Our hotel/apartment in Assisi overlooked a very cute square, which I thought was wonderfully charming – until I tried to go to bed. While I never got the feeling that anyone was drunk or out of control, there were waves of enthusiastic people coursing though the piazza until 2:30 am. Needless to say, I did not sleep very well. Then, in the morning, Mer confronted the fact that the “shower” was really the world’s smallest bathtub with no curtain. In addition, the hand shower sprayed in all directions, including at right angles to the showerhead. When Mer’s quick shower was done, the bathroom was swamped. I tried briefly to “shower,” but gave up and washed my hair in the kitchen sink.
We packed up and checked out and managed to catch the bus to the station quite efficiently. We were headed to Rome, and the next train did not leave for an hour and a half. So, after some quick deliberations, we checked our bags and walked the short walk to Mary of the Angels, a large church near the station. What I did not realize, but Mer did, was that this was a very important Francis of Assisi site, and I was deeply grateful to Mer that she got me to see it.
When Francis had a few followers, a benefactor gave him a very small church to use. Francis repaired the church, which was called the Porziuncola. Francis often lived in a hut nearby, and he died next to the church. Mary of the Angels church was built around these sites – literally. In the middle of the tenth biggest church in the world is the still-intact Porziuncola, all four walls and the roof. There are a small chapel and marker where Francis died, and a small memorial in the church complex to show where he lived. We walked through the whole site, and we really enjoyed the modern art paintings that told the story of St. Clare, a young woman who decided to become a nun, following the practices of Francis as closely as she could. The paintings were very striking.
We headed back to the station, where we caught our train to Rome. While on the platform for the train, a man asked me if I would help a woman with her bag because she had a bad back. I agreed, and thus Mer and I met Susan, a professor of sociology at the University of Washington in Seattle, who had just wrapped up being in charge of a three-month student program in Italy. The students had gone home, and Susan had taken a week to relax, and she was headed to Rome to fly home on Sunday. We chatted much of the way to Rome, and she was quite interesting and funny.
Our hotel was right next to the train station, and we checked in around 3:00. I was “in charge” for Rome, so I did a little research in Mer’s Rick Steves tour book, and Mer pointed out a few things based on my itinerary (things along the way). So, we started our brief tour of Rome by heading over to some former Roman baths, one part of which was turned into Rome’s Mary of the Angels church. Along the way, we managed to run into the staging area for the Rome gay pride parade, which was quite a contrast with the church we entered. You could still hear the music from the parade inside the church, which I suspect broke the usual calm of the huge church.
We then headed a few blocks away to another church. Some time ago my brother had given me a DVD set called The Power of Art. This set is where I learned to appreciate Caravaggio as a painter, and it also introduced me to the astonishing sculptor Bernini. The program focused on his piece The Ecstasy of St. Teresa, and it is a moving piece. It turns out that the statue is in Rome, in a chapel of the church St. Mary of Victory. So, having seen Caravaggio paintings, we took the opportunity to see St. Teresa.
The sculpture is amazing, but I was most pleased to see the context of the work in the church. The program had lots of close-ups and angles we could not see from the floor, so it really showed off the statue to better effect than seeing it in person. What we could see in person was the whole church, which was elaborately decorated, but harmoniously so, with lots of gold coloring. The church itself is fairly small, and that made the space seem intimate.
By this time, around 5:00, I was fairly hungry and hoping to get chicken for the protein. Mer found Flann O’Brien’s pub, which is an Italian take on an Irish pub. The “Irish” pub had lots of pasta, and listed food in courses in the Italian way, but they did have chicken, which I was happy to order. I also got an order of potatoes, which managed to be Italian by being coated in olive oil and rosemary, but were excellent.
We went back to the hotel, where I rested about an hour. I found a little lie-down to be very helpful after the heat of Italy’s afternoons. We still had plenty of daylight, so I decided we should head over to the Vatican, and then walk back through the city. We took the Metro to near the Vatican and walked the four blocks there. We got there after the church and museum had closed, but the square around St. Peter’s is still impressive. It was being filled with tons of chairs, and we found out that Pope Francis was celebrating Mass the next morning. We looked and strolled around, and after a failed attempt on my part to find a nearby park, we headed down the main road leading to St. Peter’s, with my goal of crossing the Tiber and walking back to the station.
There were a ton of people out along the road, and an inordinate number of them were nuns. We could not quite figure out what was going on. We got to the end of the road, and some polite men offered us candles. Mer asked what was happening, and as near as she could make out, there was going to be a celebration that night, and the Pope might make an appearance. After some debate, I decided we should try to see the Pope, so we got our candles and stuck around. We waited about an hour, but the evening was cool, and it was a fun place to watch people.
A little after 9:00, some officials gave some speeches, some in Italian and some in English. We had trouble making out the particular words, but the speeches wound down, and people started moving toward the Vatican, so we did too. I have to admit it was a bit strange – here were two American Protestants walking with a couple thousand Catholics toward St. Peter’s, walking between barricades as tourists watched. We filed into the courtyard of St. Peter’s, and Mer and I ended up quite close to the stage. People spontaneously began singing a version of “Ave Maria” several times as people continued to pour in behind us.
Once people were more or less settled in, a small service of sorts began, with priests and nuns praying and saying the creeds and the Lord’s prayer. It turns out the march was a celebration-of-life march – for the unborn, for the sick, for the needy, and for justice. Sadly, the Pope never made an appearance, but it was a great experience of which to be a part, both on a cultural and spiritual level.
By now, it was 10:00, and so I gave up on my idea of walking home. We made our way back to the station (walking behind a priest and a cardinal). Once on the train, Mer saw we were passing close to the Trevi Fountain, so she wanted to go see it. I thought that sounded fun, so we got off at the stop. To our surprise, there were no signs, so we headed off as best we could. At one point we backtracked, and then went back down the hill again, and to our surprise and delight, we ran into Diana and Kate, the young women from the train to Florence. We were on the same street corner at the same time in Rome – it was quite bizarre. We were near their hotel, and Diana ducked in to get ready for bed while Kate walked us the two blocks to the fountain. She really saved us a ton of time – for a famous site, the Trevi Fountain is not easy to find. We thanked Kate, and we jumped into the tourist fray. We took a couple of pictures, and made our way to the edge of the fountain, where we threw in a coin together. Tradition holds that if you throw in a coin, you will return to Rome. We had done that the last time we were in Rome about eighteen years ago, so we’ll see if we are about sixty next time we get there.
We walked back to the hotel, going past a huge palace along the way (I think it is or was the presidential palace). We grabbed some pizza just before the hotel, and so we had a late and light supper back in our room. I had read the flight itinerary for the next day, and our flight was not until 4:30 pm, so we had an easy morning ahead of us to sleep in.
Three churches, a gay pride parade, a life-celebration march, a sculpture of an ecstatic nun, an Italian/Irish pub, finding two needle girls in Rome’s haystack, and a crowded public fountain. It was a bit of a surreal day in Rome.