Vatican

Thursday 9.9.2010

Got up and noticed a sign saying the hostel had free pasta from 7.30 to 8.00 every night. Wasn’t too remorseful I’d missed it though. Knowing that place there probably wouldn’t have been any sauce or something. I was waiting for the guy to get back so I could ask if it was all right to leave my stuff there for the day, but he never came back and I wanted to get an early start to hit the Vatican before the crowd. So I used his computer to look up other hostels in Rome (the second time I’d used hostel Internet to look up other hostels in the same city, after Innsbruck) and marked a few on my map. I left my big bag of clothes and non-valuables in a corner and hoped he wouldn’t throw it away or anything, then took the dirty, crowded subway to the Vatican. There wasn’t too big of a crowd there. I went saw a couple Swiss guards, went through security, and went into St. Peter’s Basilica, which is free to get into.

St. Peter’s is bloody amazing! It’s the cathedral, the bishop of which is the pope (the pope is the bishop of Rome) so of course, knowing how obsessed Catholics are with materialism and hierarchy, it’s going to be the biggest, grandest Catholic church of them all. It’s bloody huge. It’s just a gigantic structure, and the ceiling is very, very high. It’s filled with giant statues of saints, and there are tombs of deceased high-ranking clergymen everywhere, with statues of them as well. There are like, three or four places in which mass can be conducted. The very middle (the intersection of the cross; most Catholic churches have floorplans shaped like crosses) has this giant black decorative thing above where they discovered what they think are the bones of St. Peter, the first pope and Jesus’s homeboy, even though Peter was kind of a scared little bitch about the whole crucifixion thing. But forgive and forget (or if you’re a Catholic, just look the other way). Dom Ambros was telling me that people were exploring the vast catacombs beneath Rome, and they saw with little  note scratched into the wall that said “Here lies Peter” or something. They found a skeleton complete except the feet. Supposedly after Peter was crucified upside down, his followers cut him down at the ankles and made off with his body lest the Romans steal it. Then they sent the bones to this bone specialist university in Israel, without telling them where they found it or that they thought it was Peter, and everything the specialists came up with matched Peter. They said he was a fisherman from Galilee who lived around the first century, &c. So they’re pretty durned sure it’s ol’ Petey. Anyway so they built this massive cathedral over where they found him. There’s kind of this stairway that leads down to his tomb, but you’re not allowed to go down it. I assume the Swiss Guards would come and beat you to death with their pantaloons if they caught you trying. So St. Peter’s is just really really big and really really full of stuff. I think that’s where the popester conducts mass when he’s in Rome. There’s a museum attached to the cathedral, but I decided not to pay for it because I’m cheap and it didn’t sound too terribly interesting and I did the Vatican museum later anyway. There’s also some little gift shops and stuff. I went outside and there was this place where they’d let you climb to the top of St. Peter’s cupola for €5, so I did that. The stairs are super tiny, so they’ve got to have two different sets for people going up and going down; there’s no way you’d ever be able to fit two people on the same stair. Once you get to the actual dome the stairs are really close to the outside, so the walls are actually slanted along with the dome, so you can’t stand up completely straight. Anyway, once you get to the top there’s a really spectacular view of Rome, and you can walk around the entire cupola to get a 360° view. Unfortunately the Vatican is kind of on the edge of Rome, but it’s still a really nice view. After this I asked a guy in a suit (lots of them work at the Vatican) how to get to the Sistine Chapel, and he showed me on my map, and said in a really funny way something like, “You must go around here and then walk, walk walk walk walk.” I enjoyed it. Anyway so to get to the Sistine you have to buy a ticket for the Vatican museum for €15 and then you walk through the entire museum and the chapel’s at the end. So I did that. One of the first things I saw was this statue called Laocoön and His Sons, and it’s one of my favourite pieces of art. It comes from the story of the Trojan war where Laocoön was I think this Trojan prophet that pulled some dick move to get the Greeks killed (you can get the more accurate details by Googling the bloke), and so the Greek gods sent these serpents to come kill him and his sons. So the statue is of this muscular guy and these two young boys, and they’re all naked (they thought sculpting clothing was a cop-out in those days, I guess), and these serpents are wrapped around them, and they’re all struggling but their limbs are entangled and they have these fraught expressions on their faces. I really like it. Some farmer was digging in his fields in the 16^th century and just found it underground, which is amazing because it’s taller than I am. It’s a big sculpture. They think it was made around the first century, which puts it at around 2000 years old, which is cool. When they found it parts of it were missing, for instance one of Laocoön’s arms. This sculptor decided to guess how it originally looked and sculpt the rest of it, and they kind of restored it. But then this German scholar was in a Roman antique shop and he saw this stone arm and was like, “Hey, that’s Laocoön’s arm!” So they compared it to the statue and it fit, so they took off the fake bits and put on the real arm, and it was actually in a completely different position from what they thought, so they had guessed wrong. Anyway I learned about it in this art history class I took in high school and it was my favourite piece of art, so it was completely cool to stand in front of the real deal. It’s all cracked with age.

