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V. A CITY OF ETERNAL SURPRISES
Rome is a city of endless surprises, as you discover in the following few days while repeatedly telephoning Professor Darwin’s house without getting any response. You wonder if he’s just busy, or if he’s disappeared, or if he really wants you to explore the places he has suggested. You assume that there is a purpose to your explorations, which culminate in a rather shocking discovery at the Sistine Chapel.
The City of Rome, proper, as bounded by the GRA, looks a bit like a huge puzzle chip thrown on the table. The Tiber meanders through its valley on the way to the Tyrrhenian Sea. It makes an S-curve through the ancient capital. The anchoring point in your mental map is the boat-shaped Tiber Island that sits in the lower loop of the S, just above the knee. Since ancient times, the island has particularly been associated with healing, from its dedication to Aesculapius to its Medieval role in quarantining plague victims to its modern site of a hospital. Near here, the Tiber was first forded and later bridged in Iron Age times (800-600 B.C.), and the ancient heart of the city lies right there off the east bank.
Off the west bank (‘left’ as you look north on a normal page; often called the Right Bank by historians holding the book upside down) the river stretches a long hill called the Janiculum. At the Janiculum’s southern end, near the river island, is the Trastevere section (ancient Trans-Tiberim, or ‘across the Tiber’). It’s the only part of the city, across the river on the west bank, that was inside the ancient Aurelian Wall. North of the Janiculum lie the old Vatican Hill, and Vatican City—so much for the west bank.
Most of your points of interest in this story lie, with the heart of ancient Rome, east of the Tiber Island. Think Roman Forum, the religious, political, civic, legal, and commercial center of the city. Think Capitoline Hill at the Forum’s northern end, Colosseum near its southern end. Rome had other fora (‘forums’) but this one was the original. Understand this: just as moderns think of Imperial Rome as ‘ancient’ (a term we’ll have to use often, alas), so the Romans of the Imperial era thought of the early days of the Republic, and before them the Kingdom, and before them the Iron Age settlements, as ‘ancient.’ It’s all relative, as you discover with much sandal-wear and road dust.
On this western side, now: a mile or so north along the Via Lata ("Broadwayt") and the Via Flaminia lay a plain called the Fields of Mars or the Military Fields, outside the old Servian Wall. There is a story here, as always. The Romans expelled the Etruscan kings and founded an independent nation in 509 B.C. Their new nation was neither a kingdom nor an empire, but a republic (res, ‘concern’ or ‘matter’ + publica, ‘of the people,’ hence ‘Concern of the People’). They used the best Greek models, including the wisdom of Solon and the Spartan example of having two rulers rather than one, to make a division of powers so no one person or agency could become all-powerful. Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, among the U.S. Founding Fathers, took these lessons to heart. The Romans were leery of military power, and so they stripped from the very symbol of authority (the fasces, or bundle of sticks) the axe that had symbolized the life and death power of the Etruscan kings. (The same symbol is paraded inside the U.S. Senate when it’s in session.) A set of twelve laws (lost to us, known only from references) formed a civilized, if stern, basis of law and order. The Romans passed laws forbidding any general to march into the city at the head of his army, with a few limited exceptions, so triumphal parades and celebrations were held on the Campus Martius.
East of the Campus Martius lies an area that you will only need to remember in this journey for several passing reasons. Professor Darwin’s modern-day townhouse is in the Castro Pretorio (Castra Praetoria) district on the far eastern part of the ancient city wall, with some of the more fashionable suburbs, embassies, banks, and parks. The hills include the Quirinal, Viminal, and Esquiline, and south of there the Caelian. Your journey will not much concern itself with these areas. They circumscribed several densely populated poorer areas, including a teeming valley east of the Colosseum called Subura, which you will experience in all of its sooty, painful reality. Oh, will you ever!
