Rome: day 1

So Rome it is. Time for me to make that mandatory trip to the masterpiecemines of the South, in times gone by made by every young artist of any ambition whatsoever. Oh, all right, it’s just four days, and it’s not like I’ve got any artistic ambitions connected with this journey – but it’s hoorayishly exciting nonetheless.

The cash machine broke down right before Dad got to it. No, there isn’t another one on the airport. Yes, this is the capital of Italy. No, we don’t have enough euros for the bus tickets.

The man standing ahead of us in line to the currency exchange seemed to have all the time in the world for transactions with copious amounts of money; we didn’t, so Dad ran to look for another exchange point. When he got back (the line in the second point was hopelessly long...), the lady operating the initial exchange was gone, replaced by a sign saying more or less “I’m not here. Go to the other currency exchange.”

Eventually, we got the money (no need to speak of the horrificness of the exchange rates) and our desired tickets. Getting to the city center would only take us two hours... (This does include the money exchange and the forty minutes in line to the luggage storage...)

Meanwhile, in the bus: green, green, green! And blue, blue, blue, and sunny!... Long, shady clouds of puffy-green stone pines, pinned to the sky with hazy needles, propped up on numerous standing-sticks of knobbly wood graze quietly on the horizon. These are the preschool-trees, the archetypes of treefulness, Eeyore’s wistful balloons perched on Winnie-the-Pooh-esque[1] trunks. When I had visited Italy almost ten years ago, I had decided to make these my favorite trees ever. I had been beginning to forget why – in my memory they had faded to mere funnily shaped pines. One glance at them now, and I remembered again.

We were going to do the one thing our guidebook said one should never do – visit the Vatican Museums right after arriving in Rome, after a sleepless night. Frankly, I could think of plenty of things one should do much less often than that – and not booking one’s visit on the internet would be one of those things. Unless one loves standing in long, long lines and having someone butt in in front of one ten minutes before the end of the wait. More of those Italian queues (I suppose I ought to start using such British words by now and admit to my growing Britishness – but how I wish this one was pronounced cue-we-you-wees!) later; for now let us enter the Vatican Museums, internet booking for the forbidden day – and the only day they still had spaces for – in hand, yawns stifled deep inside.

Of course, the occasional yawn still escaped, along with the occasional thought of “I’d rather die than not go to sleep now”, but on the whole our sleepiness did nothing to stifle our amazement at the Museums. “Oh my goodness! Good Lord!” I exclaimed on entering the first room. “Don’t swear,” Chris reminded me. “Oh, all right. Flowers!, then,” I conceded. “You swore again...”

Light and shadow hardened into the most solid of marble, squeezed onto the whipped cream of a flowing cape, painted over the firm existence of a limb. This was my first real encounter with ancient sculpture, and I hadn’t expected such amazement. I was always more of a painting person, color was my thing – but at the Vatican, I hardly glanced at most of the paintings. This was what the artists of old had come to Rome for – unsurpassable mastery, perfect proportions, the ideal beauty of the human form. “Blah, blah, blah,” I had thought previously... Surely the masters of the Renaissance had had enough talent to stop considering the ancients the unreachable ideal?

Now I wasn’t so sure anymore... It kind of beats all sureness of yourself out of you when you realize how much people had already achieved two thousand years ago.

“Yuck, too much of everything,” Mom dismissed the swirling rivers, pools and waterfalls of gold, the fields of paint, the mountain ranges of marble with one sweep of the hand. She was absolutely right, of course, but... Flowers! Flowers! Flowers!!!

Faced with all this magnificence, the whole time we were only really waiting for the Sistine Chapel. Every so often, we would pass an arrow directing us there, reminding us that this was our final destination. The tension was rising – could it have ended with anything but disappointment?

It could have and it did – despite an acquaintance’s mumblings about how the place had been smaller than what she had expected, I couldn’t possibly imagine it being any larger than it was.

Like everywhere in the Vatican Museums, there was a whole deluge of people. Here, for a change, photography wasn’t allowed, but what of it? Flashes exploded every few seconds, with the guard throwing “No camera, no camera!” at the deaf mob once in a while. They just threw back more flashes.

Each part of the fresco was a work of art on its own – I had known that before, of course, that’s what reproductions are for. But there was also the whole, immense but also measured, proportional, complete. I looked up one last time and once more believed in the Renaissance and in color.

The hotel rooms we had booked were small and smelled of mold – but when I lay down that night, I immediately woke up the following morning.

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[1] I am referring here to the Walt Disney interpretation of trees; an adjective truer to the original might be “Heffalump-esque”.