Pretty much as Catholic as a human can be.

Michelangelo's Pietà.

Laocoön and His Sons

There’s a bunch of other cool old stuff that the popes collected over the years in the museum, lots of ancient old sculptures and statues and things. Some of them are really famous, I guess. They had this room with all animal sculptures, and a bunch of them were of carnivores and herbivores in mortal combat, for instance these dogs fighting a deer or something, so that was a really cool room. They also have an Etruscan wing (the Etruscans lived in Rome before the Romans), so it’s all really, really old pottery and spearheads and stuff. Like, really old. Two to three thousand years old or more. That stuff would make your great granddad feel like a spring chicken.

Perseus holding Medusa's head.

Anyway there’s a lot in there, including some more modern stuff. They even have a couple paintings by Salvador Dalí, which I was really surprised to find in there. But then again, knowing Catholic priests and their history of encounters with little boys, maybe I shouldn’t have been. Sorry, Catholic readers. It’s just really easy to make fun of you. But I deeply love a few devout Catholics, so you know, nothing personal. Anyway, what was I saying? Oh yeah, so they’ve got some modern stuff, and in fact a lot of Dalí’s work had significant religious meaning, it wasn’t all melting clocks and dicks (just most of it was that). Anyway I only saw two Dalís. There was also a bit where they had all the carriages driven by popes through the years, so you start with big elegant Baroque horse-drawn deals, and work your way down until you get to automobiles, finally ending with that popemobile that John Paul II went around in, that Mercedes-Benz white ugly truck thing with this glass case in the back and a chair where he could sit and do his wavy thing to his adoring crowds.

Finally the Sistine Chapel, which was bloody amazing. Unfortunately they had stern Italian guys in there who kept saying “No photo!” and if they caught you taking a picture they’d come and make you delete it. As I’m sure you’ve heard, that famous God-and-Adam-trying-to-grope-one-another bit where their fingers are about to touch is only one tiny part of the Sistine, up in the middle of the ceiling. There are bunches of other frescoes everywhere of various Biblical scenes, from both the old and new Testaments, and it’s a really big place, which is why it took Michelangelo four years of just working on that one building to get it done. Also, it’s a rectangular building with a flat ceiling. For some reason I always thought it was a circular dome deal, but it’s not. I think my favourite bit was Michelangelo’s Last Supper, in which they’re all around the table similar to da Vinci’s Last Supper, except eleven of them have golden halos and Judas has like a silver halo and he’s sitting on the other side of the table. Guess he’s kind of an anti-saint. Though really I don’t see why they’d make Peter and everyone saints after they were always falling asleep on watch and denying they knew Jesus and not being faithful enough to walk on water, and not make Judas a saint. I guess they draw a line. Someone’s got to take the fall. Oh, also Judas committed suicide, I guess that’s minus points in the Catholic book. Anyway, the reason that’s my favourite bit is because on the floor in front of the table there is this cat and this rat, and they’re facing off. And they’re both baring their teeth and they look like they’re about to go for one another’s throats. It’s just so silly and unnecessary. You’ve got this big famous Biblical scene, and then this cat and this rat about to fight for no apparent reason. I loved it. Go, Michelangelo, go.

Right, so that was my Vatican experience. After the Vatican I looked around for a place to sleep. I went to this sort of cheap bed and breakfast that I’d found online. But it was kind of a walk, and then when I got there they were full. They called another hotel that his boss owned closer to downtown Rome, but it was like €60 a night, and I needed to stay two nights, and that was kind of over my budget. So then I went to one of the hostels I’d found online. It was one that was in the guy’s guidebook on Rome that I met in the shitty Innsbruck hostel a few posts back. I found it online in the shitty Rome hostel that morning, and then went to it that afternoon. It seemed like a nice place so I took it. It was so, so much better than the other one. On the way down the stairs from my room, who should I meet but the guy from Toronto that I ran into outside the station the day before! You remember, the one who asked to borrow my Czech map. It turns out this was the hostel he was staying at, which he eventually found. We were passing one another on the stairs and he said, “Hey!” and I kind of stared at him for a bit, then said, “. . . Toronto, right?” and he said, “Yeah! California, right?” I said, “Yeah!” and then I knew it was that guy. So that was a cool thing.

