Rome, Day 3

Today continues the theme of being very, extremely hot. We topped out at 100 degrees again, this time right about when we trudged the 500+ stairs to the top of St. Peter’s, but more on that later.

The first half of the day was a comedy of errors; I got us up too early, sacrificing an hour of sleep in order to arrive an hour before our Vatican Museums entrance time. Juliet has caught James’ cold, and has it worse than he did, so she struggled through the day sniffling and just generally feeling kind of “punky,” as my mom would say. Well, this really came to a head within about 15 minutes of entering the Museums. A guard told us to return a very specific way to the ground floor to get a pass out so Erica could run to a pharmacy for some children’s ibuprofen. But when we got down there, another guard informed us no such opportunity existed, and more than that, because we had descended the exit stairs, we had to leave. He was resolute in the face of my complaints, then Erica’s, but eventually relented and let us take the (very cool, old, fancy) elevator back to the museum floor. Anywhozzle, at this point we all decided just to gut it out, and Juju put on her best face and we marched on.

James and the giant Lacoon

Now, the Vatican Museum is one of the largest and best museums in the world. The bulk of its collection is the personal property of a hundred popes, and represents the absolute best of Antiquity (with a healthy dollop of Renaissance goodness thrown in; Rafael’s Transfiguration, anyone? Da Vince’s St. Jerome, that doing anything for you? There’s even a some Matisses and a Picasso, if modernity’s your bag). James and Juliet are art lovers, at least the classical sculpture part of art. James’ love derives ultimately from his interest in Greek mythology via Percy Jackson; Juliet thinks the naked butts are funny. Look, what gets you in the room, as the saying goes, is not necessarily what keeps you in the room, and whatever it takes for at least one of our kids to become a classicist or medievalist or archaeologist or a student of paleo-linguistics, is fine by me. Erica did a fair bit of piggybacking Juliet through the looooong hike to the Sistine Chapel, which sits at the end of the museum, so kudos to mom. At one point, Juju left her fannypack in a bathroom stall, and retrieving it meant a long conversation with security, who take abandoned bags very seriously. 

We braved the extreme heat (the museum has little to no climate control, which seems insane given the pricelessness of its collection) and battled the crush of crowds to the Sistine Chapel, where we got a rare chance to sit and chat all about Michaelangelo's handiwork. BUT, whereas every other time I've been in the Sistine Chapel I've been able to pass through the loosely-guarded "tour groups only" passageway directly into St. Peter's Basilica, this time the martinet manning the door was giving every guided group a thoroughgoing review to weed out hangers-on like us. So we had to trudge back through the museum to the entrance (over a quarter of a mile away), then another half mile around to the front of the basilica in the blazing sun in order to enter it. Maybe you feel like that's just desserts, but let me just say that rewarding the tour groups with easy passage is incentivizing the very people who make visiting the Vatican Museums so hectic.

Here I choose to indulge my worse angel and interpret the situation in the least flattering light possible. With respect to the tour guides, we are not talking about learned lovers of art here, keen to share their passion with like-minded religious devotees and antiquarians. They are more akin to New York City cabbies (who, I dunno, maybe at one point enjoyed exploring the city in their cabs?), but who are now battle-scarred cynics, speaking on autopilot into mic'ed headsets while they sadistically drive their great hordes of dead-eyed, cowlike customers on an itinerary that includes only to the most famous pieces, with all the charm and charisma of drywall. God help you if you deign to pause to read a placard, you will be unceremoniously barged out of the way and then separated from your friends or family by their whole waddling retinue, who anxiously follow directly in the wake of their misanthropic leader lest they be abandoned in a sea of other helpless souls similarly engaged and miss their bus back to the cruise port. Buying a guide book and taking your time with a small group of friends and family, on the other hand, is a much better way to experience the museum, and at half the cost. If anything, the Vatican should prioritize these serious good and righteous folks and let THEM (us) go into the Basilica from the Sistine Chapel. Yes, yes, money talks and they’re paying a kickback to the Vatican for the privilege of swift passage, but the Popes have been one of the very few global moral voices of our age opposing the Mammonization of everything, so someone (not me, I’m on vacation) should write a strongly-worded letter to Pope Leo on the matter.

