50th Anniversary Cruise: The Vatican

The Vatican plaza and St. Peter's Basilica

       We boarded the bus at the Colosseum and traveled down Via de Corso through Rome going by the Forum and the Fontana de Trivi the famous "three coins in a fountain." We continued past the Plazza de Spagna, then took a left past the Museo of Augusto and crossed the Tiber River heading for the Vatican. Stopping by the Piazza del Risorgimento, Renata told us that we would be getting out to have lunch on our own. She pointed several restaurants down the side streets that had tables set out on the sidewalks. We had an hour for lunch and then we would meet at this same corner to walk to the Vatican.
        John and I left the bus taking our packed lunch and looked for a park bench in the little park across the street. It was crowded with tourist buying mementos from out door shops. We found a bench under a tree and had a leisurely lunch surrounded by families, seniors, and a few people begging for food. As we munched away, we thought about what we had seen in the Colosseum and the life in the first century. Looking ahead, we could see the dome of St. Peter in Vatican City. There was quite a gap in knowledge between the first century and Renaissance. We wondered what happened to Rome during the Middle Ages...
   Nero was in his prime soaking in all of Rome's riches in the first century. He thought himself a poet and a musician and enjoyed the games at the Colosseum. His great joy was watching the chariot races that sped around to Egyptian obelisk that now stands at St. Peter's Square. He especially liked to kill Christians in various vulgar methods for his enjoyment. This practice continued by his successors for three centuries as Rome was becoming decadent. What the upper class Roman leaders didn't realize was that the lower classes were becoming Christians by the millions as they witnessed people becoming martyred unwilling to give up this new religion. The more martyrs were sacrificed, the more the word spread even outside of Rome. The upper class Romans thought that their gods were angry and blamed the new Christians for the problems that befell Rome. The new Christians leaned that they could not worship idols and became victims of more slaughter. Finally, a stop of killing Christians was declared after a monk was killed for trying to stop two gladiators from killing each other in the Colosseum.
   By the third century, the Roman Empire was divided by two ruling areas: Rome in the west and the Byzantine in Asia Minor. Forms of Christianity had spread through the oral tradition creating many forms of Christianity in the empire. Constantine, a Roman soldier, became a convert perhaps through his mother's influence, who later became St. Helen. She traveled from what is now Serbia to the holy land and brought back a part of cross used for the crucifixion of Christ. The story goes that Constantine used the iron from the nails to make the bridle for his horse. Another story tells of Constantine having dreams before battles in which he was told to put a Christian emblem on his shield. He attributed this to winning his battles. What ever the reason, Constantine was a true convert. When he became Emperor of Rome, he wanted to legitimatize Christianity as the religion of the realm. Whereas the masses were behind him, the upper class was still worshiping the Roman gods. He allowed the Christians to build churches outside of the walls and advised that a low profile be taken as many powerful people were still not adopting this new religion.
         Constantine needed to unify this new religion to give it a single voice. First he built a church at the site where St. Peter was crucified upside down. Then in 325 A.D. he gathered bishops together in the city of Nicaea to decide the divinity of Jesus. Then after much discussion gave approval to the Nicene Creed which gave a formal edict to the new Church. He also needed to legitimatize the teachings of Christ. Not a single written source had been written from the first two decades after Jesus left the earth in the year 33A.D., although the majority of Christians believe the Gospels were written by direct witnesses of the life of Jesus. Writing was a specialist skill known by only a few and most of the teachings of Jesus was circulated by oral tradition. The first written sources appeared around 50 A.D. as the letters of Paul. Paul was a Jew who came from Tarsus, a Greek city. He did not know Jesus and initially opposed the Christian dogma. In time he became transformed and became a prophet.
         The four gospels that form the New Testament all date from the last third of the first century. Like Paul, the authors of these documents did not know Jesus and might have been foreigners as well. The book titles "Matthew," "Mark," "Luke," and "John" are names given by the early church to these anonymous documents that were written at a much later date. When writings started to evolve, supplementary ideas may have been added as time went on. So at the time there may have been different versions of the gospels besides the four that we know today. Catholicism was one of a dozen "denominations" within the early church. Others were Gnosticism prevalent in Egypt, Montanism in Turkey, Marcoinism in Syria and others. Eventually, the Catholic church was adopted as the state religion of the Roman Empire proclaimed by Constantine. All other systems were branded as heresies, and all other written gospels were ordered to be destroyed. During the Middle Ages many monasteries were built throughout Europe. The monks in these monasteries preoccupied their time making copies of the bible in script for the Catholic Church.
   Now Rome was being ruled by popes wearing togas. The Pope tried to preserve the Roman heritage by preventing vandals from destroying the historic buildings. The Visigoths, the Lombards, and the Huns invaded city states in the Italian peninsula. The Pope did not have the strong army to protect Rome and the fearless tribes rushed in and pillaged and stole anything that was precious. The Popes relied on mercenary armies to help defend Rome and often gave some ruling power to groups outside of Rome as payment for defense. The Senate made up of the high class families in Rome was still a ruling body but not functioning as a government apart from the church. Sometimes they were the ones to choose the popes until the cardinal system of choosing became evident in later years.
       In 590 the Church was running out of funds so Pope Gregory I sent missionaries to convert more people in all the surrounding areas asking the faithful to come to Rome as a pilgrimage to see the relics of the martyrs. Soon Rome was filled with visitors paying dues to the church to see relics of the new religion. Pilgrims were also going to the holy land and protection was to be provided by the church. A clever way was to have patrons pay the church to lessen their time in purgatory. Pope Urbane II instigated the selling of indulgences to raise money for the Crusades that would accompany pilgrims to the holy land. This way of raising money also came in handy when Pope Nicholas V wanted to begin rebuilding St. Peter's Basilica. So money started to fill the coffers and the building plans began. Materials were available all around Rome after a few earthquakes demolished several buildings including part of the Colosseum. By 1455, 2,522 blocks of travertine were transported to build the new building.
          We noticed that we still had some time before we were to meet out tour group so we wandered down one of the side streets. In Italy you never go too far before you find a gelato store. We found one that was not crowded and sat and enjoyed gelatos in a cup as we watched people go by. We even got into conversations with the owner he talking in "broken" English and we speaking in "broken" Italian. It made for an enjoyable exchange of communication.
    Following the way we had come, we joined some of our tour group that was heading for our meeting place and circled around Angela while Renata picked out the end of the group after counting to make sure we were all there. We were fortunate that everyone could gather on time at the corner of Via de Porta Angelica so we could begin our walk without having to leave anyone behind. We walked down the street and soon followed the wall that surrounds parts of the Vatican.