I went to my old hostel to get my stuff (which was still there, fortunately; I’d been worrying all day) and then went back to the new hostel. Outside this bar next to our hostel was the same Canadian. He was eating pasta and drinking wine, and invited me to join him for a glass. So I deposited my stuff and returned. It turns out his name is John, and we ended up hanging out together for the rest of the night. I had some wine and pasta, and noticed that his accent is basically American, but certain words he says with a Canadian flair, which is funny. Because you’d never know he was Canadian, and then all of a sudden he’ll say something in a really Canadian way. Particularly the word ‘out.’ Anyway so we relaxed for a bit and then went back up to the hostel. I met two of my roommates, who hail from Germany and were pleased that I spoke some German. We got along well. I went down to the main area to do some work; that’s where the Internet is, I think I was just working on my blog though. Eventually the Germans came by and said they were going to the famous Spanish Steps in Rome to sit and drink some beers, which I guess was a thing that a lot of people do, and invited me to join them. I said okay, and a bit later John the Canadian comes down, and I said hey, let’s go to the Spanish steps. So he said okay and we met down in the bar in a bit. We had some wine and got to talking, and ended up staying there a good long while. We had espresso with a shot of this Italian liqueur that tastes like licorice, but not quite like Jägermeister. It was delicious, and I wish I remembered what that stuff was called. I think it starts with an S. Anyway, we had some more drinks and met some people from the hostel. Of note is that we met this Swiss girl named Myrjam, with awesome long blonde hair and beautiful blue eyes. She speaks like, five languages, it’s crazy. Swiss German, High German, French, Italian and English. Anyway she was completely fluent in High German so we conversed in that, but she was also really good at English so she could help me out if I had some trouble. She also really cool to talk to because she has a passion for learning languages, and if I misspoke she’d correct my German, which was extremely helpful; most native German speakers will just nod their heads as long as they know what I mean. We also met this French girl named Matilde (possibly misspelled) who was really sweet, and some other people. John found a couple of Austrian girls from Vienna and tried to hook me up. I went up to talk to them but they were sitting in an area with really loud music. It’s hard enough to speak German for me, it was almost impossibly when we’re both shouting over music. Also the less hot one was doing most of the talking. Was nice anyway. We invited the girls to come to the Spanish Steps with us, but they went to bed. However, since the Swiss girl and I had both done the Vatican that day, and hadn’t yet seen the rest of Rome, we had both been planning to explore Rome the next day, and agreed to meet up at breakfast and set off together.

So John and I set off alone for the Spanish Steps, getting beers to go. On the way we ran out of beer and stopped by this bar to get more; we got this Italian stuff that was kind of weak, but whatever. I’d forgotten my Andechs bottle opener, so John taught me how to open a bottle with a lighter. Just now, I’m typing this from a hostel in Salzburg, and my bottle opener is in my other backpack in my room, and I’m too lazy to go in and get it, so I opened it with my lighter. Thanks, John. Anyway, by the time we got to the Spanish Steps it was after one in the morning, and almost no one was there, including my Germans. John and I talked about girlfriend troubles. He has a huge crush on his best friend’s sister and no one to open up to about it, poor guy. Since I don’t know any of his friends, obviously, he told me about his feelings and stuff, and I told him about my own girl troubles. By the time we finished the beers we were kind of tipsy; we’d been drinking for a few hours by that time. Anyway, we eventually headed home (this one guy tried to sell us roses . . . not sure why, it was just two guys alone). Along the way he decided to call one of his friends, who also knows all of his other friends, including best friend and sister, and talked to him about stuff. We got to the hostel and he kept talking, and I sat down to keep him company, and he smoked and handed me a cigarette, and I was drunk enough to smoke it (though normally I don’t smoke cigarettes; I think that was the fourth one I’ve smoked in my life). Went to bed. That was the last I saw of John the Lovelorn Canadian from Toronto; he had to catch an early flight to Amsterdam to meet up with his best friend (the one whose sister he likes).