Roman Holiday, Part 7: The Vatican Museum

We managed to add an additional country to our list while we were on this trip. You can do that surprisingly easily in Rome since it’s right there on the edge of the city and it’s roughly the size of an American Walmart, though it is a lot more interesting.

Vatican City was one of the places that we had on our Must Do list that you have to have when you go on trips. There are things you want to do, there are things you’d like to do, there are even things you’ll go out of your way to do, but some things are not optional and if you don’t make a list they’ll just get lost in the shuffle. The Colosseum. The soccer game. The Vatican. All the food we could eat and possibly just a bit more. That was the Must Do list. Everything else was extra.

The extras are marvelous, though, it has to be said.

It’s pretty easy to get to the Vatican from Testaccio – you take the 83 bus until you get to what looks like a fortress with high stone walls that slope inward as they go up, and then you get off and follow the crowd because they’re all going to the same place you’re going. We were headed for the Vatican Museum and Kim had bought our tickets ahead of time. GoogleMaps said this was the path. The crowd sweeps you along a wide sidewalk with lanes marked off with rope but no signage explaining what lane leads to where or even why there are lanes in the first place and mostly you just hope you pick the one that takes you to the “Already Bought Tickets” door, though it turns out you can hop from lane to lane without fear. Nobody checks. Eventually we got to the end of the lanes and found ourselves in a small widening with a souvenir stand on one side and several sets of doors on the other. Eventually we found the right door and went in.

That's not the right door, by the way. That's the exit. The entrance is behind me.

You don’t actually buy tickets to the Vatican Museum ahead of time, it turns out. You buy ticket vouchers, and when you get inside you can exchange them for actual tickets – with lovely artwork on them – and when you get to the next checkpoint you show them to the guard and they scan them and then let you keep them because Art. You also get a little map of the place, which is detailed enough to give you some idea of where things are but not so much as to allow you to navigate with complete confidence. For all I know this is deliberate, as you end up making exciting discoveries that way.

Even early on a Tuesday in March the place was mobbed, but it’s also somewhat on the larger side of immense so you can spread out and not notice the crowd so much. We headed in and, map in hand, tried to figure out where we were, how that differed from where we were hoping to be, and if possible how to bridge that gap without losing either our minds or our way.

This it turns out is tricky, but doable.

I will just stop right here before moving on and point out that the Vatican Museum is one of the most overwhelming collections of artifacts and displays in the world. It is entirely possible to spend a full day there and not see anywhere close to what is on display, and once you realize that what they have on display is a vanishingly small percentage of what they actually own that feeling of being overwhelmed only gets more intense. We probably spent four hours there and barely scratched the surface of the place but eventually you just have to go somewhere else or your brain overflows.

The first section we ended up exploring was devoted entirely to things made of stone – statues and carvings, mostly, though occasionally mosaics. It kept going, area after area after area, and it had an astonishing array of artwork.

This one appealed to me for some reason, mostly I suspect because the figures look like they might actually be enjoying themselves, which is not a common thing in these statues. Most of them look rather glum. This one stood out a bit.

This guy, for example, clearly has had a hard day.

This photo is there as an illustration of one of the things that would eventually become obvious as we worked our way through the museum and which is not surprising if you take a moment and think about it but is something that I rarely ever consider, which is that ancient Rome supported a phenomenal number of sculptors and artists. There is just so much of it, and this is just the stuff that a) survived and b) is in this particular museum. You want to take the time to savor each one of these objects, thousands of years old as they are, but eventually it’s just another head. And there are a lot of heads. All sorts of heads. Roly poly Roman heads, eat them up, yum.

At some point later in the day we were working our way toward a particular goal and found ourselves in a hallway that teed into another hallway, with maybe forty yards to both right and left. All of that space was entirely filled with heads – both busts and things that had once sat on full statues – as well as random other statuary and it was about that point that I realized that trying to see it all was probably not going to happen.

In addition to the statutes there were mosaics of astoundingly fine detail work – the sort of thing you look at from a few feet away and can’t quite bring yourself to believe it’s not a painting. People who think that modern humans are by definition more sophisticated than ancient ones haven’t really explored what ancient humans could do.

