il papa don't preach

We're sitting in this cool little bar with blue light in Sorrento, where we've been for a couple of days. It's Carnevale, so kids in costumes are walking by the door outside. Bobby Vinton is playing. I just finished working on arbitration stuff... even in Italy. Unfortunately, I've gotten behind on here so I have to back up to Rome before I can talk about Naples and Amalfi. (Note for the VCs: Brie is here, safe and sound, jet-lagged but having a good time. We found her easily at Termini Station. She sends "kisses and squeezes to Schmoopie and Schmooperton" in a kind of high-pitched voice. Schmoopie and Schmooperton, I assume you know who you are.)

Friday night was our last day of school. The teachers gave Yvette and I each homework anyway, but I'm pretty sure I won't be completing it. Maybe Yvette will. That night we walked to the other side of Termini Station to a friend's new apartment, on a kind of creepy path that freaked us both out a little. We finally found our way away from the station, past a medieval wall into the neighborhood, which had a lot of graffiti and seemed rundown but was well-lit. The neighborhood was just off our maps, so it was a little difficult to find the place. An Italian couple came up to me and asked for directions to the exact street we were going. I meant to say, "I don't know, we're looking for it too," but what I said was, "I don't know, we're seeing it too." The guy looked at me for a second, and then said, "Ohhh," like "Ohhh, I get it, you're an idiot", which was pretty fairly well-deserved, and turned around to ask someone else. So then we just followed them and found Vincenzo's. (The New Yorker from my class who got laid off from Chase Morgan and moved here for a year.) We toasted with some wine to christen his new apartment and then walked to an enoteca near his house. We met people from school at this dive bar with no sign that had a band playing "folk Italian", which sounded suspiciously like Celtic Rock to me. It was fun in a surreal sort of way. On the way back a girl named Sara, who's traveling around Italy for a year working on various organic farms, walked with us and we felt a bit safer. (Incidentally, everyone we meet at the school has moved here for at least a year. When we say we're leaving in a month or two, they shake their heads in disappointment and pity.)

We wanted to get up early to hit the Vatican, so obviously I was miserable four hours later when the alarm went off. At the train station I was nearly accosted by a group of Roma girls who wanted to "help" me buy my train ticket, but Yvette gave them the evil eye.

The Vatican is pretty amazing. I guess one would assume that. We had actually gone to see just St. Peter's a few nights before, and were there when it was about to close, and was lovely and nearly empty. Even the courtyard is gorgeous. If you stand in front of St. Peter's you can look up to your right and see the Pope's window. (Il papa, they call him here. I kept hearing references to "papa" in random circumstances and didn't get what they meant for quite a while.) That's his study window, with the light on, and his bedroom to the right.

St. Peter's is built on the spot where Peter was crucified upside-down. His remains, buried in a nearby cemetery for three centuries, were secretly revered by persecuted Christians before Charlemagne made Christianity acceptable, and were eventually moved to the site where the basilica is built. The building is breathtaking in and of itself, especially because mass was ending as we came in and strains of organ music were dying away, but my favorite was Michelagelo's Pietà near the front entrance. It's just one of those things... it looks nice and everything in pictures, Mary looks a little oversized maybe, but when you look at it in the church, it's just... beauty itself. It's silly for me to post a picture after making this point but you should just look at it as much as possible I think.

Anyway, we went back to the Vatican Saturday morning to do the museum itself. We got up early to wait in a long, cold line outside. A Spanish couple stepped in front of us and a German couple behind, but I didn't say anything, because I didn't know how to say "no cutsies, no backsies" in either of those languages.

Our guide book (more on that later) told us to skip around a bit and see the Pinoteca first (paintings from the 13th through 17th centuries... normally you would see things in a chronological order) so we did, and I'm so glad because it was empty. We could walk through the rooms quietly and see the transformation from the pre-Renaissance to the Renaissance and watch the art becomes something else altogether. There was one room with a Caravaggio and another painting with a name I can't remember by a painter I didn't recognize but will figure out, it was of two saints being martyred, tied together and sliced open. It was so realistic and gripping I had tears in my eyes, and my throat is closing a little now thinking of it. It was so amazing to see these incredible pieces and be moved... and not just feel that I am supposed to be moved, which is a more common feeling.

The rest of the Vatican was fascinating but exhausting, because then we hit the crowds. It was really cool to see The School of Athens, for example, but we were basically getting mauled by tour groups. These are some pictures from Yvette:




After that we climbed the dome of St. Peter's. It was 4 euros to take an elevator up the first 200 or so steps and then climb the next 300, and 7 euros to climb the whole thing, which is what we did. The first part was actually the easy part. The last couple of hundred were narrow and either spiraling or sort of slanted sideways, so you hand to bend at a sideways angle at the waist. I don't think Yvette will ever be the same.

The amazing part was really the halfway up part, where you could look down at the inside of St. Peter's. That place is just amazing, looking up or down. There are seven-foot high black letters against a gold background that ring the church, spelling out in Latin everything Christ said to Peter in the Bible. From the floor they don't seem like they could possibly be so tall, but from above them you can get a slightly better idea of the vastness of the church.

The top was fine, but really crowded and sort of claustrophobic. Rome is a little smoggy (like home sweet home) and I'm not sure the view was worth the walk up. Yvette and I walked around the dome for about half an hour looking for each other, probably circling on the other side from one another like a Tom and Jerry cartoon.

That night we headed back to the room and then to the train station to meet our freshman starter, Brienne, looking much cuter in her new boots than us. We began resenting her immediately.