Primo Assaggio d’Italia

Today was a mixed bag, I must say. It was meant to hold great promise. A tour of the Vatican Museums, a look at the Sistine Chapel, and then a tour of Saint Peters Basilica, all wrapped up in three hour guided tour booked online months in advance. The tour was well organised, easy to follow instructions, and our tour guide Gina, originally hailing from Barcelona but a fluent Italian speaker, was friendly, charming, knowledgeable and fun.

However, that’s where the positives end.

Let’s do this systematically.

The Crowds were horrendous. Good on them for being here, but wow, honestly, what with the death of Pope Francis, the calling of a Year of Jubilee (only happens once every 25 years), a conclave, the election of Pope Leo, the Vatican was packed to overflowing with both tourists (us included) and pilgrims. Today, around 2pm Pope Leo was going to say a Mass for youth in the open air of St Peters Square. A lot of these folk wanted to see the museums and the Basilica too.

The Museums are vast and like the National British Museum in London, you need a few hours to wander around to try to pick three or four rooms that you’d like to concentrate on and leave the rest for another time. If we’d had normal tickets, we could have done that. However, with tour tickets, we were on a forced march through various rooms but mostly through corridors lined with extraordinary antiquities from the ancient world that we did not have time to stop and see. With a hundred people in front of you and maybe two to three hundred people behind you, all walking through the long corridors of the museums in the same direction, you just could not stop. This meant that the tour was slow. With so many people, there were long waits and the whole things happened in slow motion.

The Sistine Chapel, I don’t care what anybody says, is extraordinary. It is absolutely not over-rated. There were hundreds of us let in at our time, so we stood in the middle of the chapel looking up at the various panels, surrounded by a throng of other folk also all looking up. This was the only place in the tour where I was able to forget the numbers of people surrounding my personal space. Looking up at Michelangelo’s ceiling and his Last Judgement above the altar, I was quite transfixed by what he had achieved and disappointed when it was time to leave. By this point already, we were three hours into a three hour tour and still had St Peters to go, for me the highlight, a church I had always wanted to see. But we were on the clock due to the Papal Mass where the Basilica would be closed an hour or so before the Mass started.

The Heat Rome today reached 31°. We were ushed out into St Peters Square, an incredible sight, but immediately pummelled by the unrelenting sun high in the sky, and bouncing off Vatican walls and bitumen, it must have reached the late thirties as we stood among a multitude of other people likewise melting away. The crowd would have been twenty across at least, hundreds in front and thousands behind. We were all cheek by jowl, which is very stressful. I am sure it was the largest crowd I have ever been in. My body was pressed in on all four sides by strangers. And the sun beat down.

It was not long before heat stress started to overtake some. We inched our way up to the side steps at the front of the Basilica and just stopped. No-one knew what was going on. No-one could see why we had stopped. Pilgrims were moving up to the doors, but the rest of us were just left there to bake. And bake we did. Chris was struggling. I was struggling. In the end, I pulled the plug. There was no way we could stand there with no sense of when there would be movement because no-one was telling us anything. I was feeling weak at the knees and didn’t want to buckle. Chris looked exactly the same and so was with me all the way.

We headed all the way back down to where we joined the crowd when we left the Museums, where a young Vatican official refused to let us out. I begged, cajoled and got very assertive with him, but to no avail. He told us that we had to follow the line we just left, go up those steps and head out on the other side of the Basilica.

This is what we did. Of course, we had lost our place, but we pushed our way through to close enough to where we stood before and then miraculously, there was movement. It took about ten minutes to climb those few stairs with the amount of people. But it was all too late. The sun and the Vatical crowds had defeated us. We were over it and just wanted out. We passed open doors into the Basilica and headed for the exit on the other side feeling completely overwhelmed.

I think the Vatican authorities should have had better crowd control, some public service announcements and should even have sprayed the crowd with cold water as you see in some crowd situations. I am disappointed I never got to see inside the Basilica. The front façade of this immense church was built in the early 1500s to show the power of the church and the power of the papacy in the world as it was then. It still does, even though the institution doesn’t hold the same sway. As a building, it is very impressive as it is meant to be. The Square likewise with its colonnades topped by saints and apostles is very impressive. There is no other word for it.

But having survived the turmoil and sheer effort of having to get through something extremely uncomfortable, I would not recommend a tour of the Vatican Museums. I would rather buy a normal ticket and take myself through. But so popular are the Museums that finding a low crowd time might be difficult. I also would not attend the Basilica on a special event day. And in the future, if there is another future, I would not come to Rome in the dead of sweltering summer.

Tonight, dinner (pizza), drinks, a stroll, gelato, a sit on the fountain steps, another stroll by the river and home. My back aches from all the standing and my feet are still on fire. It is what it is.Lue lisää