Days 19-23 - Rome

The first task when arriving in Rome was getting from the train station to the hotel. We decided to walk – a mistake we would not make again when returning to the train station to catch our train to leave Rome for Milan. The footpaths and the human traffic made it very hard work.


We arrived on Holy Thursday, and I had no opportunity to go to confession. It would have been nice to go to Communion while in Rome at Easter, but, alas, it was not to be.

Our first dinner in Rome was tremendous. We found a little boutique place near our hotel, which served wild boar. I could not resist, and my temptation was rewarded by one of the better meals I’ve ever had. The vegetables were asparagus, zucchini and eggplant, and I did my best, which was considerably better than Rose’s. She had a beef fillet done with a sweet sauce that she enjoyed very much.

It turned out our only opportunity to see the inside of the Vatican would be on Good Friday morning, bright and early on the other side of Rome at 7:45am. We were greeted at our meeting place by a young lady who worked for the tour company. She demonstrated an incredible ability to look lost, confused, exasperated and slightly annoyed, all at the same time. The other couple who were meeting her there got lost, and so we were a little late getting to the Vatican Museum, and then there was more waiting outside the Vatican Museum, and a little more waiting inside the foyer of the Vatican Museum.

It was certainly worth the wait, although there isn’t much time on one of these tours to look around about 7km of Vatican Museum. Apparently some overly prudish Cardinals had ordered some of the ancient Roman statues have their naughty bits covered up, and one would have liked a little more time to look around the place.

However, the main event is down the corridor, as you enter the Sistine Chapel. Despite being full of people, it is still an amazing place. You can see the famous creation scene, as God leans out of a giant brain to touch the hand of Adam. You can see the Judgement Day scene, with the Cardinal who complained about all the naked people on the painting, so Michelangelo painted him in the lowest corner of hell, with Satan himself as a snake, surrounding the Cardinal and biting his Jatz Crackers. Somehow this greatest of artistic f**k yous has survived five hundred years.

After the Sistine Chapel we went outside, and fortunately the queue for the Vatican catacombs was short, so in we went. The most popular tomb is for John Paul II, who still garners a massive amount of admiration and love in Rome, and all over the Catholic world. The prize for me, however, was a little bit further.

Behind a glass screen is an artistic representation of Christ, and about fifteen feet under that is the tomb of St Peter.

In 1939, during renovations, the floor collapsed, and they were able to gain access to the original graves and tombs on which the original St Peter’s was built. They found a body, which tests proved to be a man of 65-70 years of age, who had the build of an agricultural worker such as a farmer or fisherman, who had both feet missing. St Peter, legend says, was crucified upside down at his own insistence by the Romans, and in order to get his body down from his cross before the Romans tossed his body into the Tiber River or fed it to the dogs, the early Christians in Rome took his body but left his feet. Pretty convincing story, that.

St Peter’s itself is a massive church, with mosaics all around instead of paintings, which mean that people can happily use their flashes on their cameras. Just like in the churches of Venice, corpses, or to be more accurate, one corpse, is on display. It is that of Pope John XXIII, the “People’s Pope”, who was elected as a stopgap and started the Second Vatican Council and changed the church for ever. Even after all these years, he looks in good condition.

The crowds inside St Peter’s and all around were crushing, to say the least. In one corner, a number of small confessionals advertised confession in different languages. I was tempted to wander off, but I was on a tour and couldn’t.

It was still morning when we left the Vatican City, and it was time to do what I call the “Rome Salute”. No, this is not some remnant of ancient times carried on through in the new, modern, Italian capital, but what seems like an endless stream of tourists looking at maps, then looking for street signs, then furrowing their brows and looking generally bewildered. It took us a while to get back to the hotel on foot, and having been walking for hours, we decided to rest.

Our pace in Rome soon began to resemble the pace in Venice – not as hectic, but a little more relaxed. As many citizens of Rome work on Good Friday, services for the commemoration of the Passion of Jesus are generally held in the evening. Our afternoon was spent watching snooker on Eurosport and relaxing. Rose now considers herself a bit of a snooker expert.

Rose then did something very nice to me: she accompanied to the Good Friday service down the road. Let the record show that probably Rose’s first attendance at Catholic services outside of weddings (including her own) and funerals was in Rome at Easter. Talk about being thrown in at the deep end.

Saturday would be filled with mundane things in the morning (laundry) and the ancient Roman area, including the Colosseum, in the afternoon. We took the opportunity to slowly wander down there in the early afternoon.

Rome is filled with people trying to sell you crap. One suspects that many may be illegal immigrants the system here ignores, so they are free to try and make a few Euros in order to live. Almost none of the stuff they sell is of any use, but they are persistent.

They have managed to preserve a massive amount of ancient ruins right in the middle of Rome, and it did seem a great time to go down there, on a sunny Saturday afternoon. However, we were met for our tour by our friend from the day before, looking more frustrated and completely lost than the day before. If all people are blessed with one world class talent, then looking like she didn’t know what was going on was this person’s.

Unfortunately they didn’t provide enough earphones and receivers for the group, which delayed us about an hour as our guide, a French woman, had the limits of her patients tested by a group predominantly made up of Americans. Americans are everywhere in Rome. By the time the extra sets had arrived we were already in the area of the ruins, and everyone was somewhat jaded by the experience.

By the time we got to the Colosseum we were hungry and tired, but the Colosseum is worth the trouble. I couldn’t help but feel sorry and sad that this great arena had been scavenged for marble and other materials for so long, leaving the site a sorry shell of what it once was.

Early on Sunday morning we made the train trip back to the Vatican City for Easter Sunday mass in the square. We had been told that we wouldn’t be able to get a seat, but it started to rain and this seemed to keep enough people away that a seat was easy to get.

We sat in the light rain for a while before a family two rows behind us gave their spare umbrella to us. It was a little broken, but we were grateful for the shelter.

The rain did its best to mar the mass in the open air, with readings and general intercessions in different languages, and a beautifully sung gospel, but the rain did stop for a short while, and at the most appropriate time – from the start of the consecration to the end of communion. Then it began to come down in bucketloads.

The Pope returned after mass to give his Easter address, followed by an Easter proclamation in what seemed like 43,387 languages. By this time we had decided it was time to try and get warm and dry.

Walking through a crowd of people with umbrellas fully expanded isn’t easy at the best of times, but when that crowd is 100,000 people in St Peter’s Square, it becomes nigh on impossible. It took a long time for us to even get to the edge of the Vatican City.

A long, wet walk down Rome’s incredibly narrow footpaths awaited us, as the rain continued to fall, and Rose started losing feeling in her lower extremities. I think we got back to the hotel just in time for a couple of hours of defrosting and drying.

Our Easter Sunday afternoon had been well planned – going to the local Irish Pub to watch Liverpool and Birmingham. Liverpool were once again disappointing, but five pints of beer each wasn’t. And, of course, we managed to have a group sitting next to us that included a young married couple from Mount Waverley.

We planned some shopping on the Monday, but almost everything was closed, so the day became a bit of a wash, which was probably just as well as we were both feeling the after affects of plenty of beer. Two burgers from Burger King always helps that along, and we bought a couple of DVDs to break the monotony. The only disappointment there was that we bought the wrong Bridget Jones movie, but it wasn’t quite as bad as advertised.

Only on the last morning did we really get to experience, albeit for a very short trip, the joys of being a passenger in an automobile in Rome. This town’s reputation in this regard precedes it, and a short trip to the train station (which we had walked with much difficulty on the way in) was certainly enough.