Flying Home

Part 22:  Flying Home.

Thursday October 10:

American Airlines Flight 235 is scheduled to leave Rome at 9:50 AM, and we have been advised to be there 3 hours early – just in case.  We, with four others from our group, rent a minivan; it’s 15 euros each and cheaper than a taxi-train combo.  The minivan arrives on time and gets us to Fiumicino Airport at 6:30.  We are early.  The ticket counters don’t open until 7, and we see that our flight will be delayed an hour.  Not a problem. We have a 3 ½ hour layover in New York before we have to catch a flight to Chicago.  We get to our gate and wait 3 hours in a very crowded boarding area. We board the plane about 11, get settled, and await takeoff.

“Ladies and gentlemen, this is your pilot.  We have a problem.  The air traffic controllers in France have gone on strike, so we can’t fly over France.  We are submitting a new flight plan that will take us over Spain instead.  But we’ll have to wait our turn, because a lot of other flights are doing the same thing.”  

Two and a half hours later the pilot announces that we are cleared for takeoff.  Our 3 ½ hour layover in New York is now down to 30 minutes – and we will have to go through customs and have our bags searched again.  

The flight goes smoothly, but our stomachs are churning.  What happens if we don’t make it?  A night in NYC?  The only positive I can find is that our connecting flight is also American Airlines.  

When we get off the plane at JFK we have 30 minutes until our connecting flight leaves.  American staff are pointing all passengers with connecting flights to a table where they give us this piece of gold and say: "Show it to the people in every line you come to and go to the head of the line immediately."

We run/trot/walk down a long corridor, down an escalator, through Customs – they just stamp our passports, no bag search.  Then around a corner into the departure area leading to ALL GATES.  “Which way is Gate 43?”  “No, you have to go through security.”  So we are off to the bag checking area, where we get some resistance when we jump to the head of the line, and I have a 16 oz. bottle of water.  But we get through it.  Then it’s up two sets of escalators, hang a right to Gate 43, which as we approach, appears vacated. “Oh Crap (and other stuff)”.  No, there is someone there!  We flash our EXPRESS badge.  She checks us off and gives us a boarding pass.  We are the last ones on.  My watch says 5:13.  Flight is scheduled to leave at 5:15.  Two minutes to spare.  And this flight leaves on time.

Here is the crazy thing:  we got off the plane at Gate 41 and re-boarded at Gate 43 – they are right next to each other.  But we had a half hour run, 2 check points, and several escalators to get through in between.

The flight to Chicago is 90 minutes.  We get to our motel – the Best Western at O’Hare about 9PM - but 3 or 4 AM on our biological clocks.   

Next AM – Friday.  Up at 8, breakfast, back to O’Hare, catch a shuttle to Midway to connect with a Southwest flight that will take us to Portland.

It all goes smoothly.  Fred and Cheri pick us up at the airport.  We are home.  Trip is over.

It was a blast! 

End of Story.  End of Blog.  Hope you enjoyed it.

MITCH

Our Last Supper, the Villa Borghese, & The Etruscans

Part 21:  Our Last Supper, the Villa Borghese, & Etruscans  

Tuesday night we gather for the official group photo and our last group meal at Ristorante Terme Diocleziano (Baths of Diocletian Restaurant).

The Official Team Photo

                                                 Thanks to Gary Ong for the Last Supper pictures

Tomorrow morning is the end of the tour and most of our group will be heading for home.  Bonnie and I are staying an extra day.  We plan to sleep late then visit the Villa Borghese and Etruscan Museum.

These are the only pictures we have of the Villa Borghese and they don't tell you much.  The gardens begin at the head of the Spanish Steps then spread our mostly to the north over 148 acres.  They contain formal gardens, art galleries (Villa Medici, Galleria Borghese, and the National Gallery of Modern Art) and traditional park amenities like bike rentals, playgrounds and a zoo (Bioparco).

National Gallery of Modern Art

Just outside the Gardens (west side) is the Etruscan Museum.  The Etruscans were an advanced civilization that existed on the west coast of Italy north of Rome from the 9^th to the 6^th century BC.  Very little is known about their language, but their skill in ceramics was highly developed and ancient Rome seems to have adopted much of their culture.

The museum is in this building, the Villa Giulia, a beautiful renaissance palace dating from the mid 16^th century. Pope Julius III commissioned the building, and it was transferred from one papal family to another until 1870 when the new Italian state confiscated it and eventually gave it to the National Etruscan Museum in the early 20th century.