Opposite the Tiber Island is the double-peaked Capitoline Hill. On top of this two-headed hill were two important structures. Closer to the river was the Temple of Capitoline Jupiter, which was the religious heart of the ancient city, and near that the Tarpaeian Rock, from which felons were thrown to their deaths on the rocks of the Tiber shore far below. (Call it ‘death-lite,’ since much crueler punishments were meted out for really gnarly crimes.) On the other ridge stood the Temple of Juno Moneta, which was not only a religious site but also the first national bank—from Moneta, a title of the goddess Juno, you get ‘money.’ A high spot on this crest, the Arx, overlooks a long, narrow valley called the Roman Forum.
The Roman Forum is about a big city block wide, and runs a quarter mile northwest-southeast. It was the city’s Wall Street, Madison Avenue, Westminster, Champs Elysees, and Civic Center all rolled into one prestigious address. It’s the familiar story: originally it was worthless swamp useful mainly as a cemetery. Then, in earliest Republican times, it consisted of facing rows of the best addresses plus temples, tombs, public memorials, and so forth. The Curia of the Senate convened near here.
In a bit of Iron Age irony, the Forum started out as a marshy, haunted cemetery, and ended pretty much the same way in Medieval times about 2,000 years later. Today it is one of the world’s top tourist and scholarly destinations, and contains a wealth of archeological treasures. At the southeastern end of the Roman Forum lies the Arch of Titus, which commemorates the defeat of the Jewish Zealots in 79 A.D. You’ll also find the Arch of Constantine and the Colosseum nearby.
The nearby Palatine Hill was the home of emperors, giving us the term ‘palace’. The emperors built palaces here, until the imperial complex covered practically the entire hill. According to legend, its primordial settlers were Greek followers of Evander (or Euandros, "nice guy," "happy guy") from the city of Pallantion in Arcadia. Today, 3,000 years later, it is still an upscale address.
Southwest from the Palatine, also by the Tiber, is the Aventine Hill. Several emperors (Tiberius, Domitian, Septimius Severus) built palaces on it. Today, the Aventine still has ritzy addresses, like that of the Knights of Malta (more below) and many churches. Its most imposing ruins are of the great Baths of Caracalla (188-217 A.D.). The Appian and Latin Roads enter Rome near here (as will you, soon).
On the shore just north of the Aventine, across from the Tiber Island, was a marshy area that became Rome’s first river port (when Ostia was still a distant settlement 16 klicks away). The early Romans excavated a sort of sheltering marina there, which would have been safe from all but the worst of Tiber’s raging spring floods as the river makes a hard westward turn toward Ostia. This Portus was the scene of Rome’s earliest fora, or market places, the Forum Boarium (‘Cattle Market’) and Forum Holitorium (‘Vegetable Market’). The cattle market was the scene of the last human sacrifice (two Gauls and two Greeks) during the Second Punic War. Possibly three men and a woman, the victims were buried alive with much solemn pomp and rather desperate circumstance, since Hannibal and his elephants were tromping around the countryside not far away, and it was starting to look like curtains for the Carthaginians’ worst enemy (Rome was still just a pipsqueak compared to the mighty empires of the Etruscans, the Greeks, and the Carthaginians at that time). The old port was important for other reasons. It was the eastern side of an important fording place on the Tiber. Here early Romans built the first bridge across the Tiber (the Sublician, dating to the 600s B.C.). Near here too, the first and greatest of innumerable priesthoods got started (Capitoline Jupiter) whose priests were called ‘bridge makers’ (more on this later). In a marshy valley south of here appeared the Circus Maximus at a very early time, as just a grassy field with simple markers on either end, for games and races—it grew into the largest entertainment center of all time, capable of easily holding between a quarter to half a million cheering chariot racing fans in tiers of marble-clad seating. Think NASCAR with togas.
Any map of Rome shows myriad roads and aqueducts converging on the city and more or less pointing toward this core area of the Tiber Island, the old Portus, and the Forum Romanum.