Rafael's School of Athens

On our walk to St. Peter’s, we paused for lunch and kids ibuprofen, and given the heat, some medically-necessary gelato. The kids were rightly delighted by the basilica, the world’s largest church, while Erica and I fought to balance our own delight in the sheer artistic and engineering marvel of the church and the twin pangs of the juxtapositioning of this place with the life and times of the poor carpenter, and the callous and cruel means by which funding for the basilica were secured (wars, indulgences, and the like). After touring the upper floor, which includes the lightly-waxed body of Pope John XXIII on display (patron of our home parish), we descended into the crypt to see lotsa pope tombs, including those of recent office-holders Paul VI, JP I, JP II, and Benedict XVI. James remained interested while Juliet was starting to fade. So we headed up again to start our pre-booked climb to the top of the dome.

St. Peter's above

The saint's relics, below

Now, we booked this before we knew it’d be 100 degrees, but we were all still were game, so we went ahead with it. It’s 551 steps to the top; roughly, the first half takes you up to the roof, then up a bit more and you emerge out onto an internal balcony that encircles the bottom of the dome. From here you can see several hundred feet down to the church floor, where the people look small as ants. The kids were pretty well spooked by this (you can’t fall though, there’s an 8-foot plexiglass barrier along the walkway to prevent falls), and Juliet did a bit better with it than James did. After that, you take a series of tight, stepped passageways that wind up between the interior and exterior of the dome at a sideways angle, then a few more hilariously teensy spiral staircases to the cupola at the tip top. This is the highest point in the city, so you get an uninterrupted 360 degree view. If you lived in Rome, you could see your house from there. 

Dome interior view

We did it!

After descending, we completed a lap through the surprisingly modest (though hopelessly overrun) gift shop, where Juliet was talked down from a 20 euro calendar to a 3 euro vial of holy water (“No, you cannot drink that! Put the lid back on!) Afterward, we headed out into the square and over to the bus stop. We’ve pretty much only taken busses in Rome, which are fast, cheap, and efficient once you get used to how the system works (the Metro is limited, given the difficulty of digging under and around so many ruins, so you can’t use for easy access many of the major sites in the city). The bus back was actually air conditioned (sort of), and we took a long siesta in the afternoon. 

Our evening passiagiata began at the nearby Campo d’Fiori, a scruffy square doubling by day as a flower and vegetable market and by night as a lively hang-out spot with restaurants and cafes. Though it was still 93 degrees, the evening scene was popping off, with locals sweating over their piping hot espressos and resolutely refusing to wear shorts. The kids played a bit in the fountain before we wandered over to the massive, oval-shaped Piazza Navona (it retains the shape of the Roman circus that was once here), basically a bigger, livelier version of the Campo d’Fiori. Did we take the time to appreciate Bernini’s grandiose Fountain of the Four Rivers? No! The kids were whining for dinner, so we schlept on (I say “schleped” because one of the writers of this blog was suffering from an acute case of chafing) to our dinner reservation near the Pantheon.

After carbo loading again, we got some gelato and headed to the famous Trevi Fountain. It was typically crowded, so could barely see it at first, but with patience managed to wait out a few tedious instagrammers and their idiotic, self-unaware posturing (one girl had her boyfriend taking hundreds of pics of her with both her phone and a separate pocket camera for that “old school 90s look”) and eventually got up to the railing for an admiring view and a photo of our own. Afterwards, James and Juliet paid a euro each to buy this gross little squishy toy from a street vendor; it does nothing but kind of splat when you throw it on a hard surface, then reform into a ball. Unsurprisingly, they did not long survive.

A single, tasteful photo is all you need

Last, it was off to the Spanish Steps. Man, that’s a cool hang out spot, and right at the foot there’s a neat little potable fountain in the shape of a sunken boat by Bernini’s father, the lesser known Pietro Bernini. The kids ran up and down the steps while Erica and I sweated. The square was crowded with tourists, vendors, young lovers making out, and drunken teenagers (it’s open carry here, people). One could just stay there all night with a bottle of vino and a couple of glasses if one was not with a seven year old whose cold was starting to worsen. So, off we trotted back to the hotel for some well-deserved rest.

Steps and boat

Tomorrow, it’s off to Napoli! Ciao!