As the Wind Blows

They say that it’ll take you approximately 20 years to see everything on display in the Vatican Museum if you spend two minutes in front of each statue, painting and other pieces on display. Considering my achievement of spending two hours at the National Portrait Gallery in London the previous week, I cannot even comprehend the thought of spending so much time at one of the world’s most famous museums. Honestly I wish I had been to the Vatican Museum at the end of my trip, because after visiting Pompeii, Hadrian’s Villa and the rest, there are meant to be so many things I could have looked out for instead of going in blind.

Instead I learnt that the Romans copied a lot of Greek statues (plagiarism in the centuries BC), but since a lot of the Greek statues were supposedly destroyed, it was a good thing that the Romans copied these statues – as justified by an Italian.

I’ve mentioned a couple of times that I would love to have a fresco in my imaginary house (along with a reconstruction of Hadrian’s wall and a projector with surround sound in a round room), well after visiting the Sistine Chapel, I think I might re-assess that criteria. The Sistine Chapel is painted from head to toe, or from ceiling to floor as the case may be, and is just a little too fresco’d for my liking. What impressed me the most that Michelangelo painted the ceiling and ‘The Last Judgement’ by himself and he wasn’t a painter by trade.

Rome is meant to have over 400 churches and I have been to approximately five. I can’t really include St Peter’s Basilica because it’s technically in Vatican City which is a whole other country, but if you’re going to see at least one church in your lifetime it has to be St Peter’s. St Peter’s isn’t exorbitantly designed like a lot of other churches I’ve seen around Europe but it has more of a presence than any other church I’ve been to in my life time. And I don’t just mean the physical presence of people, although there are quite a large number of people that come through those doors and an even greater line outside to get inside. I think it’s really sad that you have to get your bags scanned just to go to church; it makes St Peter’s seem threatening.

Hearing a church service in Italian is quite impressive, especially at St Peter’s. It’s an old school church service as the priest stands with his back to the congregation except when he’s handing out communion.  And personally I think hearing the Lord’s Prayer being said at St Peter’s in Italian is really quite moving. Okay I’ve said St Peter’s quite a few times now and there are hundreds of other churches in Rome.

Rome is quite an expensive city, but visiting churches are free. And you really can’t avoid seeing a church in Rome. Most people seem to visit churches now for famous paintings and famous people’s tombs and they only way I could tell which ones are famous was because of the huge group of people surrounding them.

If there are over 400 churches in Rome, it’ll take you approximately 8 years to go to a different church every Sunday. And if there it takes you 20 years to see everything on display at the Vatican Museum (not taking into consideration everything that’s not on display), then you could spend a good 28 years of your life indulging in Christian Rome and the Vatican city and never get bored.