Vittorio Emanuele and Mary Churches

It's been a couple days since I've posted, and in the interim I've been able to visit a couple churches. Yesterday, we went looking for the Crypto Balbi. It's a privately owned museum by Trevi Fountain that's situated on a first century AD theater. Apparently it's easy to see the archaeological stratification: over time, the city built and rebuilt over itself and so the change over time is clearly evident. We couldn't find the place, even though I'd personally walked by it like a week ago. The plan is to go back there next week with some of the archaeology students; that will be great because they have an in-depth understanding of the things we'll be seeing.

Instead, my buddy John and I went through the Vittorio Emaneule II monument. He was a 19th century king of Italy. The monument is big, ugly, gaudy and super nationalistic. I've never been a big fan of monuments for the sole purpose of showing how powerful a country is, but this one is just over the top. I mean, come on, it has an altar "to the State", right under the huge statue of Vittorio riding a horse. The one thing I did like about the monument was that it has a very respectful tomb to the unknown soldier, which is accompanied by twin flames that are always burning. The actual body in the tomb was picked by Maria Bergamas, a woman who lost her only son in WWI.

We then headed to Ara Coeli. It's located right behind the monument and is a church dedicated to Mary, Queen of Heaven (Regina Coeli). The Ara Coeli is the home to a really interesting relic called the "Bambino". It's a woodern statue of the Christ child which was made by a Franciscan friar in Israel. On his journey back to Italy, it is said that the ship got into some bad weather and it had to be jettisoned. It miraculously floated to shore safely; other tales included it being stolen and somehow getting back to its home church on its own. Because of these things, they adorned this baby with gifts. Its wooden face is shown, but the rest of the body is completely covered in gold and jewels. Il Bambino has more necklaces of bling than Puff Daddy at the Video Music Awards.

After that, we headed to the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore. It's the third of the four basilicas of Rome I've seen; I still need to get to St. Paul. Maria Maggiore was pretty impressive; it's unique in that it's very well decorated on both the front and back side. Either could be a very worthy entrance to any other church. The insides are very cool too, lots of religious iconography having to do with the life of the Virgin . The crypt has some pretty famous people buried there: the sculptor Bernini, St. Jerome (author of the Vulgate Bible), popes. The founder of the Jesuit order, St. Ignatius of Loyola, celbrated his first Mass there. We stopped by the museum the have in the basement and got to see all the ancient trappings of a Catholic Mass: huge golden candelabras, vestments sewn in complicated fashions, architectural drawings of the church, and bejeweled Bibles.

Overall, it was a pretty good experience. Class is running pretty smoothly now that we have two pretty experienced people taking over for Reggie. It's good to get back in the swing of things; gotta do some work before I head down to Nashville!

Capuchin Cemetery

The last few days have been a little weird without class. It's been nice to have a break from studying, but at the same time, the reason I'm here is to get better at Latin. We've had study sessions where some of the more advanced students take the reins and we translate at sight, but they're not nearly as edifying an experience; it's pretty much something I could do on my own sitting at home or in library in Ann Arbor. The new news is that Reggie's surgery is scheduled for tomorrow and he'll be back in class on Thursday.

The other day I went to Santa Maria della Concezione. It's a church in the central-northern region of the city run by Capuchin friars. The church is on the Via Veneto, which is kind of a swanky street. There's a lot of upscale restaurants and nice hotels and smack dab in the middle of it is this church. The church itself isn't that impressive, realtive to the rest of the city's churches. It does have a lot of decoration, a nice altar, and a bunch of statues and paintings, but I do prefer the more epic churches like St. John Lateran and Gesu. The draw to the church is its cemetery. Over 4,000 people are in the cemetary. The bones of the dead are organized into different designs and artwork, much of the time separated into types of bones. The monks nailed bone patterns into the ceilings and walls so that almost every surface is covered; in some cases things hang down that resemble chandeliers. I almost bumped into one; I guess I'm a bit larger than the average friar that the area was created for. The full skeletons of monks are so creepy. They're still wearing the robes that they wore when they were alive and are all really small, posed inside skeletal arches, standing up with their hands in praying positions. The furthest room had a skeleton child made to look like a grim reaper with a scale and a scythe. He had a small marker under him that said, "Remember that one day we were as you are now, and one day you will be as we have become." Not really my cup of tea, but something one has to see while in Rome.

Reggie

So Father Foster fell before class yesterday, injuring his pelvis. It was a relatively small fracture; the doctor said it was something pretty routine that happens to the elderly. If that was his only problem, the doctor said he would have possibly been up and moving with a walker by Friday. The real issue is that Reginald has some issues in his legs with liquid buildup that have been bothering him for a couple years now. He never had it looked at and there's some pretty bad infection. The good thing is that with some help from the hospital and regular check-ups he could be back at home and teaching the class in some aspect by Monday. Until then, we're going to try to do some of the aspects on our own. A group of us had a bit of a study session at 2 today, but it wasn't really as successful as with Reggie. Even so, it was good to do some Latin. I may try to use some of this extra time we have to do some more sight-seeing, perhaps even hit up the beach. We'll see.