Today, as you keep trying to contact Darwin by phone, your explorations take you to all the usual tourist haunts, but you know that’s just skimming the surface. You visit the Spanish Steps, the Piazza Navona, and other famous locales, but pay little attention to them. You need to bypass all the glitz and go to the heart of the matter. Rome is an endless source of surprises and layers of history that lurk in every square inch. Consider for example, that the city contains at least two independent, sovereign states whose history contains a slice of life of Rome’s long and tempestuous story. You know that Vatican City, created as an independent nation in 1929, is the larger of the two. The smaller one is really tiny, and it reflects a rich history intertwined with that of the Church and the City.
Arguably the world’s smallest sovereign territory (0.005 square miles or 0.012 km sq) is that occupied by the Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of St. John of Jerusalem, Knights of Rhodes, and Knights of Malta (one lungful, one bunch of guys). It’s a city block. Crusaders ruled the Holy Land from 1099 to 1291, until they were tossed on their ear by the Arabs. They fled to a Christian, Mediterranean island-nation called Malta. During their time in the Middle East they gained an esoteric and dark reputation that has endured to this very day. They dug around the in the ruins of Jerusalem, looking for curios that were highly prized in their homelands, like pieces of the cross on which Jesus was killed, his cup used at the Last Supper (the Holy Grail), the crown of thorns, countless versions of the reputed burial shroud of Jesus, and all sorts of other meaningful if not necessarily authentic relics. Enough pieces of the cross existed across Christendom, so that putting them all back together might have made a forest. Don’t laugh—the intention was pious and sincere; certainly the enthusiasm was no less than that of the rioters in India who, in the 1920s, killed over four million Hindus, provoked by a rumor that an infidel had stolen a sacred beard-hair of the Prophet from a mosque where this holy relic was housed. European rulers founded military-religious crusader orders like the Teutonic Knights (ultimately disbanded in 1807 by Napoleon) to defend the forts. They also founded other military/logistic organizations, like the Knights of St. John and the Knights Templar (not to be confused with each other). The Knights Templar occupied the spot where the Temple of Solomon had stood before being destroyed by the Assyrians in 587 B.C., rebuilt in later centuries and extended by Herod the Great in Jesus’ time, destroyed under Titus (70 A.D.), and currently occupied by the Islamic Dome of the Rock, with a portion of the original temple wall still visible, now known as the Wailing Wall, and used in Jewish worship. The Templars grew enormously wealthy, almost to the point of having their own empire, and were ruthlessly suppressed by Pope Clement V and the French King Philip IV around 1312. What little of their property did not wind up in Vatican or French royal coffers was donated to the other guys, the Knights of St. John, who really didn’t seem to be threatening anyone important. Napoleon in 1798 expelled them from Malta, and they found a home in Rome, and that’s where your story picks up again. By 1834, they had established themselves in Rome, where today they occupy a sovereign territory recognized by some 81 nations around the world, and have observer status in the United Nations. They issue their own stamps and coins. Citizenship is hereditary and cannot be acquired by immigration. They have their own license plates and their ambassadors enjoy diplomatic immunity like those of any other sovereign state. Thus, believe it or not, they are a state even smaller than the Vatican, occupying essentially one building in Rome or about three acres, on the Aventine Hill fronting the Via Condotti, Rome's main shopping area. It’s probably almost the only nation in the world where you could stand outside, looking in through a keyhole, and if the door is open on the other side, look right through that nation. Or you could theoretically roll a bowling ball across the entire country—in one door and out the other.