At some point, though, the stone art gave way to paintings and other such. And if I had thought the sculptures were overwhelming, the paintings let me know that I had not yet begun to be overwhelmed.

We started by going into a self-enclosed wing of the museum and then heading into exactly the wrong room. You’re supposed to go through these things in chronological order and it turns out that the security folks get rather annoyed if you start with a recent room and try to move backward in time. Time travel is not allowed, either by the laws of physics or by the rules of the Vatican Museum, and there is a certain symmetry to that. So we backed up and started from the beginning.

There so, so many magisterial works of art in this place, some of which are over a thousand years old.

I liked this one because even here, in the heart of one the oldest branches of Christianity, there are occasional reminders that a Messiah who came to humanity in the western Mediterranean two millennia ago was not likely to be a white guy and medieval Europeans knew this in a way that still seems to come as a shock to modern Americans.

This one appealed to me for the colors.

And this one – part of a larger sequence of such portraits – just struck me as funny. Someday I will make this one my profile picture on my various social media accounts just to see if anyone thinks it’s as funny as I do, though I am already preparing myself for the echoing void that will likely be my answer. But hey – sometimes you just have to do you.

This tapestry hangs in a room full of them – it’s kind of like The House on the Rock in Wisconsin that way, only with taste and class – and the thing that struck me most was the sheer scale of the things. You can see some fellow museum goers at the bottom, just to give you a sense of it. I have no idea how you hang a tapestry that big without having it sag down in the middle, but there it is. Three cheers for the folks behind the scenes who figured that out.

Sometimes the museum will take some of the art away to have it cleaned or restored or whatever, and rather than leave a blank space they’ll put something else in its place. For this painting they had the original “cartoon” of the thing – the charcoal sketch that the artist was working from, though I admit that this wasn’t the first thing that came to my mind when I initially saw the word “cartoon” – and it was fascinating. I think I preferred seeing this to the actual painting, though the actual painting was not there so maybe I’m just making that up. After a while in a place like that you do get a little lightheaded.

At one point we found ourselves outside (how?) and were confronted with this, which I just thought was marvelous.

There was also the pine cone. I’m sure it has another title and is Deeply Symbolic of something, but it just looked like a pine cone to me.

The main reason we were at the Vatican Museum, though, was because of the Sistine Chapel. This was the single most important sight of our entire trip in Kim’s estimation, and no matter what else happened while we were in Italy we were going to see it. This turned out to be more complicated than you’d think.

For one thing the Sistine Chapel is all the way at the other end of the museum from where you come in and you have to figure out how to get there from here. This is not as obvious as the map makes it seem (few things were), and we ended up asking a great many questions of a fair number of guards, all of whom were helpful and polite about answering questions that they probably hear every two minutes all day long.

For another thing, at least in our experience, when you are nearly there and feel you are just about at your goal you find yourself at the top of a staircase where there are a number of guards and a few barriers, and then you get detoured through a long series of other artworks before being allowed to proceed on to the main event. I’m not sure why they do this – perhaps to control traffic flow – but you do get to see some fascinating things along the way. Pack a lunch.

The first thing they shunt you through is a long series of rooms containing what appears to be the entire pottery output of Etruscan civilization as well as some deeply weird little statues and a host of other things that were probably fascinating in themselves but which you end up cheating a bit since you’d kind of hoped to be closer to the Sistine Chapel by then.

But eventually you come full circle back to that landing and at that point the guards decide that you have proven yourself worthy and you can go toward the Sistine Chapel, which is still a considerable walk away through a number of other galleries at that point, my favorite of which – one that I had hoped to visit anyway, Sistine Chapel or no – was the Hall of Maps.

The Hall of Maps is – like every other space created in Renaissance Rome – incredibly ornate and covered from top to bottom in artwork. Each individual map is also huge, maybe two to four meters on a side, and surprisingly detailed.

 

I made a special point of finding the map of Sicily since that’s where a good chunk of my ancestors come from. It takes a while to orient yourself since the map has south on the top so it looks upside down to modern eyes, but there it is. My family comes from the part just off the mainland, in the northern part of the island, which is at the bottom left corner of this particular map.

