Preparations

Before we went to Rome in December of 1999, my son, Liberty, and I took a night class in Italian at a community college. I’d enjoyed France a lot when we'd travelled to that country in 1995, partly because I’d been able to put to use the French I’d learned in high school and college. I enjoyed talking with people and being able to find my way around. Wanting to recapture that good feeling while I was in Italy motivated me to take Italian.

I had first enrolled in the class a semester earlier, and when we went around the room to make introductions, I saw there were three or four mothers with daughters about Liberty’s age. I dropped out of the first class, and then I lured Liberty into enrolling in the next one by telling him many young women would also be there with the same interests. The class was at Foothill Junior College taught by charming Rita Walker from Taormina, Napoli, and we both enjoyed having her as a teacher. Unfortunately for my credibility with my son, no mother/daughter pairs enrolled the semester when Liberty was in the class.

Also as part of my preparation for the class, I read up on the country. And that is how I came to read Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad again [Innocents Abroad: Roughing It, Literary Classics of the United States 1984 Viking Press]. For years I had read everything I could get my hands on that Twain had written but Innocents Abroad hadn't made much of an impression on me. [I vaguely recall having read the book when I was 15. Innocents Abroad was Twain's second book, but Twain's youthful sense of humor didn’t make a good initial impression on me when I was that young.]

Twain Quotes Stick in My Head

I think the following quote from Innocents Abroad may have made me self-conscious about writing about what I saw, which may account for my long delay in starting to write about a trip I took four years ago:

What is there in Rome for me to see that others have not seen before me, what is there for me to touch that others have not touched? What is there for me to feel, to learn, to hear, to know, that shall thrill me before it pass to others. What can I discover.--Nothing. Nothing whatsoever. One charm of travel dies here. [Mark Twain, p. 209]

Twain was right. Rome’s been done. But the effects of his discouragement have worn away, and I am going to try to write something original anyway.

The following quotes from Mark Twain skewed my expectations about the dimensions of St. Peter’s. But I should have known that the rascal would be putting us all on.

Of course we have been to the monster Church of St. Peter, frequently. . . . When we reached the door, and stood fairly within the church, it was impossible to comprehend that it was a very large building . . . The trouble was that everything in it and about it was on such a scale of uniform vastness that there were no contrasts to judge by--none but the people, and I had not noticed them. They were insects. . . . . The church had lately been decorated, on the occasion of a great ceremony in honor of St. Peter, and men were engaged, now, in removing the flowers and gilt paper from the walls and pillars. As no ladders could reach the great heights, the men swung themselves down from balustrades and the capitals of pilasters by ropes, to do this work. . . .While we stood on the floor one of the workmen swung loose from [a] gallery at the end of a long rope. I had not supposed, before, that a man could look so much like a spider. He was insignificant in size, and his rope seemed only a thread. Seeing that he took up so little space, I could believe the story, then, that ten thousand troops went to St. Peter's, once, to hear mass, and their commanding officer came afterward, and not finding them, supposed they had not yet arrived. But they were in the church, nevertheless--they were in one of the transepts.]

 

The High Point of My Life: At Home in Rome

I explored St. Peter's Basilica in Rome over a period of almost two weeks starting a few days before Christmas. It was only years later that it dawned on me : no one could have overlooked 10,000 troops in one of its transept.

The first hotel where we stayed in Rome with the pilgrimage group was called the Michelangelo. St. Peter’s is only a 10 minute walk from the hotel, so several times I walked over to 7 a.m. Mass. The sellers of rosary beads made out of roses and of other trinkets would be setting their tables up outside the hotel entrance as I went out into the dark pre-dawn city. The metal shutters would still be rolled down over the windows of the shops along the way. I would wait near the statue of St. Peter in the piazza with a small group, mostly nuns, for the doors to open, and once we were admitted we each straggled off on our own or in pairs to locate a priest praying a Mass, one of many at the multitude of small altars around the nave.

All the time I went there, I enjoyed the fancy that this beautiful, historic church was my own parish. And I found it hard to leave when the time came to move on.

One afternoon, Liberty and I and the pilgrimage group took the elevator to the roof, where the hollow-backed reliefs of saints that line the roof line peer down onto the piazza. And we toured the publicly-accessible grottoes below the main altar, where many popes and some saints are buried. Liberty even climbed the stairs to the top of the dome and gained a panoramic view of the Vatican and much of Rome, but the most moving tour of all took us to excavations deep below the grottoes in an ancient Roman necropolis (or city of the dead). More about that later.

Meet Me at the Pieta

First I want to tell you about a tour I took on 12/27, after the pilgrimage group had gone home to the States, and before we joined up with another [secular] tour group. Liberty and I were on a bus coming back to our hotel from exploring other parts of Rome, and as I held onto a pole, I struck up a conversation with a young deacon who was from Minneapolis, where we had lived for many years. The deacon was studying in Rome, preparing to be a diocesan priest in the Minneapolis/St. Paul archdiocese. He invited us to a tour he was giving to a few of his friends from the Midwest. As we got off the bus near the piazza in front of St. Peter’s, he said, “Meet us at the Pieta.” How cool is that? I could get a tour of St. Peter's if I met them at Michelangelo's famous sculpture close to the entrance on the right, at 3:30.