Compared to these guys, Vatican City (0.17 square miles or .47 sq. km.) is a giant. The Vatican has a population of about 770 at night, but on feast days a quarter million as pilgrims and tourists crowd into the main square to see the Pope. This country, which contains St. Peter's Basilica and the world’s largest collection of art and historical treasures, is the spiritual center for the world's Roman Catholics (over 1 billion souls). Also known as the Apostolic or Holy See (from a word for ‘seat’), it is surrounded by Rome. The nation of Vatican City has officially existed since the Lateran Treaty of 1929 was signed between Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and Pope Pius XI. The treaty was reaffirmed in the Italian Constitution of 1948. From ancient times through the Middle Ages and until about 1870, the popes were not only spiritual rulers but also temporal rulers with enormous land areas mainly in Italy (dating back to the fact that the later Roman Emperors made Christianity the official state religion and after the civil state vanished, the Church remained the only glue that held society together in a framework of social decay and erratic barbarian rulership). Italian national unification in 1871 ended all that, with the seizure of the last papal estates and the reduction of the pope to the unhappy status of "prisoner of the Vatican." This didn’t go over very well with the staunchly Catholic Italians and the bombastic Fascist leader Mussolini in the 1920’s, and presto, Vatican City emerged as the solution. Vatican City is the only nation in the world whose official language is ancient Latin. One priest’s part-time job is to keep inventing new words to add for modern inventions—which isn’t too hard, considering many new terms like ‘refrigerator’ and ‘television’ or ‘cosmonaut’ and ‘astronaut’ come directly from Latin or Greek. The Vatican State consists of St. Peter’s Basilica, the Vatican Palace and grounds, the Pope’s summer residence at Castel Gandolfo (which was in ancient times the tomb of the Emperor Hadrian), and several buildings in Rome itself, including the Lateran Palace, first official headquarters of the Church in ancient times. The Vatican is represented in the United Nations and exchanges ambassadors with most of the world’s nations including at various recent times with the United States. The Vatican state has its own postal system and issues Vatican stamps and coins. It has a train station, a jail, a fire department, and most of the other accoutrements of a state. It actually has three different uniformed services: (a) The 100 member Swiss Guards headed by a Colonel, all Catholics of Swiss origin in a tradition dating back to Medieval mercenaries whose uniforms were designed by Michaelangelo and who were massacred to a man during the religiously inspired sack of Rome in 1527; (b) a separate Vatican police department in both uniform and plain clothes divisions; and (c) an honor guard composed of young Roman men of appropriate background. Yes, the Swiss Guards do carry automatics under those fancy outfits. They are seasoned veterans of the modern Swiss army, and experts with assault weapons as well as hand-to-hand combat.
Rome is a bit like a river of time. She forever moves seamlessly from one era in her long life to the next. On the age-blackened walls around the Tiber, you see the classic, unresolved political debate of two relentlessly warring 20th Century ideologies, both rendered obsolete as time moves past them—red spray-can graffiti slogans by the Communists, black slogans by the Fascists. Holy city of Christians in general and Roman Catholics in particular, Rome today sports the largest Islamic mosque in Europe. In the diplomacy of spires and minarets, the main minaret in Rome rises 131 feet, just a few feet shorter than the dome of St. Peter’s.
You are sure that St. Peter’s is the chief church of Roman Catholicism (true) and the largest church in Christendom (not necessarily). The Basilica of Our Lady of Peace in Youssoukro, Ivory Coast, Africa, is a close replica of St. Peter’s in Rome and is allegedly a hair larger. The story goes that the late dictator, Houphouet-Boigny, was going to build it larger than Michelangelo’s basilica, but was talked out of it. Building it cost over half a billion dollars amid all the poverty of Ivory Coast, which would embarrass Pope John Paul II when he came (reluctantly or not) to consecrate it. Boigny made the dome a few feet lower. After the Pope left, Boigny installed a cupola and cross, making it taller than St. Peter’s.
