Rome: Churches

Any day in which you wake up to the words "President Obama," do two hours of voice work, do an hour of yoga and another hour of acrobatics, pick olives in the late afternoon sun, and then go for a long run through the back roads of Tuscan wine country, you have to start wondering if you're leading a charmed life.

When you started off the week in Rome, you have to conclude, yes, it's definitely charmed.

In the continuing series of installments, here are a few pictures from the churches and cathedrals I visited.

Santa Maria Maggiore was just a minute or two from my B&B. Unfortunately it wasn't open for visits.

Next on the tour was San Pietro in Vincoli, on an out-of-the-way piazza just a block or two from the Colosseum.

It's a pretty quiet, unassuming place--for a Roman church--and I think most people just go there for Michelangelo's Moses, which is to the right of the altar.

But it also has several graves and memorials adorned with what look suspiciously like real skeletons.

I thought this was really spooky, until I saw the crypt of the Capuchin monks, which is decorated with over 4,000 skeletons lovingly taken apart and turned into, say, rosettes of vertebrae, or arches of shoulder blades, or domino-rows of pelvises. Now this is just somewhat spooky.

Later, having found the Pantheon closed, I stepped into Sant'Andrea delle Valle. It was twilight, and most tourists were elsewhere.


And finally, the next day, St. Peter's, where the late-morning sun fell onto the smoke from the censers:

It's difficult to appreciate the scale of St. Peter's from a photo, but take a look at how it dwarfs the people attending mass:

But oddly enough, for me the dominant impression was not so much the glory of God as the glory of man. The amassed wealth is clearly displayed for human eyes, not divine ones. The genius of Michelangelo shines through--you can almost sense him pacing, solving problems of proportion and weight and balance. He borrowed the dome's proportions from the Pantheon's dome, which seems almost subversive--a pagan design crowning one of the high seats of Christianity.

The whole thing is a stunning example of what people can achieve. It is, finally, quite a humanist cathedral.