Things You Can't Get From A Book

My mother used to say she didn’t need to travel. She could see every thing in a book. She was wrong.

She could have looked at pictures of the Vatican in a book, but she wouldn’t have seen the relation of the tiny country to the rest of the city, felt the texture of the small grey-brown rectangle bricks of its walls, realised that stepping into St. Peter’s Square that it was a circle not a square. Nor would she have had small purple flowers drop into her hair when a gust of wind rippled the trees on a Roman Street outside the Vatican.

Because I was covering a conference, I could only get a smattering of Rome, but that smattering was wonderful. I had wanted to see St. Peter’s and the Sistine Chapel leaving the rest of this city that makes me want to sing as I walk down the street to another time. Where else can you take a walk and come across a 2000 year old cistern for a villa, or a gate that Julius Cesar could have walked through near a modern office building? The new buildings, the flowering trees all gave an ambience not possible to feel, touch, smell and hear from a book.

The sun was blistering, relentless, hot, sizzling…writers are told to not use adjectives and to show not tell. Let me show you about about the heat -- a cherry Popsicle would have had about 1.5 nano seconds of life before being turned into pink steam.

The lines were long going into St. Peter’s. The basilica was impressive, imposing and oppressive all at the same time. The art showed the greatest talents of centuries (I wonder where art would be without the Christian Church). The feeling of power, perhaps more of man than God, was overwhelming.

I was a bit disgruntled to realise that there is €4 Euro charge to enter the church and another €3 to use the elevator. I pictured any pope meeting St. Peter at the gate and charging the newly deceased four euros to enter heaven and another 3 to use the elevator to God’s office or be made to walk up 320 steps. I can see charging for audios, souvenirs, toilets and even non Catholics. I can see asking for a donation forcefully, but if I were Catholic I would resent paying to enter the seat of my religion. I guess I’ve read too much about the humble Cathar Good Men and Good Women roaming the Pyrenees preaching goodness and forsaking all worldly wealth or the Gnostic gospels.

By the time I got to the Sistine Chapel the line was approximately two hours long, at least 75% in the sun. I am not a cherry Popsicle but I pictured myself vanishing in steam. Another trip, off tourist season in cooler weather, I said to myself. Guaranteed. But if I never set foot in that city again, being there was truly a treat that I could never capture in a book. I am truly blessed to have had the experience.