You might assume St. Peter’s has the largest dome in the city of Rome, but that is not correct either. The honor goes to the Pantheon, Rome’s best preserved and largest intact structure (1900 years in its final iteration, while the original dated to 25 B.C.). Michelangelo purposely made St. Peter's dome a few feet smaller out of reverence for the ancient Roman builders working under Agrippa. The Pantheon overlooks the cobblestone Piazza della Rotonda in the Campus Martius (Field of Mars). The area has a close, overwhelmed feeling, given the enormity of the Pantheon, the jumble of mostly tall, dark dwellings surrounding the piazza, and in the middle a large and fanciful fountain. You step through a portico of big pillars. The large bronze doors date back to Classical Rome, and still work as smoothly today as they did two thousand years ago, swinging on enormous brass hinges that would pull your entire house down. What saved this polytheist temple from destruction was its conversion to a church (St. Mary and the Martyrs) in 609 A.D. Inside, men in dark business suits step forward putting their fingers over their lips in a gesture of silence. They roll their eyes in that threatening manner typical of pious volunteers around the city’s many holy edifices (a Praetorian Guard like the blouse-and-shorts patrol who terrorize impious visitors to St. Peter’s for wearing shorts and sandals). You’d think their eyebrows alone could beat you into submission. You understand their concern. Mass is in progress near the far side of the rotunda, opposite the entrance where Augustus and the senators were invited on dedication day in 25 B.C. to admire Agrippa’s vision. With Augustus would have come the chief priests from most of the state-sponsored cult centers of Rome. The Pantheon (Greek pan "all" + theon "of gods") signaled Rome’s new philosophy of religion. No longer was she a local power limited to her own native gods, gilded with cultural nods to the more stylish deities of Greece. When the Pantheon was built, Rome was entering her golden age. The Pax Romana or Roman Peace would last 180 years and encompass much of the known world and its many peoples and their deities. That all changed when tribes like the Vandals (whose name lives on as a synonym for wanton destruction) zipped through here like a horde of rush hour motorists some 435 years later. In the enormous dome are numerous niches that are now symmetrical but empty concrete holes. These were once finished in fine woods and gilded, and contained statues of all the known world’s major deities from Jupiter-Zeus to the Egyptian Osiris to the Middle Eastern Invincible Sun, and a whole lot more. High up, the oculus (‘eyelet’) is open to the sky. It’s called an impluvium (‘in’+’rain’) and wasn’t uncommon in Roman structures. The original metal-sheathed drains are still in the floor. If you were here at night, you would see the stars passing in their divine courses, and you can imagine ancient Roman augurs studying the heavens—perhaps a comet will flash across the field of vision, always a sign of coming calamity. By day, if it isn’t the blue sky rolling by overhead, maybe it’s a mass of rain clouds. You can stand here and witness the utter incongruity of watching rain drop down and land in a big circle in the middle, while the Christian altars and shrines around the inner cylinder remain dry. On the right, as you come in, is a secular shrine dedicated to the last Italian king, Victor Emmanuel. (His enormous monument, nicknamed by modern Romans either ‘the typewriter’ or a grinning set of ‘dentures’ weighs down the hills above the Forum. ) Each Sunday in the Pantheon, a uniformed devotee in a quasi-military uniform including cape and Napoleonic hat stands honor guard before the royal shrine. You watch as the Mass proceeds through its rubrics. It is the centerpiece of daily worship of the world’s billion Roman Catholics, as well as another half billion or so Protestants (Anglicans or Anglo-Catholics) and Eastern Orthodox Christians. The Mass is a reenactment of the Last Supper, including the breaking of bread and the drinking of wine. The Jewish Passover Seder commemorates the Israelites’ escape from Egypt (Holy Week of Christians closely coincides with the time of Passover).
You leave the Pantheon, walking backward, looking upward and reminding yourself not to gape. Though timeworn, the Pantheon is a world-class marvel in itself. It was built between 27 and 25 B.C. during the reign of the first Roman emperor, Augustus. The builder was his wealthy and powerful son in law, Agrippa, using all the latest technology but more importantly, all the latest philosophical and religious remodeling of the very soul of Rome. The principal building material was tons and tons of concrete, in whose usage the brilliant Roman engineers were masters. The building is one of breathtaking simplicity in its original form: a dome set upon a cylinder. If you were to make a mirror image of the dome and place it underneath the dome, to form a concrete ball resting on the cylinder, the result would be a perfect sphere whose lowest point would just touch the central point on the marble floor of the cylinder. From that central floor point to the highest point of the dome (the oculus, or ‘eyelet,’ open to the sky) measures 142 feet. As already noted, the Pantheon contains the largest dome in Rome. By comparison, the dome of St. Peter’s is just under 138 feet, and purposely so. Its builder, Michelangelo, had such professional and artistic respect for his ancient colleagues that he did not want to outdo their work. There’s actually a bit more to be read into that. From earliest times, people have tended to look backward to a golden age when men were men, things were better, and there was a five cent cigar. In the Classical world, people looked backward to a mythological golden age, whose heroes and their exploits were celebrated in wall frescoes and in the somber games of the arena. During the Dark Ages of Europe, well into modern times, the Church looked back in admiration on the Classical world, which indeed was more advanced in many ways (except, again, for those blasted games). The Church revered what fragments of theologically compatible Greek or Roman writings survived, and the greatest Medieval theologians, like St. Thomas Acquinas, made Aristotle and Ptolemy keystones of their own cosmological constructions. This brings you to another interesting surprise.
