Greetings from Rome!

Hi, we’re in Rome! After about 9 months of waiting, the big family vacay finally kicked off with a long direct flight from Chicago on ITA. The flight was uneventful except for the bad food and badly undersold seat inventory. There were so few people, we each had a row of four seats to ourselves! Since the flight left at 3 PM and landed in Rome at 11:30 PM body time, it wasn’t exactly an overnight flight. So we did the “work really hard to stay up as long as you can routine” and managed to get in a pretty good day!

Happy Travelers 

Upon arriving at Termini, we dropped our bags at a dumpy little bodega/luggage depot and got right to the sites. First up, the Papal Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, one of the four “major” basilicas in the world (they’re all here in Rome). This is an ancient edifice, the main structure dates to the fifth century, but like so many classical, Romanesque, Gothic, and Renaissance-era churches, SMM is the victim of gross Baroque redesign overreach. The best way to understand the Baroque mind is to imagine yourself as a little kid faced down by a soda fountain and unable to choose which flavor—so you just choose them all! Or perhaps as an adult person you visited a Flattop Grill and you faced a similar dilemma with respect to choosing which sauce to put on your protein-vegetable mis (and you didn’t choose, so you just put all the flavors in there). Baroque is everything all at once, like a Queen song. Thankfully, they had enough sense to leave alone the 5th Century mosaics around the transcript and apse, which are stunning. This church was a personal fave of the late, great Pope Francis, and he chose to be buried here. In typical Francis style, his tombs is an unadorned grotto with a white marble slab reading, simply, “FRANCISCUS.”  A bit of badly needed taste in these parts.

Pope Francis, ain’t puttin on airs

After, we headed two minutes down the street to a mosaic-lovers dream, the oft-overlooked St. Praxedes. This little gem-box is the work of 9th-century artisans who escaped Constantinople during the iconoclast controversy and came west to ply their trade in the old imperial capital. Of particular note is the tiny chapel of St. Xeno, where you can get very close to the mosaics and appreciate the insane handicraftsmenship required to compose these works. 

Nothing’s strange about St. Xeno except the world class craftsmanship

The chapel also holds the supposed pillar to which Jesus was chained and subsequently scourged. It’s a marble pillar and quite short, and having this particular pillar sounds like the kind of thing someone would say if they wanted to get a bunch of credulous medieval peasants to come visit the church they’ve just constructed. On a scale of relic credibility, I give this a 2. Remember, Jesus was a peasant and, though he was an efficient agitator against Roman oppression, nevertheless belonged to a disposable people in an imperial backwater; it is extraordinarily unlikely that relics pertaining to his life survived to today, simply because Rome didn’t care about him. Consider the thousands of supposed pieces of the true cross (if all of them were real, Jesus would have been crucified on a cross 50 feet high). Jesus was probably not the first person to be crucified on his cross, and unlikely to have been the last. His death—however important to the cosmos—was unlikely to have meant much to the local Roman garrison who crucified him. Just another criminal. Just another Tuesday. That it was “discovered” 300 years later by Helen, mother of the emperor Constantine, on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem (a city which had been completely and totally destroyed by Rome some 37 years after Jesus’ death) beggars belief.  And why does it matter anyway?!

Since we’re going to be seeing a lot of relics, let’s make a whole relic credibility scale out of 10 right now, shall we?

10 - This relic is verifiable with 100% certainty. Pretty much any Carlo Acutis relics, who died in 2006.

9 - 8 - This relic cannot be historically verified for certain, but evidence suggests it is likely real. E.g., Catherine of Sienna’s head or the bones of St. Ambrose.

7-6 - Plausibly real, given historical circumstances. I’m too tired to find an example, but you get it.

5-4 - Unlikely, but not impossible, like the Holy Stairs.

3-2 - Sure, Jan. (You can’t prove a negative, of course, but highly, highly improbable.) The aforementioned column, or the vial of St. Januarius’ blood in Naples.

1 - Outright forgery, like all the “heads of John the Baptist” floating around Europe. 

I didn’t mention Santa Maria Maggiore’s relic, which Jesus’ crib. Sure, Jan. When we visited, it was being mobbed by the adoring faithful, but I dunno, man. St. Jerome is buried here! That’s way cooler, and like an 8 on the credibility scale. Why on earth are people here to see Jesus’ supposed crib? Anyway, back to St. Praxedes…the kids thought the whole place was gorgeous and I was super pleased they were enjoying themselves in these ancient churches! I love all this stuff, but I recognize that others (wrongly) don’t always love all of it. So you can imagine how proud I was of the kids.

Santa Maria Maggiore

Afterwards, we processed down the leafy Via Merulana to the mother church of all Roman Catholicism, St, John  Lateran. Wait, isn’t St. Peter’s the mother church, you ask? No! As the seat of the bishop of the diocese of Rome, St. John’s is the money melon. In fact, the Popes all lived here until St. Peter’s was rebuilt during the Renaissance. It’s a super big and lovely and cool church, featuring massive Bernini sculptures of all the apostles, including Bartholomew, of ritzy island fame, who’s depicted holding his own skin (he was martyred by being flayed alive). Leo XIII, father of modern Catholic Social Teaching, is buried here in an elaborate tomb. Pour one out. We wandered the church for a bit, then headed back the way we came to grab some pizza and our bags before heading to our lodgings near the ancient Largo Argentina archaeological site, where Caesar was assassinated on the Ides of March in 44 BC (seriously, it’s right outside our doorway).

In the evening, we took a short stroll over to the Pantheon for some appetizers and a look see at one of the most intact of all Roman buildings. The West lost the ability to build domes on this scale until Brunelleschi’s study of the Pantheon roof lead to a breakthrough that allowed him to design and construct the Duomo in Florence—1,400 years later. And, hey, Rafael is buried in here, which is a bonus.

Pantheon paring well with an Aperol Spritz or Belinni

We were so tired at this point, we slept-ate a dinner of pasta and pizza, scored some gelato, and beat a hasty retreat back to our hotel. Incidentally, both the floor and ornate, pained ceiling of our room date from the 17 Century, when the building was some big shot’s apartments. Cool!

More on tap. Stay tuned!