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Some friends and I went to Rome in March - mainly to fountain/café hop and shop. Of course we had to go to the Vatican while we were there. It was much smaller than I thought it would be having seen so many movies with the Plaza jam packed with people. It was quiet being early spring, so we almost had the place to ourselves (well the other several hundred tourists and us). There were long cues to visit the galleries which moved very quickly, but the Sistine Chapel was closed. It's only open on certain days as the breath (carbon dioxide and moisture) of all the visitors is slowly eating away at the paintings.
There's a dress code! No shorts! Or maybe it's no knees! It was most amusing to see some of the skaterboys low-riding so they could pass inspection.
St. Peter's Basilica
Where the plaza felt small, the Basilica seem to reach up to the heavens. Each wing branched off into smaller galleries with marble statues of long dead Popes and Saints towering over 20 feet and larger. It can feel intimate in these smaller spaces but stepping back before the alter and tomb of St. Peter - you feel ant-like.
The Pietà, (Michael Angelo Bounarroti) is heartbreaking in its beauty. The marble statues are testaments to the finest abilities of man during very hard and harsh centuries. Standing in front of the life's work of so many talented people does make you revaluate what your own goals are. How they were able to use the grain of the stone like in the cloak of Death and fold marble like it was cloth. The pieces and the domes showed how people can dream and how far we can stretch our arms out for those dreams.
But I couldn't help but feel an incredible weight that all this wealth was spent on art by what was supposed to be a group who had vowed to fight poverty. Yes, there's the double argument that without the money, there would be no art and the church was acting as guardian of the future… But when weighed against the poverty faced in third world countries where the church's following is the strongest - it made us debate; the future of the catholic church, the place of organised religion in modern man's lives, the whole concept of charitable giving. We went in to see "the sights" innocently like all ignorant tourists but spent the afternoon in serious thought and in engrossed, even inspired conversation.
Maybe that's the ultimate purpose of such places - to make you think and question.
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