Vatican Museum

This morning, before we heard the bad news about Reggie, my buddy John and I went to the Vatican Museum. The Vatican Museum was pretty awesome. Unfortunately, I forgot my camera so I have no photographic evidence of the event. We got up bright and early, killed our breakfast, and sped over to the Vatican Museum around 9 am, which was perfect timing. There was absolutely no wait whatsoever. I think this had something to do with the Papal Audience; since the Pope has one every Wednesday at 10 am, everyone was in line to get into the seating on the Piazza San Pietro while we just walked in to the Museum. Not so when we left a little after noon. The line followed the walls of the Vatican for nearly half a mile. I read somewhere that the Vatican Museum averages over 4 million visitors a year. No wonder, it's really amazing. Julius II founded the place in the 16th century. He was invited to an archaeological dig where the Laocoon statue was being uncovered. He luckily visited the site as they were unearthing it from the ground, and with the haughtiness of a world leader declared that he had to have it. The statue was already promised to another collector, but Julius said that he would pay ten times the asking price. Money talks and Julius got what he wanted. Julius built a collection of antiquities around this statue and thus began the Vatican Museums.

I've heard people say that the Vatican Museums are intimidatingly large, but we didn't have a problem with that. It is a large complex, but we only spent half the day there and saw a good majority of the stuff. We got through the modern art galleries, classical, Egyptian, and statuary museums, as well as the Raphael Rooms and the Sistine Chapel. I really enjoyed the hallways leading up to the Raphael Rooms. For most tourists, it's a long hallways that's kind of a filler to moderate traffic flow into the really famous rooms. People look at the stuff on the walls, which isn't very impressive by itself, but I found really gratifying with my incomplete knowledge of Latin. The hallways are painted with maps of all of Italy and its environs. Each area is blown up into sections of only a couple miles at a time with some fantastic Latin descriptions, informing the reader about what rivers, forests and mountains are prominent there, what minerals and trade products grow well in the region, and show little pictures of each town and village. The ceilings are painted mostly with biblical and church history stories, many of military iconography. My favorite was a picture about a guy named King Theodore being thrown into hell. It looked like two bishops were throwing him down into burning damnation. I researched online for a bit and found to what this could be referring. St. Thomas Aquinas says in his Exposition on the Psalms of David:

Et in synodo Toletana quidam Theodorus Mopsuestenus, qui hunc ad litteram de David exponebat, fuit damnatus, et propter hoc et propter alia multa; (Super Psalmo 21 n.1)

And in the church council of Toletana (Toledo?) a certain Theodore Mopsuestenus, who was explaining this according to the letter of David, was damned both on account of this and many other things.

Apparently, this Theodore had some teachings in his early writings that were antithetical to the reigning members of the Church. After he died, some condemn him pretty heartily. I don't think this is what the picture depicted, since he wasn't a king, but it could possibly be related.

I also enjoyes a certain picture in the Raphael Room. It was pretty funny, but also kind of gross. In one of the large epic military scenes, there's a dwarf. This dwarf is super ugly and really deformed. He looks out of the painting right at you while putting on a helmet as if making fun of the war behind him. The best part is that if you look closely, the dwarf is showing off his balls. Raphael must have gotten bored with painting all this highy and mighty elegant stuff and decided to put in some bawdy elements. I almost laughed out loud when I realized it.

Besides that, the Sistine chapel was beautiful. I won't go into all the details because you can open up any art book or look at any website and get the whole thing. It was really cool seeing the artwork that I spent a whole semester studying for my upper level writing requirement at Michigan. I know more about the Libyan sibyl Michelangelo painted than I ever really cared to, but it was great to actually view it.

The rest of the Museum was good too. They had a ton of Roman statuary and a decent, yet kind of small, Egyptian exhibit. The modern art was good, but there wasn't anything too exciting. A couple paintings did interesting things with color, there were some of Salvador Dali's paintings, and an immense 7 piece bronze artwork showing Pentecost and bishops, priests, and laymen looking upon the scene as if there. There was also an area that showed some museum workers as they were cleaning dirty reliefs. To steal the words Ferris Buehler, the Museum "is so choice. If you have the means, I highly recommend it."

Reginald Foster

On his way to class today, Father Foster fell. I don't know all the details, but it was bad enough that he had trouble standing back up. Some other classmates got him a chair and he sat in it until the ambulance came. I know it's always bad to assume, but I think he broke his hip. Always thinking of the students, Reggie made sure one of us brought our next homework sheet in for the rest of the class to work on in his absence. I hope he's okay. If everyone could say a prayer for him, I'd really appreciate it. It's sad to see someone so full of life and zeal for what he's doing have to deal with the problems of old age. I'll update on the situation asap.

