Quotes from Rome, Part I:
Attack of the Jesuit Clones

Our excursions around Rome for the first day-and-a-half took us to the Pantheon, a museum dedicated to Purgatory, St. Peter's (where Emily decided St. Peter would have been amused by John XXIII's choice of burial footwear), and up and down Rome's nexus of weirdness, the Corso. However, the first place we took our intrepid and jetlagged friends was our studio on the Via Monterone. Upon seeing our mini-monumental marble staircase with its stuccowork and faux marble, the first thing Rich asked me was "Do you have a slinkey? Those stairs are just crying for something to go down them."

Slinkeys were a running theme the next couple of days. We nixed the idea of putting one on the Scala Santa, and decided only a baroque slinkey (with its curious diagonal capabilities) would work on the curvaceous Spanish Steps.

Monday and Tuesday were full of various adventures, including a visit to the Irish College where my friend the Roman Seminarian proved an energetic and engaging host, remembering "the Evil Photoshop Genius" and "the famous Emily" in addition to giving us a behind-the-scenes tour of the college that filled us in on the real dirt on Pope Joan (a local heroine of sorts), the story behind the clerical classic The Scarlet and the Black and the Pope's deranged Carmelite Latinist, Fr. Reggie. We also got a close-quarters look at a belled Byzantine thurible and the presence of Gaelic missals in the sacristy proved too much of a temptation for my friends not to snoop. We wondered what took them so long to get out of there.

Other escapades revolved around the Society of Jesus. We started off one day at the Gesu, where St. Francis Xavier's withered arm-relic got Brian off on a flight of paranoid-Jesuit fantasy:

"It's like the arm from the Terminator, they've got a Jesuit cloning lab where they're creating a whole army of Xaviers optimized for baptismal efficiency!"

The last sentence was said an an appropriately Ahh-nuld voice. Later on, we found ourselves at the baths of Caracalla, which somehow degenerated into a discussion about Carl Jung and Star Trek. Rich is our resident Trekkie, if you don't know already. Oh sorry, Trekker. My bad.

Matt: I'm talking about the show, and I haven't even seen Star Trek! They've passed into the collective unconscious of mankind!
Kristin: I feel sad I'm not participating in the collective unconscious of mankind.

Emily felt compelled to write that one down. The hilarity continued when Brian attempted to speak Latin in regard to his Polaroid--"Carpe camera!" which seems to mean, according to Em, "Seize the room." In general, besides my pseudo-Lord Clark lecture on the caldarium, tepidarium, frigidarium and crisper drawer, the discussion had very little do do with the baths:

"It's an ancient Roman garbage can! (Rich)

"...the hosarium aqueum maximum..."

"...and give up an opportunity to make fun of Biblical scholarship?"

Kristin: This photo will be titled The Boys Being Dumb.
Rich: We're expounding wisely.
Brian: Yeah, the four wise guys.

"These are very nice trash cans. Not very trashy."

Brian: I don't want to get near the mosaic floors. Think about it, you could get ancient Roman foot-fungus. A gladiator-sized case of athlete's foot.
Matt: But you'd be one with the past! You'd be experiencing the germs of antiquity!
Emily: Yeah, it'd be like catching Scott Hahn's cold!

Rich was, however, in awe of the ruined walls:

Rich: These are tall.
Andy: Sometimes at night I lie awake thinking of how tall the Roman baths are.

Brian later decided they must have had the tallest shower heads ever. And then the non-sequiturs picked up later, including whether I, being a resourceful architect, could rig up a Roman bath using chewing gum, toothpicks and, of course, duct tape. And then there were some Jesuit ones, largely courtesy of Brian's continuing fixation with St. Francis's arm at the Gesu.

"People would come and take Francis Xavier's fingers..."

"...his head fell off because they put him in a tomb that was too small..."

"If you're gonna quote something here in the baths, quote Gladiator or something, sheesh." (Emily)

"...bionic baptismal bicep..."

