First Thoughts on St. Peter's, and Other Avventure Romane

I walked over to the Vatican the other afternoon under looming purple-shadowed clouds against a pale luminous sky. Rome is a field day for strangeness and novelty; I think I may have set a record today. The bookshop I stopped into to pick up a guidebook to Rome had a volume entitled I Clown, either Bozo's tell-all autobiography or a execrable bilingual rendering of I Pagliacci; as well as one entitled Nudes: Index I (under the Art Monographs section...no, I did not look inside it), a bunch of texts on the Vatican, Biblical figures, and a dog-eared history of the Italian cavalry that looked about as old as I am. And in another bookstore, there was some good-weird stuff, like a massive tome depicting all the escucheons of the cardinals from 1800 to the present day (but costing nearly two hundred Euro...no way, Giuseppe).

There's also neither good-weird or bad-weird, just weird. I remember a recent trip past the Colosseum and glimpsing a bunch of Italians got up in Roman legionnaire costumes posing for photos (five Euro, signore!). Some are strangely convincing, others are just strange, like the motley crew of gladiators standing near the Vittoriano in plastic helmets, one of them with a Caligulan paunch crawling out from beneath his too-small cuirass. Come to think of it, they don't even belong there; if you wanted a Victor Emanuel II-themed photo, red shirts and tricolors (or a man dressed as Pio Nono with a frowny-face button pinned to his simar) make more sense than artificial Roman armor.

Then there's bad-weird, inevitable but rare. Still, seeing a movie poster of Allyson Hannigan in a wedding dress above the title American Pie: Il Matrimonio, is just scarring. Somewhere, the Pope that banned opera rolls over in his sarcophagus.

Speaking of sarcophagi, St. Peter's is just as splendid as I remember, and I spent a long, quiet time amid the whispering crowds walking past the side-chapels, past the reserved Eucharist surrounded by winking oil lamps. Random slivers of memory: the tomb of St. John Chrysostom, now the altar in the Chapel of the Choir; "In nomine Patris et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti": the beginning of a Latin Mass at the altar beneath the gargantuan Chair of Peter; the lights burning before the Confessio and the enthroned bronze of the Prince of the Apostles.

And of course, memories of the funky religious habits I spotted. Three new ones on that trip, I think. There was a friar or a monk in a rumpled collarless khaki tunic, discalced and rope-cinctured, draped in a smock-like scapular with an embroidered cross and a Sacred Heart with rays of white and red flowing from its center like an image of the Divine Mercy. Then there was a nun all in white with a strange hoop-like stiffener around the edge of her veil, a sort of oversized skullcap beneath it. Last of all, a grey-veiled nun I passed on the Ponte Vittorio Emanuelle with a square, very square boxy forehead piece to her wimple. Weird.

Of course, just when I thought it couldn't get any weirder, I looked up saw what appeared to be a replica of the first Montgolfier balloon hovering over the Palace of Justice like a big fat blue marble. Huh.

I love this town.