Very nice, Michelangelo. Now what about the floor?

Holy cow! I just did a quick scroll back through this diary and discovered that this is actually the 16th update on this summer’s Italy trip.

I said – “WAKE UP! when I’m talkin’ to ya’ boy. (Nice kid, but as thick as a whale sandwich.)” – I said this is the 16th update about this trip!

I’m not sure, but I think Caesar conquered Gaul in less time than it’s taken me to get to this point. But fear not, brave hearts… I plan just three more – this one and one more to wrap up the trip with the rest of the amazing things we saw in Rome (with a few food and drink digressions, of course) and a generic last entry devoted exclusively and in somewhat more detail to several of the unique tasting experiences we enjoyed throughout this trip. (“Tasting” won’t just mean food, either. They even make orange pop way better over there than we do over here.)

So, where are we?

According to my notes, we have reached the day where we had to rise extra early in order to get to a particular staircase close to a special tour entrance into the Vatican Museum and, beyond it, the Sistine Chapel. It was another Dark Rome tour. Plug: if you’re going to be in Italy for a few days, check out Dark Rome’s choices. Despite their name, they’re not all about 2500-year old sub-basements and catacombs (and neither, for that matter, are they only about Rome).

In this case, we were promised a “small-group” exclusive pre-opening visit to the Chapel and it turned out to be one case where the box delivered exactly what the label said it would.

Because we actually departed the Hotel Britannia before their breakfast service began, they had prepared a box breakfast for us and as much as we had to stoically accept the fact that bacon probably would not have travelled well in a paper bag, we were more than compensated by the fact that several delicious little pastries, a couple pieces of fresh fruit and a small bottle of juice did.

After a few introductory remarks by our guide, we were each given one of those antenna “whisperers” – a small receiver that you sling around your neck and listen through earphones to the guide’s comments. It was actually my first experience with such a device and it really is quite remarkable. It gives you the sense that the guide is standing right beside you while permitting him / her to make comments in a low speaking voice so as not to disturb any other groups in the vicinity.

A couple things about the Vatican and the Sistine Chapel that might seem obvious. Other than finding yourself cribside in Bethlehem in the Church of the Nativity or atop Golgotha, the hill in Jerusalem upon which Christ is said to have been crucified, when you are in St Peter’s, indeed almost anywhere in the Vatican, you are in the single most sacred site in Catholicism. The Basilica, after all, is named for the Apostle to whom Christ is said to have given the mission of carrying on His Church on Earth. And the Sistine Chapel is where they elect the Popes, for heaven’s sake!

So we weren’t surprised at all to be advised by the guide that when we actually reached the entrance to the Chapel, three things were absolutely forbidden: normal voice-level conversation; the presence of a guide’s commentary, and photography. Even before we got there, our guide had gone to considerable lengths to explain these rules and to advise us she would be collecting the “whisperer” devices at the entrance.

The no-photography rule, as it turns out, is actually largely capitalistic. Our guide explained that a consortium of US and Japanese companies, between them, have recently spent tens of millions of dollars on a multi-year restoration of the Chapel’s interior artworks, including its famous ceiling, and in exchange have been given exclusive rights to all images of the Chapel’s interior.

(Now, was there anything in the preceding paragraph difficult to understand? We certainly didn’t think so. But I’ll come back to that no-photography rule a few paragraphs farther along.)

Getting to the Sistine’s front door was accomplished by travelling along what felt like a couple miles of interior corridors through the Vatican Museum where photography was indeed permitted. Here are a few of the visual highlights of that walk:

The Galleria delle Carte Geografiche almost doesn’t need a translation. One is hard-pressed to pick which is more impressive: the 120m long corridor of maps of almost every part of Italy, or the corridor’s stunning ceiling. The maps – 40 in all – are frescoes commissioned by Pope Gregory XIII and painted between 1580 and 1583. (Here we go again; I haven’t been in the Museum for 15 minutes and we’re already strolling 120 metres along past 40 500-year-old maps!)

This close-up is in the album for two reasons: first to show the detail of the maps, and second because pretty much dead centre in this shot on one of the hills to the left of that large lake is the hilltop location of that beautiful Umbrian Villa where we pre-emptively ended our trip to the country last Fall with my sciatic back.

It’s hard to imagine, but this was actually considered a lesser assignment once Michelangelo received the commission from Pope Julius II to do the entire Sistine ceiling. The assignment was to decorate four rooms that, at the time, were intended to serve as part of Julius II’s private quarters. Their collective name today, the Stanza di Raffaello, will give you a clue about the name of the young artist from Urbino commissioned to do the work around the year 1508. Raphael’s star at the time was only just on the rise but today his work in these four rooms is considered, with Michelangelo’s famed ceiling, to mark the “High Renaissance” in Rome.

I won’t turn this diary into a history lesson at this point, but if you want to read a great story about the building of St Peter’s and the often chippy relationship between Julius and his two centuries of successors, and their chosen artists and architects, this one is excellent. It’s not intended as an academic study of the 200-year process required to complete the Basilica, but rather as a darn good yarn. And that it is.

I’ve already described the almost overwhelming feelings that arise when one is actually inside the Sistine Chapel, so I won’t repeat myself here. But I can’t let my Sistine story go without recounting a brief feeling of a decidedly UN-christian sort that I experienced while we were there.

You recall my earlier recitation of the guide’s rules, and the reasons for them. Well no sooner had we ten people (that’s right – we were exactly ten people with the magnificence of the Sistine Chapel entirely to ourselves for an hour, but I digress) when this friggin’ little weasel of a twerp happily pointed his camera at the ceiling and started furiously clicking away.