You visit Vatican City, and of course you cannot leave without staring at the wonderful ceiling created by Michelangelo for Pope Julius II in his Sistine Chapel (named after his uncle, Pope Sixtus IV, whose chapel needed a dramatic overhaul). The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel lays out a panorama of Christian teaching and experience starting with the Creation in Genesis and ending with the Last Judgment in Revelations. The ceiling is a sort of roadmap of late Medieval Christian theology. Interwoven, surprisingly, are ancient polytheist themes. How is this possible? What a surprise, when you thought just a moment ago those old polytheists were just a bunch of moonshiners and country folk (like in the millennial movie Brother, Where Art Thou?, whose cornpone and fiddlin’ celebrate the Bronze Age myth of Odysseus, albeit in neo-Confederate form). To understand how polytheist mythology gets mixed in with Biblical prophets on the Pope’s private chapel, you have to review some background.
First, let’s be clear what this word ‘pagan’ really means. Over 2,000 years the Christian authorities have endlessly reinforced and pounded home the idea that ‘pagan’ conjures evils so horrific and unimaginable that one’s skin crawls. The word ‘pagan’ simply means ‘rustic’ or ‘country bumpkin.’ The word comes from the root pagos in Greek or pagus in Latin, meaning ‘country,’ or ‘countryside.’ Calling someone a pagan originally just meant sort of calling him a hillbilly—a culturally loaded put-down by urban Christians against more conservative country folks who insisted on continuing to pray in the old ways (and still faintly do in many mountain villages today). Nowadays, when two persons of Italian origin meet anywhere in the world, they happily and proudly greet each other as paisano!, which is modern Italian for "Yo, homey!" It was not initially a term of visceral loathing and unimaginable terror. It became a term of contempt, whereas the modern term paisano is a respectful and affectionate term for one’s countryman. Think of it as a counter-disinformation campaign. Christianity spread like the flu from city to city across Mediterrenean trade routes, which aroused considerable fear and loathing in the conservative, law-and-order Roman authorities, and helped lead to notorious persecutions. The word ‘heathen’ has a parallel etymology during the Middle Ages, as Christendom spread through the wild forests and meadows (heaths) of northern Europe. In English, the congruent term is heathen (modern German Heide)—literally, one who dwells in the heath or in wild places, a wild person; a pagan.
All this wasn’t so big an issue anymore during the Renaissance. After all, the old gods were long gone, their culture virtually erased by monotheism. The Rebirth was a rediscovery of ancient knowledge and arts as Europe drifted out of its dark ages and into the modern world. Church authorities in Rome began digging up the past, and ended up discovering the future—one of the most spectacular events being around 1500, when they found what seemed to be the bones of St. Peter. Pope Julius II and his predecessors had been patching and repairing the ancient basilica of Constantine for a thousand years, but even the ground underneath didn’t seem sufficiently stable. All that digging, in other words, wasn’t just for academic reasons; their buildings were falling down around their ears.
Rome lies on a major earthquake fault where two major tectonic plates converge and press against each other—the African and European. Southward in Sicily and just north of Sicily, in the Aeolian Islands, sit major volcanoes including Etna and Stromboli. The entire Italian Peninsula is riddled with geological activity, from volcanism to earthquakes to bradisism (subsidence, whereby chunks of land descend below sea level; for example, the Bay of Naples contains segments of nearly-intact underwater roads, columns, statues, and buildings dating to Roman times). One major fault line runs north and south through the Apennine Range on the spine of Italy, and a major east-west line crosses the boot near Naples.
