Gesundheit!!!

Hotel delle Province, April 30, 2015, 10:42 p.m.

I am so glad that I waited until now to write this blog entry.  Just a few hours ago, I was so disappointed in Rome that I was ready to chuck it all and run home.  But now, here in the hotel room with my babies, happy with a delicious dinner and most of a bottle of wine, I am willing to give the Eternal City another chance.  

We began at an early hour, 7:30 a.m., which, as anyone who knows Maddie will understand, is the middle of the night.  Cranky and cantankerous, the battling Herbons braved the Metro to the nearest station to the Vatican Museum.  After a bit of a walk, we found our tour guide and began our tour of the Vatican Museum, Sistine Chapel, and St. Peter's Basillica.

First, kudos to our tour guide, Eleanora.  She did her best to give us lets of information and lots of content for what we were seeing.  We were a group of just 20 people, from the U.S., Australia, Scotland, and, strangely, a guy from Denmark and his Chinese girlfriend (the world is a small place where lots of people speak English). 

Eleanora, the tour guide

The guy behind Heidi touched a girl's behind as she sat on a stairway railing he was using; he got his hand slapped for the trouble

That's the Sistine Chapel in the background 

When I imagined going to the Vatican, I expected for myself a feeling such as I had with other big churches in the world, like St. Mark's, Notre Dame, St. Germain-des-Pres, etc. While I am not a believer, I absolutely love the history of Christianity and feel so absorbed into the past in those sacred spaces.  

Yeah, this was nothing like this.  A visit to the Vatican Museum has all the charm of waiting in line at the D.M.V.  According to our guidek, 30,000 people visited the Vatican Museum just today--and it felt like they were all there at the exact time as us. With very few exceptions, we spent most of our tour staring at the back of the heads in front of us, shoving our way past people pausing to take pictues, and being jostled and bumped along in a neverending sausage grinder.

This is apparently the sarcoghagus of St. Helena, but I couldn't get any closer 

Renaissance map of Italy, with Sicily at the top

There were some few highlights.  Certainly seeing Raphael's School of Athens, even over the heads of other visitors and from the opposite side of the room, was worth a lot of my time and discomfort.  What a beautiful work!!!  The best piece of art we've seen so far this trip (although that portrait of Cardinal Richleiu in the German History Museum was wonderfull!!).  

But that's the end of anything good I have to say about the Vatican.  There was nothing sacred about our visit to the Museum, the Sistine Chapel, or the Basillica.  Whether through greed or just foolishness, the Church treats its most holy places like a money-making enterprise on the scale of a fast food place--get as many customers as you can in and out as fast as you can.  The trip through the Sistine Chapel will provide an illustration.  You enter with a big group of people, because there are people everywhere.  The room is divided into two sections separated by a metal gate.  We were warned by our tour guide not to talk in the chapel nor to take pictures.  As I entered, the low rumble of conversation was clear, but not nearly so alarming as the guard at the entrance yelling "NO PHOTOS!!!" like Mussolini warming up a crowd before a facist rally.  

Moving like cattle through a Chicago stockyard, I went to the other side of the gate to meet up with he tour guide, who was whispering to people not to talk.  Huh?  After she had warned us multiple times, one of our U.K. tour companions wanted her to answer questions about the chapel while in the chapel.  

Yes, there were frescos on the ceiling, but they were small, distant, indistinct, and lacking in the vibrant color you get from seeing them online.  Come to find out, the reason for the prohibition of photography in the chapel has nothing to do with possible damage to the frecos--the copyrights were sold by the Church to the Japanese firm who did the last restoration.  But good news, said our tour guide; the copyright expires next year, and people can take their own photos.

Sadly, the Basillica was not much different than the chapel.  Full of people, there was no opportunity to sit and meditate on the significance of the space, nor of history, nor of faith.  This was a profane experience, nothing more, nothing less.  There was nothing in our trip to the Vatican that spoke to the holiness of the site, to its importance to the Catholic Church, to the monumental impact this location had on the history of the Western World.

St. Peter's Square was also a disappointment.  Nothing at all like the Piazza San Marco, with its wide open spaces, shops and cafes, and amazing views.  Hundreds of chairs were being set up for the 4:00 p.m. mass, although it was only 1:30 p.m., meaning that the entire center of the square was unavailable.  Nothing exists around the exterior of the square except a few steps that people happily dropped onto for a rest after their Vatican experience. We took the obligatory photographs and got the hell out of there.

This was as close as I could come to Michaelangelo's Pieta

Thinking Vatican City would be quite something else, I had nothing more planned for the afternoon.  So, we took the opportunity to go over to the Trevi Fountain.  On the way, we stopped for a quick lunch.  Yvette will understand my choice:

Why are European fries so much better than U.S. fries? 

After a quick Metro trip and a long walk, we came around the corner to find the Trevi Founatin--not!  While we knew it would be under construction, we did not realize that this meant that the area would be a repeat of the cattle call of the Vatican.  Tourists willing to stand in line could walk on glassed-in scaffolding around the front of the fountain, which, of course, had no water. And, with the huge crowds, photographs from anywhere but the scaffolding were impossible.  Reiner produced pennies for us to throw, which signs encouraged us to do in spite of a complete lack of an actual fountain.  I wished for Yvette to visit--not for myself to make another visit, mind you.

Rome's drinking fountains are one of the best things in the city 

By the time we made it back to the hotel after rush-hour crowds in the Metro, I was done--done with Rome, done with my family, just done.

Here, Reiner came up with the solution.  He and the girls went out, while I stayed in the hotel room and cooled down (oh, did I mention how incredibly hot it is here on the Metro?).  The three of them picked up meats, cheeses, wine, and a whole bunch of other goodies, and the four of us had our own private picnic in the open courtyard of the hotel. Laughing, eating, drinking, etc., made for the best part of the entire day.  I guess there's a lesson to be learned here--even when life serves up disapointment, family can come to the rescue.

Wondering about the title for tonight's blog? While at our own private picnic, Heidi sneezed.  She looked up, waiting for the proper acknowledgment of her action.  From Reiner, the voice of Satan issued forth with the most demonic "Gesundheit" ever heard on earth.  I cannot even speculate on why this occurred.  The riotous laughter that followed, however, proved the perfect closure to our wonderful family dinner.

Now, I'm back in the room, ready to finish the blog and lay down for the night.  The girls are watching a crazy movie in Italian that that features women in nightgowns running into walls while doing some sort of bizarre modern dance.  Hmmmm.