Much to my delight, our guide – who had come into the Chapel with us – swiftly moved to his side and I watched for a couple minutes while she clearly made him work back through his memory card and delete the pictures he had taken. Good.

Leslie and I then sat side by side for a time on one of the side wall benches that bracket the full length of the Chapel until a crick in my neck from almost a half hour of gazing upwards forced me to lower my head momentarily. And I couldn’t believe it! The same little jerk was sitting opposite us on the other bench, now with his camera carefully positioned in his lap with the lens pointed ceiling-ward as he continued to add to his memory card.

By now, the guide had left so he clearly felt confident enough to move back out into Chapel-centre and resume his interrupted photo shoot. He hadn’t reckoned on Leslie, however, who strolled out beside him and politely reminded him of the no photography message we’d all been given (thus interrupting my briefly much less polite desire to walk over, pop his camera open, extract and stuff his memory card down his throat). Later, she told me his response had been to express an “Oh really?” reaction as though he had somehow been unaware of the rule.

Anyway, we both resumed a pattern of therapeutic breathing and got our heads back to where we were. Suffice to say it is one of the few places I’ve been in my life that allows me to say – and be grammatically correct to boot – that it is literally awesome. In fact, now that I think of it, even awe-SOME falls a little short, but given the absence of a word like awe-ALL, it’ll have to do.

One of the downsides – or upsides if you believe rules are for other people – of being in a small exclusive tour is that it plainly is not policed as carefully as during the hours when the Chapel is officially open to the public. Later that morning, as we were exiting the Vatican, we opted for a path that took us once more through the Chapel. This time, even before we joined the sea of humanity inside, a guard at the door ordered me to put my camera, which I had simply slung around my neck, inside the shoulder bag I was also carrying. And several dozen of the people crowding the floor inside inside were guards. No doubt looking for insufferable little twerps.

Even given that most of what is most important in the Chapel is straight overhead so that even in a close crowd there are no bad views of any of the staggering 5,000 square feet (!) of Michelangelo’s frescoes some 65 feet overhead, it adds something very special to be there in the company of so few people that even a soft-soled shoestep seems to echo.

Leaving the Vatican behind, we decided to take a leisurely walk back to the hotel by way of a delightful sidewalk café, a cool draft Peroni beer for me and a glass of house white for Leslie and a lunch consisting of (for me) a ball of Buffala mozzarella the size of a baseball, with prosciutto and bread, and for Leslie another specialty pizza, called the pizza quattro stagione (four seasons pizza). We had earlier encountered this particular topping where the pizza is garnished in quarters, with each quarter representing a season of the year. We didn’t quite grasp which season was which, but the customary toppings on the respective quarters of a pizza quattro stagione are black olives, artichoke hearts, mushrooms and prosciutto.

After about an hour’s battery-charge at the hotel, we took a taxi to another of the places on Leslie’s art history bucket list: the Villa Borghese. One of the advantages of travelling with someone like Leslie in an art-intensive environment is that it never becomes, “Oh ho hum, another magnificent old painting / sculpture / architectural marvel… whatever.” Instead, it’s typically a fascinating flow of information on just why what you’re looking at is so important.

The Villa Borghese is considered the place to visit if you’re a student or scholar of an artist named Caravaggio. And what I learned in the Villa Borghese was just how amazingly audacious Caravaggio was for his time.

Caravaggio’s period in art is known as the “baroque” but Caravaggio was a rebel, so much so, in fact, that when his influence finally garnered the recognition it deserved, he was pretty much declared to have been the father of “new baroque” (and vis-à-vis baroque, clearly an artistic version of what my daughter used to call “Opposite Day”).

Prior to Caravaggio’s unleashing his own take on the style, baroque’s major hallmarks were variations on ornate decoration. You see it in its architecture and statuary, but especially in its painting where pretty much every little space in the painting is filled with something. In fact, baroque is to art what record producer Phil Spector’s renowned “wall of sound” was to rock-and-roll music. Phil left nary a moment when the ear wasn’t being assailed by either voice or instruments, exactly what “wall of sound” suggests.

In the same way, a typical baroque painting could charitably be called “busy”, like this example (again by Raphael in another of his Vatican rooms). Notice how even the spaces between each individual section are filled either with decoration or even more, smaller images.

But now take a look at how Caravaggio utterly rattled the art world.

This is David with the head of Goliath. Literally, David, and Goliath’s head. Period. No heavily populated battlefield of Philistines running away in terror; no pastoral background of trees or clouds. In fact, no background at all.

Actually, since a picture is worth a thousand words, indulge me for a quick momentary digression that is hundreds of thousands of words’ worth of illustration. When you go to Google Images and search “Caravaggio paintings” – like here – notice how the first thing to hit you is how dark your computer screen has suddenly become. It’s a sea of faces and people, but almost all of them are surrounded by black.

In fact, you almost wonder if the poor guy wandered into a huge sale of black by the bucketful, or could only afford teeny amounts of all the other colours. But that was Caravaggio. Love him or hate him, he rocked the art world of his day and the Villa Borghese (pronounced bor-GAY-zee) is home to several of his works.

See? Every day’s a school day… oh shut up, me.

It’s rare that Leslie and I come to any agreement when it comes to art (except if my point is, “You know a lot; I know nothing”; on that we have no dispute) but it seemed that almost to the second we agreed we were “arted out”.

So we stepped out into what was left of the waning daylight for a leisurely walk through the Villa’s magnificent gardens (an attraction all their own for lovers of things green) to one of Rome’s most famous bars and not too far beyond it, the restaurant we had booked for dinner.

That’s where we’ll pick up next time with “Arrivederci Roma”.