Focus for a moment on Naples (Iron Age Greek colony of Neapolis, the New City). Naples is the surviving community of several afflicted by Mt. Vesuvius, which buried the Roman towns of Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Stabia. Just to the north of Naples near the ancient city and major Roman naval base of Misenum (less than 90 miles south of Rome and just a hook to the left around the Bay of Naples) are the famous Phlegraean Fields, where open volcanic vents release noxious clouds. In 62 B.C., according to Seneca, some 600 sheep keeled over dead from the fumes. These are the same fumes that probably fueled the oracular visions of the Sibyl at Cumae.
Here’s an equal testament to the ever-shifting ground under the natives’ feet, which must indeed have inspired them to shock and awe about their resident spirits. Parts of the coast along the Tyrrhenian Sea have long been subject to a form of subsidence called bradysism. In plain English, it means your stuff falls in the water. More elegantly stated, chunks of beachfront real estate suddenly start sinking and moving out to sea, an unnerving experience to say the least. If you were to take a minisub and go scuba-diving in parts of the Bay of Naples (with permission of the Italian government’s bureaucracy relating to parks and archeological sites) you would find yourself cruising several fathoms underwater over a ghostly bluish world filled with ancient streets. You’d see columns, streets, market places, buildings, mosaic floors, statues—sort of an underwater Pompeii in the realm of Neptune. Between bradysism and vulcanism, you can understand why the ancients would have had a bit of a split personality, between enjoying that endless sunshine, and yelping in terror as the ground moved about under their feet. They thought the gods had it in for them—consider the devastation wrought around Assisi, heartland of St. Francis, during the 1990s.
Lazio (region of Central Italy around Rome; ancient Latium) is a beautiful, poetic landscape. It has twisted hills and abrupt, winding valleys, and jumbled towns overhanging peaceful sandy beaches. Lazio is graced with dense, dark-green forestation, and narrow, winding roadways. Dark-blue lakes sparkle in Mediterranean sunshine yet possess a haunted otherness that inspired mythology and legend. Neanderthals lived here during the Ice Ages. These hills and lakes are the potent veins from which flowed the blood of religions so old that their gods had no names. The volcanoes that formed the crater-lakes were considered long extinct after the Pleistocene or Stone Age eras, but newer evidence supports Roman reports of volcanic activity in the Second Century B.C. A glowering dark-blue hulk called the Vulcano Laziale (or Alban Hills volcano) is prominently visible on the southeastern skyline of Rome. The complex has two nested caldera and the remains of many later explosion craters or vents. The highest is Monte Cavo (949 meters, about 3,000 feet). Two famous, elevated mountain crater lakes are Lago Albano (surface at 293 m. above sea level, depth 170 m.) and Nemi (surface at 316 m., depth a few fathoms). The area is dotted with villas and villages. Nemi is sometimes considered the shore on which Virgil’s hero in Chapter Six of The Aenead descends into the Underworld. The Pope’s summer residence at Castel’ Gandolfo overlooks the rim of Lago Albano—reputedly on the site of Alba Longa, an ancient city where Romulus and Remus were born. The outskirts of Rome reach this far, with many popular summer getaways for citizens of the Eternal City. Given that the Colosseum in the heart of Rome was damaged several times by severe earthquakes (which is why part of its outer ring or casing is missing), it is possible that new volcanic activity may be in its earliest stages, within 25-30 km. (20-25 miles) of downtown Rome. Speaking of Underworld, though, the legendary descent of Aeneas into the Inferno (Hell) is mirrored during the 1300s as Dante’s hero (himself, accompanied by Virgil) descends into Avernus, presumably near Cumae. About Avernus: it’s one of those curious mixtures of old Roman and newer Classical Greek, this work, and it comes from the Greek settlers. The northern limit of their South Italian conquest lay around the southern border of Latium, near the Phlegraean Fields. The ancients observed that birds appeared to drop dead while flying over this dark and brooding lake, which would lead anyone to think there are evil and dread afoot. They named the lake Avernus, which is a corruption of the Greek aornis (a-, without + ornis, bird; in other words, it’s the Lake of no Birds). A few cups of strong, dark wine from the local vinyards, and you have Avernus. You shouldn’t be surprised if more than one traveler through that region got himself good and fortified while telling stories like this, late into the night, in a fog-shrouded tavern in the misty Alban Hills. Perhaps both Aeneas and Dante, a thousand years apart, sat in roughly the same tavern and absorbed local stories to add color to their epic poems; in any case, Dante (1300s A.D.) imitated Virgil ( but put a Christian spin on the whole thing), while Virgil himself (a contemporary of Jesus Christ) was imitating Homer (Bronze Age Aegean around 1200 B.C., long before Greek Classic age, but putting an Augustan spin on things). Some of the background of The Iliad and The Odyssey hearkens back into the Neolithic period (neo, ‘new’ + lithos, ‘rock;’ hence ‘New Stone Age’).
