This was the day we had planned to go to the Vatican Museums, since nearly every other museum in town was closed. The museum opened at 8:45, and one of our guidebooks suggested getting there an hour early and sprinting through to the Sistine Chapel to have it all to ourselves for a few minutes. We weren't going to go that far (though I had done that in 82, in Paris, to see the Mona Lisa by myself) but we had planned to get there shortly before opening. Due to the kids delaying in various ways, we didn't get out of the apartment until about quarter to nine; then we changed our minds about taking a bus up, mindful of the bad luck we'd been having with buses not arriving, and walked up the Via della Lungara, along the colonnade of St. Peter's, and up along the Via di Porta Angelica, along the outside of the wall above which the Vatican City rose, only to meet a lineup. We weren't anywhere near the entrance to the museums, and I walked up the line to make sure. It was the right line; there seemed to only be one of them, and it was swollen with tour groups. On the way back down I counted 400 paces before meeting N and the kids again. Fortunately, the line moved fast, and we only had to endure a quarter-hour or so of the "ugly American" remarks from the tour group in front of us and their scouting for cheap plastic souvenirs (I never thought I'd see anyone buy a three-inch replica of La Pieta made in China, but after all, there are a lot of these stalls, and someone must frequent them) before we gained the entrance.
We did not enter by the double nested spiral staircase our guidebooks talked about; this was a new entrance, presumably completed for the Jubilee year. There was a separate place for group tickets, and the whole process was quite efficient. We moved up an escalator and into the museum proper.
Almost immediately the confusion started. N had specific ideas of what she wanted to see from her classics studies: ancient Roman mosaics, sculpture, and Etruscan artifacts. But the museum is partitioned into a series of one-way "itineraries", with guards to police the flow at strategic points; you simply can't get there from here. We hadn't bought a specific museum guidebook (I had one from 82 and saw one almost identical for sale at the frequent souvenir stalls) and were relying on our memory of descriptions from the Oxford guide plus the small Rough Guide, which fit in my pouch along with my wallet.
We didn't seem to be able to get to the Museo Pio-Clementino (classical sculpture) without going through the Egyptian collection, so we moved fairly quickly through those rooms. They were quite crowded, surprisingly, compared to the same rooms in places like the Met or the Louvre; it was probably just that it was the first thing one comes to after the entrance. There didn't appear to be temperature controls anywhere; it was fairly hot, with some breeze coming from the occasional open window.
We finally reached the sculpture courtyard, again fairly crowded, but adopting the museum "blockbuster" strategy of looking at whatever was unattended and waiting for the waves of people to move along, we managed fine. The kids recognized the Laocoon, and perhaps now they'll know why I say that word every time I struggle with the long vacuum cleaner hose. In 82 I had come across a modern "completed" copy first, and admired it for quite a while before moving on and discovering the original. I have little 3.5x5 prints of both. This time I left my cameras in the apartment, but I may have been the only one; there were plenty of flashes going off here and there, and the modern phenomenon of the man (it is always a man) walking with video camera in upturned palm, seeing the art through his little LCD viewfinder.
This courtyard also held the Apollo Belvedere, which to my mind is yet another example of how the sixteenth or eighteenth century view of beauty has conditioned what we "must see". There are hundreds of statues in Rome as beautiful or more so. We did look at it and the Belvedere Torso, which is pretty fragmentary, only to consider their influence on Michelangelo and other Renaissance artists whose works we would soon see.
We were sent from here along the Gallery of the Candelabra, with a few more notable Roman sculptures, and then the Gallery of Tapestries, which we hurried through quickly. With the exception of some work we once saw in the Loire Valley, tapestries are generally beyond my appreciation. Then the Gallery of Maps. These were not on paper, but painted on the wall. Had they been in some building in the southeast of the city, all by themselves, I might have taken the time to examine them and figure out their significance, but here they were just something to be walked under quickly to avoid burnout. This long gallery was notable for the numerous identical displays of parts of the Sistine Chapel with text; these stations are places that tour groups stop at in order to be talked through the details before going into the Chapel in silence, and in fact we saw a few of these (and had to wend our way through them, since they tended to take up the whole width of the corridor, as did any group being talked through some specific map or tapestry).
