c. 2006 Religion News Service
ROME _ As Jerusalem calls to a Jew and Mecca to a Muslim, the Eternal City bid me, a Roman Catholic, to explore my religious roots.
St. Peter’s, Catholicism’s grandest basilica, was high on this pilgrim’s list and it induced goosebumps even before entering, as I approached for the first time the famous square.
Then again, this is not just any square. It is surrounded by Bernini’s open-armed pair of quadruple colonnades topped by a balustrade and statues of 140 saints, all waiting in welcome.
Rome, it turns out, is a city of churches, numbering about 900. Heck, even the Pantheon, once a pagan temple, is now a Catholic house of worship. In a visit with three young men (my sons) more bent on bar-hopping, shopping or scooting around on a Vespa, I managed to get inside St. Peter’s, Santa Maria Maggiore and St. John Lateran.
That at least covered three of Rome’s great basilicas (St. Paul Outside the Walls is the fourth).
Santa Maria, a short walk from the city’s Termini rail station, is the oldest church in Western Christendom dedicated to Jesus’ mother and was begun in A.D. 431, a thousand years before the present-day St. Peter’s.
It is utterly gorgeous, more petite (if one can use that word in reference to a Rome basilica), and more feminine and decorative in style. It is as fetching as St. Peter’s is awe-inspiring.
The basilica, which has largely retained its original shape, is rich in works of art, among them 17th-century frescoes by Guido Reni and the coffered ceiling by Giuliano Giamberti, done a century earlier. Under the altar is a crypt containing the remains of St. Matthew.
The Pauline Chapel, on the left nearest the main altar, contains a bejeweled icon of the Blessed Virgin that is at least a thousand years old. It is called “Salus Populi Romani,” “Well-being of the Roman People.” According to tradition, it was this icon that Pope St. Gregory carried through the streets in 593, when Rome was suffering under the plague. The people of Rome also gathered here in 1944, when the Battle of Anzio was fought close to the city.
St. John Lateran is home basilica for the pope as bishop of Rome. To get there, I took the underground Metro (.75 euro one way) from Termini, just three stops on the A line’s Anagnina run.
The top of the facade boasts statues of Christ flanked by saints and doctors of the church, while inside powerful figures of the Apostles created by the Bernini school seem about to burst their cozy confines alongside the nave.
Rome’s churches differ markedly from the Gothic style of many Catholic churches in the United States. In place of stained glass, the windows are called on to let in light. And oh, what beauty that light imparts. The basilicas of Rome fairly drip with mosaics, frescoes and marble columns of variously veined hues, so much visual loveliness as to induce visions of rapture. Stacked on columns, pedestals and walls, the churches’ statues comprise small congregations all by themselves.
The day I devoted to St. Peter’s, I also took in the Vatican Museum. It offers a grand excursion through much of art history, both sacred and profane _ Egyptian and Etruscan art, works of Greek and Roman antiquity, 16th and 17th century tapestries, 18th century ceramics and miniature mosaics, works of modern religious art, artifacts from the catacombs and rooms full of Raphael frescoes are all part of the collection.
What stands out? For me it was two statues from ancient Greece: the Apollo torso, said to have influenced more artists than any other sculpture, and the Laocoon. Michelangelo was present at the latter’s rediscovery and may have been the first to identify the depiction of the Trojan priest being strangled by sea snakes.
The Vatican is one of the world’s grandest art treasures but, in one sense, its galleries of art merely set the stage for what comes next.
The Sistine Chapel took Michelangelo a decade to complete. Its frescoed ceiling of more than 5,000 square feet displays the world’s loveliest painted Bible; its Last Judgment on an end wall, the world’s grandest depiction of the planet’s final scene. Together they constitute a display of creative genius made all the more vivid since its restoration a decade ago.
After a lunch break at nearby Il Mozzicone (try the spaghetti carbonara), we were fortified for a tour of St. Peter’s.
At the square, we signed up for a free English version offered by the Vatican. A British woman named Penny escorted us for a look at Bernini’s baldachino, or stone altar canopy; Michelangelo’s cupola, or dome; Bernini’s alabaster window of the Holy Spirit; and the remains of Pope John XXIII.
Later we climbed up the cupola, 142 feet in diameter and rising 452 feet above the street, and were rewarded with a breathtaking view of the city.
I listened as Penny related how the basilica was built on the site of Nero’s circus and the place of martyrdom of early Christians, including St. Peter. She explained that the place he died _ tradition has it he was crucified upside down _ was marked with a simple oratory.
Two centuries later, ground was broken for the first St. Peter’s, and a thousand years later construction began on the present-day basilica.
St. Peter’s today comprises a total of six acres and is nearly 700 feet in length, the largest church in Christendom. In the center of it all lies what many archaeologists believe to be the tomb of the first pope. High above the main altar, which lies directly over the subterranean site, a Latin inscription is written. It translates, “You are a Rock and upon this rock I shall build my church and I shall give unto you the keys of the kingdom of Heaven.”
I was standing on the spot, I thought to myself, where Catholicism’s roots have sunk the deepest _ not only the largest Christian church but, it turns out, its grandest mausoleum as well.
But what surprised me most was how the basilica, immense as it was, remained so human in scale. As it turns out, this didn’t happen by chance.
“Look at the columns,” the guide told us. “See how they are drawn closer to the center of the building and also why the statues highest on the columns are built larger than those closer to the floor _ so as to appear less distant.”
A church of such elegant harmony, that, as colossal as it is _ the square can hold 400,000 _ reinforces rather than reduces the human perspective, left this Rome pilgrim with an apt point to ponder, even as the ranks of Catholicism today have increased to 1 billion.
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IF YOU GO
Information: Contact the Italian Government Tourist Board, 630 Fifth Ave., Suite 1565, New York, NY 10111; (212) 245-5618; http://www.italiantourism.com.
Vatican Museum and St. Peter’s Basilica: Museum entrance fee, 10 euro. Museum is closed Sunday. Go to http://www.vatican.va. St. Peter’s offers a free 90-minute English-speaking tour twice in the afternoon on Monday, Wednesday and Friday; it starts at the tourist information office, left of the square as you face the basilica.
MO/PH END FRANZONIA
(Frank Franzonia is a copy editor for The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J.)