 

 

At the end of the hallway you get a choice – there is a long way to get to the Sistine Chapel from there (which takes you through several other galleries, all of which were no doubt stunning in their artistry) or the short way, which seemed a better plan after the various detours we’d already taken. The short way takes you down a nondescript set of stairs with a couple of signs warning you that the Sistine Chapel is considered a sacred space and therefore talking, photos, and videos are not allowed, and then suddenly you walk through a door and you're inside.

Boom.

The Sistine Chapel, as I have noted earlier in this space, is bigger than you think it is, or at least it’s bigger than I thought it was. I’m not sure why I always pictured it as a small and rather dark Gothic church rather than a big bright Romanesque space, but the reality of it made sense when I walked in. “Oh, right, of course it’s going to look like this.” It’s a large and ornate rectangular room, maybe twelve meters by forty and about twenty meters high, every single inch of which is covered with artwork. Every. Single. Inch. As we continually discovered throughout our visit and in all sorts of places, minimalism was not an aesthetic in Renaissance Italy. The floor is ornate. The walls are even more ornate. The ceiling – sweet dancing monkeys on a stick, the ceiling – is beyond ornate. It’s hard to know where to look, to be honest.

The most famous part, of course, is the ceiling, which features Michelangelo’s painting of God reaching out to Adam – the one that everyone’s seen in one or another textbook over the course of their lives and if they haven't there's always the memes. The thing that you don’t realize is that this is just one of the images up there on the ceiling. It isn’t even the central one. There didn’t seem to be a central one. It’s just image after image after image, each one a masterpiece on its own but the overall effect combining to seem frenetically and distractedly busy. The floor is open, for the most part. You come in at the front – the house right corner by the altar – and you can wander around on your own for as long as you choose to do so. If you’re lucky you can get a seat on one of the benches that line the walls or the wooden barrier that sets off the back third of the space from the rest, and then you can just sort of take it all in without hurrying.

It’s almost impossible not to try to talk about what you’re seeing, in the hushed tones of amazement that would be expected in such a place, and while I understand the prohibitions on photography that are in place I also understand why people would try to sneak in photos anyway. But the museum guards are on to those tricks.

There are a bunch of guards there in the Sistine Chapel, as you would expect, and mostly they just sort of mill through the crowds keeping an eye on things, but every so often they feel a need to get involved and you can tell that they all, to a man, wanted to be priests when they were younger but decided they liked dating better than theology so they figured out the next best thing they could do would be to join the Vatican Museum and work at the Sistine Chapel. About every five minutes or so one of them would get onto a microphone and announce in the elongated tones of a plainsong chant,

SILENNNNNCIOOOOOOOooooooo….

NO PHOTOOOOOOoooooooooooo…..

NO VIDEOOOOOOOOoooooooooo…..

And things would die down for a bit, and then the murmurs would start up again and the whole cycle would repeat.

We stayed for quite a while, just taking it all in – seriously, why rush through a place like this? – but eventually we moved on. You exit from the back and they funnel you through the gift shop, which seems like a good place to put it, from a museum management perspective. We bought a few post cards to mail from the Vatican City post office as well as some other small things – we didn’t have the luggage space for anything big – and continued on.

We once again find ourselves in a long maze of corridors full of jaw-dropping treasures that just randomly appeared with no particular rhyme or reason that I could ever figure out.

This, for example.

Or this, which I loved.

This was about when we decided that it was lunchtime so we headed over to the cafeteria – which, like everywhere else we ate on this trip, had astonishingly good food – and filled out our post cards before heading off to find the post office.

On the way we passed a small area where some of the conservators worked, though they too seemed to be on their lunch break. It’s always interesting to see how it’s done behind the scenes and I like when museums put some of that where visitors can see it.

After cruising through a coin and stamp exhibit we eventually did find the post office where we bought some stamps and mailed our post cards. The one we sent to ourselves took about two weeks to arrive, but now we have a canceled stamp from the Vatican City which is just one of those cool little things that may or may not matter in the long run but which nevertheless makes life just that much better.

From there we headed over to the Basilica of St. Peter’s, and while I thought that would be part of this post it clearly cannot.