The Museum is filled with Etruscan craft and fine maps and re-creations of their towns.  There are hundreds of pieces of their distinctive gold on black ceramics. The prized piece is an almost life-size terracotta sarcophagus picturing a married couple reclining on their tomb at an everlasting banquet.  No photography is allowed. 

                                                         from Wikipedia

                                                                                                                                              from the website "Studyblue.com"

We capped our day with a late lunch at Ristorante all’ Orsetto (Lttle Bear) where I ate this pizza before it ate me.  Bonnie had a more nutritious salad.

Yep, that’s a whole hardboiled egg.

Then, early to bed.  Tomorrow is the long journey home and we have to leave for the airport at 6 AM.

The Vatican

Part 21: The Vatican

Tuesday October 8: 

Another trip on the Metro, across the Tiber to see the Vatican Museums, the Sistine Chapel, and St Peter’s.

In her notes Bonnie summed up this day:  “People, more people. Buildings, more buildings.”  To that I would add “lines, more lines.”   Vatican City is a crowded place.  When we got back to Portland there was an article in the paper saying that the management of the Vatican Museums is thinking about limiting the number of tourists.  If the crowds get any bigger they will stress the air conditioning system which will lead to potential harm of the art.  There were five million visitors in 2011, about the same as the Grand Canyon.

Luckily all this was indoors, because halfway through the journey, there was a serious cloudburst which would have ruined anything that was outside.

Our guide through the Vatican Museums, Sistine Chapel and St Peter’s was Christopher.  Guides are good, very good.  In his guidebook Rick Steves has several pages on strategies for negotiating the Vatican – it’s complicated.  A guide makes it simple.  The downside is that you have to stick with the group; so you can’t linger or branch out and see something that you want to see.  But I’ll stick with the guide.

The Vatican Museums are one of Europe’s “top three or four houses of art...with four miles of displays” (Rick Steves).   

Photography (but no flash) is allowed in all the museums except the Sistine Chapel.  But the crowds make it difficult.

Pope Julius II founded the museums in the early 16th century when he sent Michelangelo and Giuliano de Sangallo to check out the authenticity of a sculpture of Laocoön and his Sons in a vineyard near the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome.  On their recommendation, he bought the sculpture and put it on public display at the Vatican. 

We were able to get a picture of Laocoon.  There is a lot that is not known about this statue, but it seems to date from somewhere between 200 BC and 70 AD.

In his history of Rome, Robert Hughes describes Julius II (1503-1513) as a “monster of will and appetite and the greatest patron of art in the Roman Church.  He, Michelangelo, and the architect Bramante (designer of St. Peter’s) form the most remarkable body of artistic talent ever assembled by a European.” 

This is not Julius II, just an interesting piece.  If you want to know more about Julius and nepotism and the papacy during Renaissance, check out his page on Wikipedia.

                                                   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Julius_II

Here are some other pieces that we were able to get decent pictures of in the museums.  In the museums the pieces are grouped by chronology, genre and artist.  These pictures are arranged by “what came next.”

This is the Sala Rotunda which is shaped like a miniature Pantheon.  It contains many works from the Roman Empire.

These are close-ups of the mosaics on the floor of the Sala Rotonda.

Bust of Pertinax, Roman Emperor for three months in 193. He is known as the first emperor of the tumultuous Year of the Five Emperors.
 

This sarcophagus in the Greek Cross Gallery was built to contain the remains St Helen, Constantine’s mother or her mother Constance.  There are identical sarcophagi on either side of the hall. But the remains were never put there.

 


There is one room (hallway actually) with nothing but tapestries.  This is a close-up of one of one of them.  I was about 3 feet from the piece when I took the picture.  I was amazed by the its fine pictorial quality.
  

These maps are in the Galleria delle Carte Geographiche.  They are topographical maps of the whole of Italy, painted on the walls by Friar Ignazio Dante and, commissioned by Pope Gregory XIII (1572–1585). It remains the world's largest pictorial geographical study.

 The Raphael Rooms - Stanze di Raffaello 

The four Raphael Rooms (Italian: Stanze di Raffaello) were the public part of the papal apartments in the Palace of the Vatican. They were painted by Raphael, and together with Michelangelo's ceiling frescoes in the Sistine Chapel, they are the grand fresco sequences that mark the High Renaissance in Rome.  Julius II commissioned them in 1509 as adornment for his suite of apartments.