Soon we were at the entrance of the museum entrance.

Angela told us that we would be visiting the Vatican Museum first then go to the Sistine Chapel and finally to St. Peter's Basilica.

We walked into the courtyard of the Museum.

Once inside, we waited for Renata to obtain our tickets.

The Vatican Museum was founded in the Earth 16th century by Pope Julius II. Pope Julius was informed that a marble sculpture of Laocoon and his Sons was discovered in a vineyard in the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome. When it was found to be authentic, it was brought to the Vatican and put on display in 1506. Since this was the Renaissance, Roman, Greek, and all ancient articles were highly regarded. The Catholic Church through the Vatican made sure that these valuable historical assets would be housed in a special place and the Vatican Museum was founded.


Laocoon and his Sons

The Vatican Museum has 54 galleries and it would take us a few days just to go through and study all the treasures housed there. We would be happy just to go through the main hall on the way to the Sistine Chapel at the end. We entered and immediately circled around the beautiful floor mosaic of Hermes. It was bordered by a metal bar circled around so no one would step on it. Mosaics are pictures made with small pieces of glass or stone of many colors. Mosaics were first found in Mesopotamia and flourished into the Greek culture that made figures of their gods into mosaic art like the one we were observing.

Hermes mosaic

We continued abound following Angela as she led us to the Tapestry wing. We looked up to see beautiful frescoes on the ceilings.

Above some of the doors to museum rooms or salas, we would see a commemorative bust of Pope Leo XIII who commissioned the works in the hall.

We followed # 19 as we entered the tapestry hall.

The Tapestry Hall

Along the walls huge tapestries hung depicting the life of Christ. These were probably done in the Middle Ages. Huge tapestries like these would hang in castles of noblemen to keep the inside of the castle warm as many castles were made of stone without any lining like sheet rock with insulation to regulate the temperature inside. These thick hanging tapestries were used for the dual purpose of insulation and decoration.

It was amazing to see up close how the tapestry was made. It requires a loom or frame, yarn or thread and a plan or design. Tapestry weaving dates as far back as 30000 B.C. in Egypt. Weavers have created tapestries depicting their surrounding often using art to give social commentary. This textile art is composed of two sets of threads those running parallel to the length (warp) and those parallel to the width (weft). The Warp threads are set up under tension on a loom, and the weft thread is passes back and forth across part of the warp creating a design. Once the plan was set the weaving could be done by several people.

We were examining a large tapestry of babies being taken from mothers after order from Herod to kill all male babies when it was prophesied that a baby was born that would become king. It was quite a dramatic piece of work!

Another huge tapestry down the hall showed a pope on his throne and the bishops all around,

The gold ceiling was also a beautiful sight to see. It was hard to see everything at once as we were kept moving in procession through the hall.

We then continued walking into Gallery of Maps section in which ancient maps were displayed .
The gallery of maps show the length and breadth of the peninsula or Italy around 1580. Pope Gregory XIII commissioned the maps from his cartographer, an Italian priest Ignazio Danti. Danti had come to Rome from his post as mathematics professor in Bologna to help the pope with his efforts to correct the inaccurate Julian Calendar using modern Renaissance mathematics and astronomy. At the time, cartography was in its own renaissance. The age of exploration had brought new knowledge of distant lands, and technical innovations like the magnetic compass, sextant, and telescope which improved accuracy. By the late 1500 the famous map makers, Mercator and Ortelius, were creating their landmark world maps. Before Danti took up his post in Bologna, he spent a decade creating maps for Cosimo I de Medici to put in the Palazzo Vecchio. The project to install 40 enormous and highly accurate maps began in 1580 and took 18 months to complete