The other modern phenomenon of note on display was the acoustiguide. As of this writing it is a CD unit with a numeric pad on which one taps in the number of an indexed work, or follows one of several pre-set itineraries with directions in one's mother tongue delivered through headphones like the ones handed out on airplanes. One could argue that there is no difference between the received wisdom of this device and of the guidebooks and art-historical books that we used, but I would like to think that we put some synthesis and critical thought into our preparations. At one point in the Pio-Clementino, N found the statue of the Apoxyomenos (the athlete using a strigil) in a deserted alcove near a stairway and exclaimed to the children how important it was and what a shame it was no one was admiring it besides us. "Someone will be along soon," I said, pointing to the acoustiguide number on the pedestal, and sure enough, someone with headphones stepped into the alcove and stared blankly at the statue while being lectured.
At the end of the Gallery of Maps the crowds started again, and we shuffled into the first of the Raphael Stanze, the rooms that Raphael frescoed (or designed the frescoes for) for Pope Julius II. These works varied considerably in effect. The ones completed by pupils or done entirely by them based on cartoons or other designs, and the ones demonstrating obscure points of theology or medieval miracles made less of an impact. The rooms were crowded, but people moved through in groups or bunches, and many stood in the centre reading the expository panels, so we could usually find a deserted corner and crouch there explaining things to the kids or asking them questions. They were quite active, pointing out things they remembered from books we had looked at before leaving or identifying saints or mythological episodes.
The first room, the Hall of Constantine, had four hopelessly crowded, monumental, and overdone frescoes, on which we didn't spend much time. The Room of Heliodorus had the interesting Expulsion of Helidorus From the Temple (A remarked on the sense of movement, and we spent some time looking at details that didn't seem to make much sense but which had a pleasing aesthetic effect) and the Liberation of St. Peter squeezed up over a window. The other two frescoes were forgettable.
The Room of the Segnatura had a similar ratio: the terrific School of Athens, with numerous artists and friends of Raphael or the Pope done up as Greek philosophers in an impressive architectural setting, and the dreary Dispute over the Holy Sacrament, which not even Raphael's skill could save.
Somewhere in here I discovered a staircase leading down to a small snack bar near which there were bathrooms. N and the kids went off to them, while I bought a couple of bottles of cold acqua minerale. But they returned only to tell me excitedly that there was a drinking fountain in the bathroom -- possibly the only public drinking fountain (apart from the huge monumental ones) in all of Rome. The bottles were to come in handy in the rest of the museum, however; they were the small 500 ml type and easily carried.
From here we could have gone straight into the Sistine Chapel, but chose to take a bit of a break from the crowds by going down to see the Borgia Apartments. The first few of the rooms had frescoes by Pinturrichio; remembering his great work in the Piccolomini Library in the Duomo of Siena, I thought this would be a treat, but the work was high up in the ceiling lunettes and not in particularly good condition. The lower walls of these rooms, and most of the rooms we walked through after, contained modern religious art; we didn't spend a lot of time on it, but some of it seemed quite striking, and it was a good change from what we had been seeing. I remember spending some time in this section in 82 just for the novelty.
Upstairs again and into the Sistine Chapel. I remember nothing of this from 82 except a vague sense of crowding. I was prepared to ditch the place as being overrated, or to adopt the queue-early-and-sprint strategy if the crowds proved too annoying. Fortunately, neither extreme was necessary; the frescoes were quite marvellous, and the people viewing them tolerable enough so that we could stay for a while.
The benches along the sides were all full, and lots of people stood in the centre of the room, peering upwards or paging through their guidebooks. We stood on the steps at the entrance, off to the side, just below Charon swinging his oar at the damned in the Last Judgement fresco, while successive waves of people swarmed into the room and were chased down the steps by the guards, who kept shushing and intoning "Silencio - silence" from time to time (though they didn't use a microphone as the brother did at Assisi).
They didn't seem to mind us where we were, but after a while we moved down into the main part. I watched out of the corner of my eye and gained seats on the benches; we sat the kids down and others moved aside to let us sit together. I had the little Rough Guide with a key to all the paintings, but neither we nor the kids really needed it; they knew all the main stories, and the more obscure ones they didn't really need to know.
