CPUnk I write right. Right? Aye.

Vaticanville — home of the hidden Pope and much much more!

Rome is a very crowded city . It was built a jil­lion years ago, and then built again and again and again … so now, it’s just this big lay­ered city of stuff. You know when you go by an alley where all the cool bands have posted their fly­ers for the last twenty years — and it’s just lay­ers and lay­ers of paper pasted on top of each other — but then peo­ple have come along sand torn strips out of it, so you can see the lay­ers under­neath? That’s Rome — with restau­rants and streets, and lots of fast dri­ving in tiny lit­tle cars.

At any point, you can be watch­ing an elec­tric tram go by across cob­ble­stones that were put down by cap­tured slaves two thou­sand years ago, while look­ing off in the dis­tance at a sky­scraper being built behind the ruins of an ancient 100ft high wall. It’s a hodge­podge of stuff … and the peo­ple just live on it and in it.

In the midst of all that is an entire sep­a­rate country.

The Vat­i­can
We headed to the Vat­i­can on our first real day here, and it was very Vat­i­cany. It’s a very small “city” — more like a col­lege cam­pus with atti­tude. It cov­ers 100 acres, and has a wall around it, from the times when the Pope was some­times hated by every­one and treated like a King. Vat­i­can City itself is a sov­er­eign state — the small­est in the world — and we walked around most of it on our way to the Vat­i­can Museum.

We started out at St. Peter’s Square, the place you usu­ally see the pic­tures of the “throngs of peo­ple” when the Pope comes out and waves. Our orig­i­nal under­stand­ing was that we had a good chance of see­ing him on Wednes­day — but after some blank stares and con­fused looks, we finally deter­mined that he was giv­ing pri­vate audi­ences that day and wasn’t gonna come to the win­dow and wave. So St. Peter’s Square was essen­tially empty (except for the long line of peo­ple wait­ing to get into the Basil­ica, but more on that later).

St. Peter’s Square is “out­side” the wall, so we just headed around the out­side of the city to the entrance for the Museum, where we had tick­ets. This entrance was orig­i­nally sort of a “side door” through the wall (which is about 80 feet high), and now leads directly into the museum.

If you imag­ine the city as a square, most of it is filled with build­ings that are all inter­con­nected. The largest of these build­ings is the Basil­ica — and many of the build­ings have been trans­lated into the Museum. These build­ings include the orig­i­nal Papal apart­ments, and the Sis­tine Chapel. There are also gar­dens in the museum and a vari­ety of stat­ues, busts, and paintings.

So, the stan­dard museum walk ensues, with lit­er­ally thou­sands of peo­ple walk­ing around with you. The upside is that see all sorts of really awe­some stuff (includ­ing actual mum­mies for some rea­son), the down­side is you’re doing it in what feels like the down­town mall the day before Christ­mas. It was packed with crowds of tours absolutely every­where.

So … we had a chance to see a lot of cool art­work — we saw orig­i­nal Rafaels, which Kathy liked a lot. These would be the mas­ter­pieces that were orig­i­nally painted onto the walls of the Papal apart­ments — they were very com­plex images that make for a lot of med­i­tat­ing and think­ing on the sto­ries of the Bible — which is pretty cool. Rafael was a favorite of the Pope and kind fo a painter “rock star” at the time — Michelan­gelo was actu­ally really frus­trated with the com­pe­ti­tion and the two were kind of ene­mies. One cool thing is that Rafael had a chance to see the work Michelan­gelo was doing on the Sis­tine Chapel (dur­ing a closed pri­vate view­ing) and was so impressed that he painted Michelan­gelo into one of his Fres­cos (The School of Athens) — which is in the Pope’s Library (now a pub­lic museum). As we wan­dered, we also saw a whole bunch of stat­ues rang­ing in size from a few feet to 20 feet tall, and then even­tu­ally we made it to the Sis­tine Chapel.

This Chapel has a great his­tory, Michelan­gelo did it all in Fresco behind locked doors. Fresco is basi­cally col­ored plas­ter, you put it on wet, and when it dries, it is the wall — and it’s gor­geous, of course. Trav­el­ing between all these places feels like going from room to room, so when you enter the Sis­tine Chapel, it’s like walk­ing into the next room. It’s an active chapel, the altar is Sanc­ti­fied … and you’re sup­posed to stay quiet (ha!).

So — pic­ture it like this — it’s a huge box. There’s no arches or “churchy” archi­tec­ture — the ceil­ing and walls are com­pletely cov­ered with fres­cos, noth­ing in between — it’s a huge fresco room — and it’s about 100 feet long by 40 feet wide. It has no seats, noth­ing but the fres­cos, the altar and a sep­a­ra­tion screen towards the back. Now, fill the room with peo­ple. No no, I mean fill the room with peo­ple — bump bump, excuse me, hey watch your elbow … filled.

