Roma

Cast of Characters

Campo dé Fiori

Caffè San Pietro

Colosseo

Foro Romano

Chiesa del Gesu

Pantheon

P. Navona

S. Pietro

Il Papa

S. Eustachio

S. Maria Trastevere

Trastevere

Bocca Verità

Fontana di Trevi

Museo Vaticani

Villa Borghese

Vittorie

Mangia!

Loose Ends

Desktops

Having enjoyed an unexpected audience with His Holiness Pope John Paul II we made it to the Museo Vaticani (Vatican Museum).

There's not much I can say about the Vaticani that hasn't been said elsewhere at greater length and with better authority.

It's difficult to grok the Vaticani with a two-year-old in hand, even with an au pair in tow. In brief, then, I'd say that the collection of art and artifacts is superb, but the knick-knack kiosks which appear every few hundred steps is incredibly tacky and distracting. Better to have one or two large, well-furbished shops. I heard it said that the Vaticani is four miles of obstacles between the entrance and the Sistine Chapel; it's not the best layout - they must be able to do something better to allow foot traffic in and out of the buildings. Perhaps several ways in and out of the central garden would break things up into manageable chunks.

I'm a map weenie and so the Vaticani collection of early cartography was captivating to me. There are paper maps, painted maps, and a huge selection of globes.

One long corridor contains maps two meters tall painted directly onto the wall, one map per Italian county. (This is the map of Rome.) With several country-wide maps which appear at the beginning of the collection, one could plan a military or taxation strategy simply by walking up and down with ones advisors. At one time this must have been an amazingly rare resource in the world.

This is a close-up of "Venezia" (Venice). I have great memories of a trip there with Rose a few months after our wedding. At the bottom center one can see the Piazza di San Marco (St. Mark's Square) and the clock tower, the tallest building in Venice. At the upper left one can see the large bridge, the Ponte di Rialto.

This is a close-up of a globe's representation of the west coast; the underlined location is S. Francisco. What's really fun for those of us who live here to see is that the coastline (and the huge river just north of the city) are completely wrong. Not even close. They did a much better job of the east coast (shown below).

Well, there's our day at the Museo Vaticani. There are hundreds of things I would have liked to share with you, but I just didn't have the time and energy to take pictures and notes. Next time, perhaps.