Honeymoon in Italy: Highlights of Rome, Part 2

Along the wall surrounding the entrance, stones are laid along the sidewalk to mark the border of the kingdom of the Vatican.

On one of our days in Rome, we had a jump-packed day with a visit to the Vatican in the morning and then tours of the Capuchin crypts and catacombs outside of the city. When you aren't sure the next time you'll be in Italy, you try to do everything you can all at once!

This is the highly decorative ceiling inside the hallway leading to the Sistine Chapel. The biggest pictures portray important parts of the Pope's life (well, the Pope at the time). 

The Vatican was one of the main things Steve wanted to do in Rome. Neither of us are Catholic, but he had friends tell him we had to do it. Plus, it IS a big deal, and I wanted to see the Sistine Chapel! We took the metro there, which is very easy, but the machines make it tricky to buy just one pass per person (the screen automatically encourages you to buy two passes per ticket, which must be used within 90 minutes of each other), so we ended up wasting a few bucks learning this the hard way. But no matter! After just a few metro stops, we easily met the tour guide and spent the next few hours in the Museo de Vatican.

This huge building is just the Pope's country house!

The Vatican is its own kingdom with its own police force, post office, and more. They use the Euro, but they do have a mint for special coins, and they have their own stamps, too. So that’s pretty cool! We briefly saw artwork from other countries that were given as gifts to the Pope or brought back from missionaries, but we walked by so quickly that we really didn’t get to see any of that. We also raced through the country house of the Pope, which features a long hallway lined with sculptures and busts from ancient Rome. They are not organized in any real fashion; it’s more just to show off all the stuff the Pope has. And he has A LOT!

Along the hallway leading to the Sistine Chapel are maps from around the world. But all of the countries are upside down, because they are all from the perspective of the Pope looking towards those nations from the Vatican. 

We did get a long introduction to the Sistine Chapel while waiting outside in the garden, which was very pleasant on such a sunny day. There are several large posters featuring images from the ceiling so that the guides could talk about the piece and the hidden secrets in the painting. Did you know that Michelangelo preferred to sculpt rather than paint? Even though this is one of his best-known projects, it was not his favorite, but at least he got to pick what he painted. I am really glad our guide gave us the long introduction before we got into the Chapel, because once you’re in there, everything is hard to see! It’s a high ceiling, so you’re far away and everything looks so small, plus you’re craning your neck to even look at it. You were not allowed to take photos (so the pictures below are all from the internet), and you weren’t even supposed to talk, because the water vapor from your breath could damage the ancient paint. The paintings have been restored, but there was one part left that was dark and dirty and from all the soot from when the chapel was actually used for real services. Here are some fun facts about the paintings in the Sistine Chapel:

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•  When you look at the garments behind God when he is reaching for Adam's hand, the shape of the red robe is like a brain or the atria of the heart. This is God giving Adam both intelligence and emotions.
• On one of the walls, there depicts the life of Moses, and on the other, it shows the life of Jesus. It was interesting to pick out parts of the paintings that showed familiar stories (e.g. Moses speaking to God as a burning bush). 

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• Within the Last Judgement painting (on the wall rather than the ceiling), there is a man in the lower righthand corner (which is Hell), and a snake is wrapped around him and biting his genitals. This man was a leader in the church who had abused a young boy so badly that the boy died, so Michelangelo painted him in as living in Purgatory. 
• Many think that Michelangelo was gay. He was clearly enamored with the male human form, and even some of the women in the painting have quite muscular bodies. There are actually several sets of men kissing in the painting (and that's in the Heaven part!). 

St. Peter's Basilica is HUGE, and every inch is covered with some ornate decoration!

The floor had amazing marble designs.

This was a mosaic front of a tomb inside the church.

We also went into St. Peter's Basilica, which is also overwhelming. Everywhere you look there is marble, gold, sculptures, mosaics, a lot of everything! There were existing tombs there, and you could even see one of the very old, embalmed bodies. I think my favorite part of this building is that, on the floor, the names of other large catholic cathedrals are listed, and the idea is to show just how BIG this one is (It claims to be the biggest, but there is actually one in Brazil that is bigger.). The whole space is so ornate and highly decorative; sometimes you didn't know where to look first!

Yes, those are human skulls piled up along the wall and then different bones decorating the ceiling!

Our travel agent booked us a tour of the Capuchin Crypts, which is something I never would have thought of myself, but it was so cool! And it’s right downtown, so it’s super-easy to get to. Since we went in October, it felt like the perfect place to visit during Halloween-time. We learned about the Capuchin friars. Capuchin means “small hood” like the outfits the friars wore (the “garment of trial,” because even in bad weather they could not wear hats or closed toed shoes). The word cappuccino comes from these friars because one of them had a coffee with frothed milk like that in Vienna and brought it back to Rome (also, capuchin monkeys share the name because they look like they are wearing little hoods around their faces). So these crypts were essentially where Capuchin friars were buried (along with other people, ~3,700 people total!). In the seventeenth century, Cardinal Barberini took the bones to decorate the crypts, and there are bones EVERYWHERE. Each crypt is named after a kind of bone, like pelvises, femurs, skulls, etc., but all kinds of bones were featured in all of them. There were some full bodies still laying in place, but the main focus are the bones that are arranged very distinctly and decoratively across the walls and ceilings, even as chandeliers. Beautiful but morbid! I really didn’t know what to expect, but I have NEVER seen anything like it before. It was very cool and different, so I highly recommend it. It’s not very big, so don’t bother with the audio-tour; you can whiz through it pretty quickly or linger to take it all in!

Along with the Capuchin Crypts we visited the Christian Catacombs of Rome. Those are about a 30-minute bus ride away, so I’m not sure I can recommend it. But it was kind of cool to see this place that had housed mausoleums for the Romans, then was used for catacombs by Christians (pilgrims would go there to worship saints, even in secret during times of persecution), and then had a church built on top of ALL of that. The halls are full of holes where bodies had been buried, but most of them are empty now because of grave robbers (talk about bad juju!). We were following a guide, but there were many more hallways and rooms we could have explored; Steve said it would be a great set for a horror movie! We couldn't take pictures inside the catacombs, but we did take a few inside the church that still stands there today.

These were the coolest parts of the catacombs (IMHO):

·       Saint Callixtus is buried there, and he was a martyr: he was a bodyguard for the Roman emperor and was a Christian, and when he would not renounce his Christianity even for the emperor, he was shot with an arrow, tied to a tree, and beaten to death. He is understandably the patron saint of police, soldiers, and people like that.

·       There are Christian symbols on some of the grave coverings (either terracotta or marble) including doves (peace), fish (Icthys is “fish” in Greek but also stands for "Ἰησοῦς Χρῑστός Θεοῦ Υἱός Σωτήρ", which translates into English as 'Jesus Christ, God's Son, Savior'.), a man standing with his arms raised in prayer, and the letters XP are the first two letters of Cristo.

·       We also saw three Roman pagan mausoleums that were open air before everything was buried with the nearby quarry and then turned into the catacombs. They look like miniature houses to fit whole families, and even had second stories. There were paintings of birds and flowers, images of Medusa to watch over them, vessels of offerings, and urns for people who were cremated instead of buried. These were probably my favorite!

This is a sculpture of the saint who was killed with an arrow. He is buried in the catacombs.

I wasn't sure what to expect from any of these tours, but they were all pretty interesting, and I learned a lot. 

Next up: our visit to the Roman Forum and the Colosseum!