Next morning we front up at St Peter’s again, bright and early, to get our gold star. We say the priest’s name, Don Bruno Vercessi, and are directed through to the Sacristy, past the Swiss guards in their gaudy mediaeval uniforms and into a little office.
After a long wait (I don’t think anyone hurries in the Vatican from what I have observed already of the cardinals walking steadily and calmly across the square with a red skull cap and a briefcase) we are issued with a visitor pass. This is the magic I.D. that, along with Don Bruno’s name seems to open every door. We are waved through, barriers are shifted to let us pass, doors are opened. As we walk across from the office, we are challenged several times, but just to point to the pass clipped to our shirts fixes that.
We are ushered into a hallway where an elderly monk is waiting for us. He welcomes us genially, warmly, slowly. We sit at a table while he chats, asks us about our journey, inspects every stamp in our credencial. No hurry, all the time in the world. He brings out the book and very slowly fills in our details and invites us to write a comment about our pilgrimage.
He then invites us to come back after midday and he will take us down to St Peter’s Chapel, down below the church. Hey, private tour of somewhere special, why not? We come back, as requested, the staff are all saying midday prayers and we can’t get through the corridor, but Catholic prayers don’t take long and we walk through to wait for the Don. He appears again and leads us through the back corridors and down into the depths. There are strings of little chapels covered in old frescoes. Finally we reach our destination.
It is very fancy, lots of gold, very grand but on a small scale, only about 2 metres wide and about 5 long. .
We admire it appropriately while the don stand by, beaming. It seems very important to him to tell that a bit of early Greek graffiti was found on the old original wall “Peter was here.” That confounds those pesky Protestants who say that Peter never went to Rome.
After we have spent a bit of time here, Don Bruno sits us down, says the Lord’s Prayer and launches into a little sermon. He is so sincere, if perhaps a tiny bit, um, elderly.
Then he focuses on me and moves onto St Peter on the role of women in marriage, quotes the bit about how wives should be submissive. He looks expectantly at me. It is all I can do to restrain myself, but what’s the point of making a fuss, after all we are sitting deep in the building at the heart of the Catholic church. Anyway, we might not be able to find our way out. But I imagine St Peter at the pearly gates saying to Don Bruno, “You were very conscientious, most of what you did was good, but that stuff you used to go on about wives and submission, that was bit off.” “But it was in your Epistle.” “Mate, what I wrote was all ahead of its time, but you were 2000 years later, you needed to update a bit.”
The Don finally lays his hand on our heads and blesses us and we escape. But it was a rare opportunity to go somewhere in the cathedral where tourists can’t go and see the workings behind the scenes. There’s no such thing as a free lunch.
We give back our passes, head out and turn into tourists. We have decided to just live in Rome for a week, so we move to a serviced apartment and settle in. Buy some food, relax, nurse our feet, leisurely explore the ruins. About those ruins, why would you have stuff in museums when you trip over bits of it every two steps around Rome? But we start doing the rounds, in a laid back, we live in Rome sort of way.
The weather, of course, continues to be very unpredictable. Or, rather, you can predict that it will rain and then change to blue skies every hour. Since Bolsena we have coined a new term for torrential downpours. We look out the window and say to each other, better put on the waterproofs, it Bolsena-ing.
And because it is Bolsena-ing in a big way, we go to do an inside thing, visit the Palazzo Barberini. Now, I don’t know how the early Pope’s got elected, but they all seem to have come from the very wealthy families, and there was a Barberini Pope who, like so many of them, fostered artists and sculptors and lived in fabulous palaces. The Barberini shack is stunning, with a staircase to make your knees go weak (and not from the number of stairs). Want a nice staircase, with some excellent use of light and sculpture and the lines and angles a picture in themselves? Call in Bernini, and while he’s at it, get him to knock up a couple of fountains on the street corners near the house.
I won’t bore you with reciting all of the fabulous artists whose paintings are in the Palazzo Barberini, but my personal favourite was a portrait by Rafael of his girlfriend, the baker’s daughter with the cheeky smile, La Fornarina.
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