Got the pic­ture? A few hun­dred peo­ple in that room, all milling about look­ing at the (absolutely amaz­ingly gor­geous) fres­cos? Now — up by the altar, put the guards — who are there osten­si­bly to ensure that there are no pic­tures, that peo­ple treat the room as a chapel (ha!) and that peo­ple are silent (ha, har, HA ha hardy har!).

The ceil­ing is about 20–30 feet above, so you’re cran­ing your neck to look at stuff, there’s this milling crowd of peo­ple, there’s that low hum that’s cre­ated when crowds “whis­per” … there’s a reg­u­lar angry yelling from one of the older guards (who really needs a vaca­tion) “Silen­cio! SiiiLEEEENCio!!!!”

It was — to say the least — sur­real … but won­der­fully beau­ti­ful. No pic­tures allowed.

So even­tu­ally — we went through a “secret” short­cut (along with a few hun­dred other peo­ple) that got us directly to the Basil­ica (which means “wow, that’s just too big — who built this?” in Latin).

To give you an idea of how large this is … we decided to jump a chain so we could just go right in — and the kids and I made it (it wasn’t a crime, just a desire not to walk “all the way over there” to get around the chain — but Kathy was busted by one of the guards and had to go out through one of the front doors and come in through the other right next to it (a sim­ple U-turn through two doors). The place is so huge that we lost each other dur­ing that sim­ple turn around.

No no — I don’t think you under­stand how large this, the largest church in the world, actu­ally is.

Upon enter­ing — you see the entire space — which is built to hold a con­gre­ga­tion of 60,000 peo­ple (that’s sit­ting down in rows) — the ceil­ings are so high you ignore them — they’re just way up there, hun­dreds of feet above. Now a church is nor­mally shaped like a cross — with each leg hav­ing a name. The “bot­tom” of the cross is called the Nave, the two “arms” of the cross are called the Tran­scepts, and the “top” of the cross is called the Sanc­tu­ary (that’s where the altar tends to be in most churches, along with the choir stalls, and other holy holy stuff.

So — we come in through one of the doors, and here’s this vast space … large enough to hold a jumbo jet — large enough to hold (with steeple) an entire cathe­dral (more on that in a sec­ond) … you’re just like “whoa — dude, this is y’know … huge.”

Over on the right is the Pieta (a pieta is any art­work depict­ing Mary with the fallen body of Christ, sad) by Michelan­gelo. It’s one of the most famous mas­ter­pieces ever made — and that tal­ented jerk did it when he was 24. It’s quite lovely.

So — you stroll along in this vaste gigan­tic space, amazed at how large it is … and head to the Altar (which stands seven sto­ries tall), and all of the sud­den you real­ize that this vast cav­ern of a build­ing (the Basil­ica itself cov­ers 6 acres of floor), the cav­ern you’ve been wan­der­ing through is actu­ally only the Nave — the lower leg of the cross … the Tran­scepts open up in either direc­tion a hun­dred yards each, and then behind the altar is the vast sanc­tu­ary space — which is also the size of a foot­ball field. Big church.

Aside from the fact that the entire air­plane hangar is made out of mar­ble and filled with mas­ter­pieces, it’s also got some pretty cool holy spots. In the West­ern Tran­scept is a small chapel nook com­mem­o­rat­ing the place where the Apos­tle Peter was cru­ci­fied. Yeah, the spot where it hap­pened. How do they know that? Because the obilisk out­side in the cen­ter of St. Peter’s Square was actu­ally the turn­ing point for a Roman race­way, which was a pub­lic place of enter­tain­ment that was well known. We thus know that this was the place of enter­tain­ment in which Peter was cru­ci­fied — and from the lay­out, we know where. Presto … we have the actual loca­tion. Trippy.

Of course, for those who don’t know it — Peter him­self is buried in a (fancy) crypt directly under­neath the altar, you can look down in there (it’s filled with gold leaf and stuff — not like some sort of creepy dark place) — and well … that’s kinda cool too. Here’s this ratty, white-trash fish­er­man — semi-educated, hot-headed — loud­mouth at times … best friend of Jesus … and well … “upon this rock” … God built His Church … and what a church it is. Kinda cool.

So … how big is this church? In a slightly grandiose style, they’ve put brass mark­ers into the floor lead­ing away from the altar, show­ing where other churches would be in com­par­i­son to size. The small­est one, near­est to the altar — yeah, that would be St. Patrick’s Cathe­dral in New York (the cute lit­tle Cathe­dral for the entire City of New York, yeah).

No joke — on roller­skates — from East to West, it’d prob­a­bly take you two min­utes to cross … from top to bot­tom, maybe four.

Big place.

We fin­ished off the visit with a few post­cards from Vat­i­can City, because they have their own post office. You get the fancy Vat­i­can City stamp and Post­mark, from the small­est sov­er­eign state in the world. Kinda cool.

Next post — the Colosseum.