Ostia

Last Sunday, our class went to Ostia. Ostia was the Roman port since Rome itself is something like 16 miles from the shoreline. Cicero himself said this was probably a huge benefit to the city, since it got all the advantages of the trade possibilities inherent with being a seaport, without the all the detriments: towns on the sea were said to be the worst areas for the degradation of morals and depths of crime. Blame it on the sailors and the pimps. We read some Plautus describing how the "ladies of the night" in some cases even knew the names of the sailors before they entered the port in order to more easily seduce them and take all their money. The cities also usually had to deal with pirate ships selling and stealing wares before Rome granted Pompey huge powers in order to rid the Mediterranean of this particular scourge. Ostia used to be pretty much right near the mouth of the Tiber, but over the years changes in the landscape transformed the environment; in the 1500s there was a huge flood that washed away the Tiber's bed and moved it away from the city. Because some time during Tiberius' reign Ostia lost most of its importance with regard to trade, a lot of the city was abandoned and left in decently good shape. Mussolini's huge nationalistic attempts to rediscover Rome's history pumped huge amounts of cash into digging up Ostia, and because of that we can see what we see today. For the majority of buildings, only parts of the first floor survived. Some buildings were lucky and had parts of the second.

Ostia is a huge site. We were there for 9 hours and I don't think we covered all of it. We did see the majority of the interesting things. Ostia has a lot of the things one would think of when one plans a city: granary storage, small commercial buildings like market stalls, an amphitheater, big houses, crowded apartments, bath complexes, temples, butchers, et cetera. I really liked the floor mosaics. They were made of just black and white stones, but were pretty intricate for only being bichrome. One in the floor of a bar said something to the effect of "If you're thirsty, come here and drink!" with a big picture of a goblet. There were a lot of aquatic pictures too. The fish seller had pictures of different fish, the market stalls had elephants, dolphins, and people. The fireman's guild hand some great pictures of bull sacrifices.

Another thing I really liked was the Mithraeum. It's an underground temple where the citizens would worship Mithras, an Eastern god. Not a lot of solid information exists, but it's known that it was an initiatory order that was highly accepted by soldiers and lesser nobles until paganism's outlaw by Theodosius in 394. The key things accepted about the cult are that it arose either in Persia or Asia Minor and has something to do with Mithras when he sacrifices a bull. I've attached a photo of the Mithraeum in Ostia that's kind of misleading. It looks larger and lighter than it actually is. It's small and dank, especially for a tall guy like me. The statue of Mithras has lost its hand with the dagger.



After a great lunch with the whole group, we went through a hotel and bath complex where it's thought (almost certainly) that St. Augustine stayed and his mother Monica died. This is a pivotal part of the Confessions since Monica played a key role in Augustine's conversion to Catholicism. Her death really struck Augustine hard and he shows it in his writing, ending his book with a plea for everyone who reads it to remember and pray for his mother. We read the section dealing with her death in the courtyard in which it happened. Very eerie, but very cool.

This weekend we'll be celebrating the Holy Day of Peter and Paul, the patrons of Rome. Should be an interesting experience; the whole city is supposed to shut down. I'm off to do some reading before class. Ciao!

St. John and Centro Storico

The last few days I've been doing some touristy stuff trying to see the city. I plan to visit all four of the basilicas in Rome; so far I've been to St. Peter's and St. John Lateran. St. Peter's, of course, is the ultimate basilica. It's immense, rich, and filled with tons of people at all times. St. John's is pretty impressive as well. On Thursday morning, my buddy John and I decided to go visit it instead of doing homework. It's the original papal seat and still holds that claim, even though St. Peter's is de facto more important these days. The church itself has some pretty old inscriptions on the inside; my favorite part was touring the Lateran Palace where the Lateran Pact was originally signed. This was a pact between Mussolini and the Vatican demarcating where each one held power, establishing the Vatican as a state, and pretty much giving the Church some sweet deals: until the 80s when it was resigned with the Italian socialists, the Church got free water, free garbage removal, and a yearly base charge for electricity. Priests also got some sort of stipend for saying prayers in all of the churches in Rome, even though the majority of the priests never did their duty and just took the money. The room in which they signed the pact has a nice little guestbook signed by Benito Mussolini and Cardinal Gasparri (the Pope didn't show up), as well as some other dignitaries from each side. The Palace had a bunch of ceiling decorations displaying Biblical stories and other scenes painted by a group of twelve painters. There was one room in which I'm pretty sure the painters either didn't know their Latin or just royally screwed up. The ceiling is supposed to show the four seasons: two of the seasons are depicted as an old man covering himself tightly with his cloak and a young woman surrounded by greenery. Now I'm no expert, but I think the old man signifies "winter" and the young woman "spring". Yet the old man was labelled "Ver" (Spring) and the woman "Hyems" (Winter). Guess even then people had problems with the language. I've included a picture of St. John's just as a reference: since I don't have a cord to upload my pictures, I'll have to upload them later. Maybe I'll do it as a one picture per day thing. We'll see.