A Well Kept Man

This post will focus on a couple of the basilicas we toured in the city, of which there are many (apparently there are more than 900 churches in Rome, most being Roman Catholic for some reason). We arrived in Rome on Friday afternoon and proceeded to take a bus from the airport to the main train station. Our hotel was about 15-20 minutes by foot from the station, so we trekked through the streets of Rome to get rid of our stuff and venture out into our first evening in Rome. En route to the hotel we stopped in a church, Santa Maria Maggiore (a recurring theme of the churches in Rome as that they are all Catholic, and way cooler on the inside than they appear from the outside). One can't help but find amazing beauty in all of the Roman churches, and for those that enjoy spending some time admiring them there is a smorgasbord of columns, arches, frescoes, and statues awaiting in Rome. I felt a little self-conscious wheeling a suitcase around the church (so I proceeded to carry the darn thing while trying to snap photos with my free hand...I am sure the Italians thought I was crazy to carry a bag with wheels on it, oh well).

I was also not prepared for the amount of nuns, priests, monks, holy men, etc. in the city. Alli didn't seem to phased by it, but it seemed that every corner we turned was met with nuns wearing habits of black, grey, brown, blue, white...it's almost as if we were being constantly reminded to be on our best behavior (no slurping spaghetti!!). As we are Lutheran I was sure that we would set off some sort of secret alarm upon entering most of the churches, but they must have disabled the alarms for Lent. We managed to enter one church during a service (San Giovanni Laterano) which was very interesting as I have been to Catholic mass before but never in Latin. It was actually comforting as the melodies are the same as those in the Lutheran church, just the words were different (apparently music is a universal language which does not require translation).

Every church seemed to have an important holy relic, from the chains used to imprison St. Peter (San Pietro in Vincoli) to his actual bones (Basilica San Pietro), as well as the steps Christ is said to have climbed during the Passion before Pilate in Jerusalem (St. Helena, Constantine's mother had them brought to Italy for safe keeping in a building next to San Giovanni Laterano). Regardless of your belief in such things, the history surrounding them (not to mention that many of them are many hundreds if not thousands of years in age) is intriguing. St. Peter's Basilica as well as the Sistine chapel will get their own posts, so more on them later. Some of the basilicas we entered we designed by well-known architects such as Michelangelo (Santa Maria degli Angeli) as well as one designed by a patrician family member of Galileo Galilei (San Giovanni Laterano which was designed by Alessandro Galilei). I wish we had more time to spend in many of these amazing buildings, but hopefully we will have a chance to go back...

Another interesting observation was many of the basilicas and churches lacked any type of seating. It seemed that they did this to avoid loitering as there were often folding chairs nearby which one could guess were brought in for the parishioners during mass. I appreciated the effort to showcase these beautiful buildings and allow an opportunity to see them without making people feel like they are walking on pins and needles (although if you are Lutheran, you can never be too careful about concealing your true identity).