All day Liberty and I had been riding buses and walking around the city. We’d been to the Spanish steps and the Borghese gardens, and we were beat. Liberty stayed behind in the hotel, but I couldn’t miss the chance to see St. Peter’s with a non-paid guide. I’m glad I did, because of the total of three tours we took of St. Peter's, his was the best. The young deacon told us details that the other guides omitted or got wrong.

On that chilly winter’s day, I changed at the hotel and showed up at the Pieta chapel wearing only my long sleeved blouse and black pants. People stared at me because I was without a coat, but I was so hot I couldn’t bear to wear one, not realizing yet that I was hot from a fever from the first stages of a flu that would keep me in bed for three days. (I probably had caught the flu from sitting outside St. Peter’s from about seven p.m. to two in the morning on Christmas Eve. In spite of the fact that the pilgrimage leader had assured us that she had tickets to admit us inside the basilica for the ceremony of the opening of the Holy Door, we had been stuck in the piazza all night watching the ceremonies on big screen TV. But that's another story . . .)

After we admired the Pieta for a while, the deacon mentioned that the Pope descends from his apartments to the main floor of the Basilica in an elevator to the left and behind the chapel of the Pieta. I found that fascinating, but I can’t explain exactly why. I guess it interested me so strongly because it was insider’s knowledge that you’re not going to get from a paid guide. And we all want to know details about our heroes, so I was glad to know how the Pope gets from his apartments to the Basilica for Masses.

Another thing neither of the other two guides pointed out is a statue of St. Longinus, the Roman centurion who at the cross used his lance to pierce the side of Christ. St. Longinus’s statue is in a high alcove in a column to the left of the main altar, and inside the statue they keep the tip of the lance. The deacon told us that once every two years the Pope blesses an audience with the tip of Longinus' lance. A statue of St. Helena in an alcove in another column has a piece of the true cross; another alcove has St. Veronica’s statue, with Veronica's veil; and the fourth alcove has a statue of St. Andrew and a piece of St. Andrew’s skull.

He told us about the chair of Peter, a simple chair that until recently had been revered as the very chair that Peter had used. Statues of two Western Doctors of the Church, Sts. Augustine and Ambrose, and two Eastern Doctors, Sts. John Chrysostom and Athanasius, support the chair. One of the secular tour guides later told me that the four statues were of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, just making it up.

As we passed the baptistery, the deacon pointed out that the huge red marble porphyry top to the tomb of Emperor Otto II is inverted and used there for a baptismal font. At one point we were standing on a circle of porphyry that is set in the floor near the entrance survives from the old basilica. Charlemagne and twenty-one successive emperors were supposed have knelt on this roundel when they were crowned.

The Scavi Tour

The first day when we’d gone to St. Peter's, on 12/20/1999, we got a private tour of the Scavi, which are the archeological excavations underneath St. Peter's, below the grottoes.

Tradition had held that St. Peter was executed in Nero's circus and buried in a cemetery nearby. The tour guide told us that the huge Egyptian obelisk that you see in post cards in the center of St. Peter's Square was situated in Nero's circus, which was behind the site of the present basilica, and the obelisk may have been one of the last things St. Peter saw as he was being crucified upside down. Architects moved the obelisk to its present location when they built the collonade and created the present-day square.

After St. Peter's death, the Christians under early Pope Anacletus built a simple altar shrine over his grave.

In the 4th century, Emperor Constantine built a basilica over the shrine. The Basilica stood for almost 1200 years, then in the late 14^th century it was torn down. In 1506, Pope Julius II ordered the building of a new bigger church, the current one--which is the biggest church in the world.

Fast forward to 1939, when some evidence of an ancient Roman necropolis (city of the dead) was discovered by workmen shoring up the baldachino in St. Peter's. Pope Pius XII, always the cautious man, decided to sponsor a secret project to try to verify the tradition that St. Peter was buried under what is now the main altar of the basilica. He wanted, I presume, to avoid any scandal that would be created if the project found evidence to the contrary.

What the excavations discovered under the grottoes under the altar was a Roman necropolis built on the Vatican Hill. (No one knows what "vatican" means.) On our tour, we were led along a cobblestone street past the room-like tombs part way up the hill to the tomb where Peter was supposed to have been buried. When Constantine built the basilica, the workmen leveled the top of the hill so the foundation rested directly on top of the tombs.

The excavators found the altar where they expected it to be. Underneath they found the spot where St. Peter’s body was supposed to be, but they found no remains. They cut into the altar, carefully because it now serves as part of the foundation for the huge baldacchino of Bernini and the papal altar above. Inside the altar they found the bones they believe are Peter's, because their age, their condition, and other factors all match.

What’s most convincing of all, they found ancient graffiti (about which one scholar has written many books). One graffiti says, "Peter here."

I got the chills from the thrill of it. At one point we were standing bout two feet from St. Peter's bones. I never expected what I experienced during that tour. If I’d known what I was going to see ahead of time that might have taken the thrill out of it. As it turned out, the tour leader presented the information like a mystery story. And at the end of it, I felt like I become personally acquainted with St. Peter there.