Saturday, November 12 - The Holy See

The next stop on the travel itinerary was the Vatican, and due to the sheer vastness of the place and the quantity of its treasures, we had a show-up-late-and-die call time of 7:30 Saturday morning. Those of you who have had the misfortune of dealing with me any time before 9:00am know that I'm just not at my best at that hour, particularly when I'm still getting over the effects of a cold. Well, never one to disappoint, I hauled myself out of the hotel in a grumpy mood, completely unfit for the holy site we were about to visit. It was early, I was tired even beyond my usual level at that hour, and I had managed to knock my camera battery charger off the Kleenex dispenser in the bathroom (the only available outlet in the room) into the toilet. Sometimes, I'd have to confess that I'm probably not good for international relations.

But we pressed on into the daylight. As the world's second-smallest independent nation, the Holy See nevertheless receives staggering numbers of tourists-some 10 million last year-and nowhere is this more evident than in the morning queue for the Vatican museums. On this morning, the line snaked out the museum doors, the remaining length of the north walls, and about three-quarters the distance to the east wall's opening at the mouth of St. Peter's Square. Apparently this line is particularly long in the mornings because the museums aren't yet open, so we optimistically took our place in the queue and waited for our local guide. After she arrived and gave a brief introduction to the site the museum opened, and-to my surprise-the line began to move. Before long we were at a security checkpoint, and with a wave of the officer's hand, we were in. Surprise!

Unfortunately, my feelings of rapture were to be somewhat short-lived. The Vatican museums are impossibly vast, and today they were brimming with all the tourists I had observed earlier while waiting in line. These both make the site somewhat difficult to take in, and although I walked that day among some of the world's finest masterpieces of devotional art, I came away with precious little that I could say about them. Our tour began at the Cortile della Pigna (Pinecone courtyard), proceeded through the tapestry collection, the Gallery of Maps and the Raphael rooms, and concluded at the Sistine Chapel. This testament to Michelangelo's genius is truly awe-inspiring, but was packed so tightly with visitors that it's nearly impossible to fully appreciate on a normal visit. Still, we doggedly made our way through, but after getting completely separated I spent the last 45 minutes of the tour trying to locate the rest of our group among the throng of tourists and pilgrims. Although I eventually found our party, they were leaving the museum and I would be unable to go back on this visit. Dang.

Needless to say this didn't do my already-glum disposition any help, and I moped along, now feeling especially sorry for myself. I briefly protested as we got in another frightfully long queue to enter St. Peter's Basilica, but more optimistic heads prevailed and we went anyway. By this time my moping had just given way to full-scale pouting, and I resigned myself to another dreary visit to another boring site I wouldn't even be able to see for the crowds. So I stood thus, waiting... for death or some similar fate to overcome me.

Upon entering the sanctuary, I immediately realized that death might well be the only human spiritual experience comparable to that which inspired St. Peter's Basilica. The interior, which houses hundreds of enormous and incredibly gorgeous works of art, is built to such an impossible scale that-as author Bill Bryson attests to in his book Neither Here Nor There-you have to be standing right next to a column or some other part of the physical structure to get any idea of just how huge it is. I walked around the Baldacchino and the papal altar to the south, dragging my jaw along the floor as I went, until I arrived at the back of the shrine directly under the dome. There, a Saturday afternoon service was in progress, and after listening to the choir and the magnificent organ, I collected myself and made my way dumbly back to the exit, taking pictures as I went. Thousands of other visitors were probably in the Basilica at the same time, and I never once noticed. The overall effect was just far too overwhelming.

After leaving St. Peter's, we stopped for a few moments in the Vatican bookstore to look around a buy a couple of stamps. Later that afternoon we toured the interior of the Colosseum, stopped to hunt down a geocache, and got a bite to eat, but those activities went by in a blur. Soon, it was time to head back to the hotel and digest what I'd seen. I tried for a while to read through a visitor's guide we picked up at the bookstore, but I just got overwhelmed all over again and had to go to sleep. I'll sort through it at a later date, I guess.

Good night,
Leanne