St Peter's Basilica, November 2016
The historical reverberations of place.
The weather was cloudy and damp. November in Rome - not the ideal time to go, but I had no control over my vacation time in Saudi Arabia. When I got a week off, I left. I got on the metro at the Piazza Bologna and rode with the early morning Roman commuters to Termini and changed trains. I wanted the experience of walking up the grand avenue Via della Conciliazione to enter Vatican City, so I got off a stop before the closer Ottaviano Station and hoofed it down to the Tiber. I felt cold and damp and hoped it wouldn't rain. It was not an auspicious start.
Coming around a bend in the river I saw the Ponte Sant'Angelo which is an iconic bridge of Rome that has been imaged to death with the dome of St Peters rising behind it. More impressively I saw the Castel Sant'Angelo, a hulking tower of brick at the end of the bridge. The size of it was amazing and I was surprised to find something so large and not "famous" (to me at least) near the Vatican. It is actually the tomb of the Emperor Hadrian and served many more functions over the years standing as the tallest building in Rome before the modern era. Why it is not called the Mausoleum of Hadrian seemed odd to me. There are hundreds of saints and only a handful of Roman emperors. I pressed on.
The Via della Conciliazione frames the dome of St Peter's perfectly. The street is lined with all the foreign legations to the Holy See - the Vatican's own "Embassy Row". The dome dominates. That dome has been copied again and again worldwide in both religious and secular buildings. Something completed in 1626 remains superlative and is still being copied - that is hard to get ones head around. The dome of the US Capitol is modeled on it. I scurried onward hoping it would not rain.
St Peter's Square - the whole world is familiar with it. You know what it's going to look like before you get there, or do you? Ahh, the empty square with that Egyptian Obelisk pointed defiantly upward or maybe the St Peter's Square filled with people waiting to hear a word from the Holy Father. I am not sure those versions exist outside of newsreels and movies. St Peter's Square was just filled with metal barricades and security paraphernalia when I visited. Utterly nothing like I hoped I would see - add to that, bad weather, and my first impression of the Vatican City State was deflating.
The obelisk is unadorned. No one really knows the exact history of it back in Egypt, but it was eventually transported to Rome and placed on that very spot by the Emperor Caligula. It sat in the Circus Nero and oversaw the martyrdom of Peter (the obelisk is called "the witness"). It brought legitimacy from an ancient land and religion to a newer land and religion. When the Romans went to Egypt to see the ancient sites, they were indeed already ancient - as ancient as the Romans are to us today. A desperation for a link to things past that may not even exist, it is something quite human. Rome did it herself and then everyone else did it to Rome The obelisk reified the Roman pantheon of Gods just as later it was the "witness" to the death of the founder of the modern church. Isis and Osiris must be smiling.
A huge queue of people were standing restlessly trying to keep warm and my heart just sank. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised that so many people were headed to the Vatican. Luckily, I was wrong. The queue was for the Vatican Museum (far away around the corner). There was actually no wait at all for the security check to enter St Peter's. I took one last look over that disappointing square from the top of the stairs (where it looked marginally better) and entered the cavernous St Peter's Basilica.
Wow, just wow. Stupefied might describe it best. St Peters is just so huge, so ornate, so over the top. The entire Italian renaissance exploded in one cavernous space. People were visiting from all over the world. I reflected on my time in Saudi Arabia where non-believers are banned from entering the two holy cities, yet here I was in an historic center of Christendom with tourists from all over the world. I pondered my visits to religious sites in other places and wondered how people felt about me coming to gawk at their religious buildings and icons. I honestly felt conflicted - good or bad thing? However, one element was missing - I did not feel "religious" at all. I don't even know what my expectation was, but while inside St Peter's I felt more akin to the swirl of tourists snapping photos than to a pilgrim.
Looking back on the experience and adding to it two other great, Christian religious buildings I visited - Aya Sofia and the Church of the Holy Sepulcre, I now can make more sense of my reactions. Aya Sofia in Istanbul was built by the son of Constantine, and it, too, is an ancient awe inspiring space. It was the first domed cathedral and the largest church in the world for hundreds of years. Aya Sofia became a template for all cathedrals to come. Then there is Church of the Holy Sepulcre - Ground Zero for Christians - in Jerusalem. It is not massive, but it is where it all happened. It is hard to top "tomb the resurrection" and the "site of the crucifixion". So why is St Peter's such a big deal?
Walk around any city in the world and you will find some architectural reference to Rome. Imagine, there was an empire 2000 years ago that still reverberates worldwide today. St Peter's was built on the glory of ancient Rome. Just as the obelisk brought a bit of the Temple of Karnak to Rome, so did the Vatican cement itself firmly in the Roman Empire (you know, the baddies who killed Jesus) as its Christian heir. Maybe that is why the Mausoleum of Hadrian remains Castel Sant'Angelo. The Roman Empire never really ended we just made it into our own image. Like Isis and Osiris, I think Caesar Augustus must be smiling in his tomb.