"....Spaaaartacuuuuus!" (Andy)

"...It's time to bust out Xavier's bionic arm..."

"You wait all your life for a Marian apparition and you get the Lactating Virgin!"

"...Gandalf the Pink..."

"You would leave the premises if the apparition of the Lactating Virgin appeared?"

"...try and bargain with the Lactating Virgin for a red martyr's crown instead..."

Pay attention, St. Bernard's miraculous milk-feeding came back to haunt us later over dinner. Then there was Rich's virgin pregnancy, caused by him wearing his camera case under his windbreaker in a most incovenient way. For some reason, we decided he was going to give birth to a Greek word rather than a person. I think this was because, when asked the gender, he thought it might be neuter:

"...The baby will be second declension male..."

"...poor Little Greek Verb with the broken declensions..."

"It's a Greek noun. I can't wait to see which one it is."

"There are no regular verbs in Greek, which doesn't bode well for the future of my child..."

"Hoi moi."

"Look, it's a plural!"

And then, there was dinner that evening. Dinner's always lively. The other day, it even included a mercifully-brief attempt to compose a mass setting to the tune of the Star Wars soundtrack and a Kyrie on the theme of The Lion Sleeps Tonight that sounded, quite honestly, like something by Guillame de Machaut or possibly a Greek Orthodox countertenor piece. S., my fellow arkie and co-host, dropped a pudding in front of Andy and told him she had heard that he ate the dish "in an unusual manner." This occasioned much hilarity, especially the pudding itself, which Rich said resembled nothing so much as a spleen with mono. And then there was more fun in various areas, including St. Bernard's taking a drink of mother's milk from Our Lady:

"...Listen to my theology of lactation..." (Brian)

"Am I the only person who takes this apparition seriously?" (Matt)

"Was Rich lactating?" (Andy; and please don't ask)

"Don't write that down." (Andy)

"Jesus didn't use silverwear."

"You mean, there's a Mormon among us?"

"...the fiery grape of doom. I've heard stories." (Brian)

"That's a sad attempt at a fez."

"...They have a priest, a rabbi, a mufti...hey, that sounds like a joke..." (Matt explaining a Tom Clancy novel)

"...C-section with a pudding spoon..."

"Blackbeard had a whole ecosystem in his beard."

Then Andy began to tell extravagant whoppers about how the recorded voice at the end of the Vatican escalator says, "Ite, missa est." Actually, it was a deacon, not a speaker, and on feast days they have a couple of deacons who sing it in modes. Meanwhile, Rich had mentally returned to the Capitoline Museums where we had spent part of the day, and in particular Kristin's favorite statue, the extremely nude Dying Gaul (who to me seems to resemble the villain from the Sherlock Holmes story The Solitary Cyclist but then that's another story):

"I'm sorry if I don't live up to your expectations of masculinity, but if I were to go into battle, I'd put on armor...or at least pants."

However, dinner didn't show any more bionic Xavier jokes. Nonetheless, jesuit wisecracks have been something of a running joke this trip, as we discovered during our trip to Sant' Ignazio the night before. Naturally, the location of the Blessed Sacrament was of crucial importance:

Andy: Look for the light.
Matt: There it is.
Andy: No, that's a plant.

Altar decorations at Italian churches are most puzzling. In my defense, the shiny red tinsel on the pot did look a lot like a vigil lamp. The altars themselves are often equally strange, as we discovered studying an uber-baroque reredos in rather bold green and yellow marble:

"It looks like bad furniture from the seventies...the beginnings of bad Jesuit taste."

Still having not found the tabernacle at Sant' Ignazio, we knelt down in front of the altar of Saint Aloysius and said a rosary (for the mystery of the finding of Our Lord in the Temple, appropriately enough) and halfway through the Gloria Patri, I was interrupted by very loud and very comic liturgical muzak being piped through the speakers. Emily leaned over to me and said, "Welcome to Italy." Indeed.