 

The School of Athens, a fresco by Raphael, is considered his masterpiece and the perfect embodiment of the classical spirit of the High Renaissance.  Plato (red) and Aristotle (blue) are the figures in the center. Diogenes (blue) is at Aristotle’s feet.  The seated figure in front leaning on the box is Michelangelo.  Socrates is in green in the back row, facing away from Plato and Aristotle.  Others pictured are Zeno, Epicurus, Pythagoras – a Greek Hall of Fame, plus a few outsiders like Averroes, Zoroaster, and Ptolemy.

This is a section from Raphael's The Mass at Bolsana, one of the fresco 

panels in the Raphael Rooms

SISTINE CHAPEL

 “SILENZIO!” “SILENCE!”  This is what you hear every five minutes or so in the Sistine Chapel.  And it is silent, considering there are hundreds of people crowded into the room (134 feet by 44 feet).  

Standing up I kept trying to look at the ceiling, but in a while my neck was hurting and I kept losing my balance.   Bonnie spied some just-vacated spots on the benches lining the sides of the room.  What a blessing.  Now the Sistine Chapel had become a pleasant place to view art.  There is no way you can take all it in, so I just focused on one or two panels. 

After 20 minutes we started feeling a little guilty, so we let others have our seats.  It was also time to rendezvous with Christopher, who was taking us to St Peter’s.

Michelangelo is responsible only for the ceiling (1509-1510) and the Last Judgment (1535-1541) which covers the wall behind the altar.  The side walls were done earlier – before 1482 – by several different artists.
Julius II commissioned Michelangelo to paint the twelve apostles on the ceiling, but Michelangelo demanded a free hand and instead painted a series of nine pictures showing God's Creation of the World, God's Relationship with Mankind, and Mankind's fall from God's Grace.  Alexander III commissioned the painting of the Last Judgment.

Here are pictures from Wikipedia that show the Sistine Chapel, a portion of the ceiling, and The Last Judgment.

St. Peter’s

This "is the richest and grandest church on earth…plaques on the floor show where other churches would end if they were placed inside…thousands of people wander about hardly noticing each other” (Steves Guidebook)

This St. Peter’s was built between 1506 and 1614.  It was commissioned by Julius II.

Donato Bramante was the original architect but died in 1514. Michelangelo succeeded him in 1546 to revive a project that had stalled.  He designed the dome and stayed as chief architect until he died in 1564. In 1607 Carlo Maderno extended the length of the church by converting the original Greek cross design (four equal sides) to a Latin cross design (long vertical, short horizontal) which almost doubled the length of the church.
This new St. Peter’s replaced an older one built in the fourth century on the same site.  That St. Peter’s was commissioned by the Emperor Constantine (who legalized Christianity in the Roman Empire).  He wanted a place to reverently keep the remains of St. Peter who had been martyred at that spot in 65 AD.

Bernini’s bronze canopy (seven stories high) was finished in 1624.  Bernini designed much of the interior:  the dove window over the apse, the marble floor decoration, and the Tomb of Alexander VII.
 

Alexander VII was pope from 1655-1657 and was very involved in Rome’s urban planning during the Counter reformation.  Bernini was his preferred architect and Sculptor.

 

Michelangelo’s Pieta is now behind glass – In 1972 some crazy attacked it with a hammer.  Michelangelo was 24 when he did it, and it was the only piece he ever signed – supposedly because he heard some pilgrims attributing it to some other artist.  So he carved on it “Michelangelo Buonaroti made this.”
He also designed the dome.

St Peter's dome is the highest in the world (448 ft) but not the widest (136 ft).  The pantheon and the Duomo in Florence are both over 140 ft.

 Monument to Pius VIII by Pietro Tenerani (1866)

Pius was very sickly and was pope for little more than 1 ½ years (March 1829 to November 1830).  He wrote an encyclical disparaging religious pluralism (a "foul contrivance of the sophists of this age" that would place Catholicism on par with any other religion”) and warned against modern translations of the Bible (“We must also be wary of those who publish the Bible with new interpretations contrary to the Church's laws. They skillfully distort the meaning by their own interpretation. They print the Bibles in the vernacular and, absorbing an incredible expense, offer them free even to the uneducated. Furthermore, the Bibles are rarely without perverse little inserts to ensure that the reader imbibes their lethal poison instead of the saving water of salvation.”  Such a big monument for an insignificant pontiff.

*     *     *     *     *         

Outside the rain had stopped and it was a beautiful day, and St. Peter’s Square was set up for Pope Francis’s appearance the next day.