by the guards, jarringly reminding everyone of the sanctity of the chapel where new Popes have been elected for hundreds of years.
Instinctively, my tourist finger was itching to make my camera shutter repeatedly click. I had to restrain the urge because of something the neatly dressed, but at this point profusely sweating, Michael had said earlier on the tour regarding the chapel’s costly renovations in the nineties. Seems a Japanese television station had footed the multi-million dollar bill for the restoration and hence owned any and all visual rights to the ceiling. We were lucky we could look at the thing without having to fork over royalties. The Vatican’s corporate sponsorship arrangement, while unfair for the tourists in the chapel, was a God-send for all of the polite neighbors and friends forced to view the inevitably blurry travel photographs, ad nauseam.
I succumbed again to Michael’s tour guide charms when he offered to take us quickly through the papal catacomb beneath the chapel. Why not? It was free, believe it or not. The tombs of several of the fellas who took up the large white hat, laid inside a bare, low-ceilinged room. John Paul II’s grave was obviously the most popular, easily eclipsing the popularity of the ten or fifteen other bodies adjacent to him. A loud recording in Italian, English, German and French repeatedly implored all tomb-goers to maintain silence and to reflect.
Once out from under, I hurriedly dodged slow-moving visitors and the standoffish Swiss guards; their candy-colored uniforms making them look like extras in a dinner theater production of Shakespeare. I swiftly headed past the thousands of chairs arranged on the square in anticipation of the Pope’s audience the next day. Moving past the obelisk and the remaining barrage of holy souvenir hawkers, I could see the transparent Italian border in the not-too-distance. I anxiously; painfully barreled towards the less opulent where I could merely reflect on the nearest Chianti bottle.