I had brought a small pair of binoculars (about the only time they were used on the trip) and we took turns examining details. I was surprised at the evolution of Michelangelo's style from the earliest panels (too crowded and detailed at first); it was easy to see his progression towards a more abstract, sculptural look. The architectural framework worked well. The colours were vibrant. Some hidden gems were to be found among the sibyls and the prophets lower down, though the frescoes on the side walls (by Botticelli, Perugino, Rosselli and others) were somewhat overwhelmed by Michelangelo's work.
Sitting at the sides, it was hard to look at the ceiling panels (what we really needed to do was to lie on the floor with our head towards the Last Judgement, but even if there had been space, there were signs warning us not to do this); the best we could do was to switch to the other side of the chapel, to twist our necks the other way. We then moved to the back wall, near the exit, and finally bid the room goodbye.
We spent about forty minutes in the chapel -- certainly nothing like the ninety minutes we spent in the Scrovegni Chapel at Padua (with a four-year-old A who wanted to know every story in every panel, and an eighteen-month-old Z who obligingly slept through the whole visit) but that was a more intimate and accessible place. If the Sistine could somehow be shrunk to the dimensions of the Scrovegni, we might have been able to spend all afternoon there.
It was almost noon. "I think we should eat on the early side," I said to N, who agreed, and we made our way quickly back to the self-service restaurant near the entrance. This had a few stations with pasta, roasted meats, vegetables, salads, and desserts; nothing very exciting, but palatable food, and we were viewing it as fuel. The servers and cashiers were efficient enough that there weren't long lineups to get food, afterwards, but the tables filled up.
After lunch we went to the Pinacoteca, the gallery of paintings off to the side, billed as the best picture gallery in Rome. This turned out to be somewhat of a disappointment. There were a few nice works: a Giotto triptych, Raphael's Transfiguration, Leonardo's Saint Jerome (the only painting I remembered from 82), and Caravaggio's Deposition; but the works by Perugino and Fra Filippo Lippi seemed substandard, and there were many minor Roman artists with pouty Madonnas and impossibly adult Children. It was also much smaller than we expected.
That was more or less it, thanks to frustrating circumstance. We tried to get into the Etruscan museum, which was supposed to be closed at 1:30 (it was 1:10) but it was already roped off. The Braccio Nuovo and Chiarimonti were not accessible, meaning we couldn't see the Augustus of Prima Porta, and most painful of all, the Gregorian Profane Museum was closed ("I waited twenty years to see those frescoes," wailed N, lamenting particularly the one showing discarded bones and bits of food as if the floor had not been swept; she had shown me reproductions of these in a book a few months after we met). We were stymied. We discussed the possibility of waiting around a couple of hours until the Etruscan section opened again, but given that it closed early, its reopening seemed uncertain.
We mailed the kids' postcards, and then went down the spiral staircase which was the former combined entrance and exit. At the end of it, I noticed a corridor over to the entrance, so I went over and tried to find out what days Gregorian Profane might be open. "Next year," I was told in Italian, "it's under renovation." There seemed to be no lineup, since it was late in the afternoon, but it didn't seem worth coming back.
N was depressed. We went down to Piazza del Risorgimento, waited in the heat, and caught a crowded number 23 bus home. There we threw ourselves on the couch and beds and rested for a bit. The kids read for a while before doing some music practice. I found that I couldn't face waiting until 8 and trying to find a restaurant, especially since Mondays are a bad day for fresh seafood, and many places are closed. "Would it be okay if we ate in?" I asked N. "Ask the kids," she said, and to my surprise they were enthusiastic about the idea.
I went down through the arch to look for supplies: bought cherry tomatoes, bread at La Renella, a bottle of Lungarotti Rubesco red wine -- not the good stuff I wanted, but there was no enoteca at hand -- some mozzarella di bufala, prosciutto, and six eggs at an alimentari called Volpetti (a branch of the one in Testaccio? Certainly not as upscale). Back at home, I took the leftover pasta cacio e pepe out of the fridge and made frittata in two batches in the best nonstick frypan the place had. A feast, everyone assured me.