That brings us back to the Sistine Chapel, where you stand gaping up at the fanciful ceiling restored in the late 20th Century by an influx of largely Japanese cash and painstaking efforts by expert artisans. Oddly, in this Christian church in the heart of the Vatican, you see a mix of polytheist and Christian mythography. The Sistine Chapel is named after Pope (1471-84) Sixtus IV. Sixtus ordered construction to begin on a special papal chapel in 1477, at a time when the great early Renaissance artists like Botticelli were still at their mother’s breast in Florence. Rome was in many ways still a backwater compared to other powerful Italian city-states like Florence, Venice, and Genoa. Mehmed II’s Ottoman Turks had just overthrown the last Byzantine emperor, Constantine Paleologos XI, in the afternoon of Easter Sunday in 1453, thus opening Europe to Islamic expansion from the East but coincidentally opening the European mind to both new and ancient learning. Europe stubbornly refused to be overrun by the Moslems, and in fact the western Mediterranean had for some time been more or less a Venetian lake. History’s finest tribute to Venetian seamanship is the fact that one of Venice’s sons, Columbo (not the TV detective), detected the New World for the King and Queen of Spain. While Islam rolled over Constantinople from the east (1453), the Islamic tide gave its ebbing shudder in the European west with the expulsion (1492) of the last Moorish rulers from Spanish Granada. Turkish sea power in the eastern Mediterranean would be checked a century later at the battle of Lepanto (1571), but for now the entire world was in flux.
Europe was awakening from her Middle Ages and, without consciously knowing it, positioning herself to conquer most of the world in the next four centuries. Christianity, which had seen its last major schism in 1154 between east (Orthodox Churches) and west (Roman side of the house), was about to further bifurcate along roughly north-south lines as the Reformation exploded in the early 1500s. In fact, the very effort by the popes to restore some of the glory of Rome (and not accidentally add to the glory of the Church) was a major precipitant of the intellectual revolutions in Europe that led to Protestantism and the Counter-Reformation as well as Humanism, the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment; which in turn spawned the U.S. Constitution and a whole new way for people to be governed—by themselves. All of that, however, was merely in its first dawning as Pope Julius II demanded that Michelangelo drop everything and paint him a special ceiling.
The building created for Julius’ uncle Sixtus was designed by the Florentine architect Baccio Pontelli in the Biblical proportions given for the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem. It’s a rather neat bit of mathematical candy, being twice as long as it is high, and three times as long as it is wide. The chapel was clearly designed (like many modern U.S. federal buildings today) to serve as a fortress, since Sixtus had tasted the wrath and violence of Roman mobs more than once. The chapel-castle had huge walls, high windows, and slits for shooting out arrows or dropping boiling oil. The latest technology in Christian living was the cannon, and the chapel was specially fortified to resist tinier versions of the huge bombards (like the terrifying giant with which the Ottomans had just a few years earlier, in 1453, breached the walls of Constantinople and ended 1,000 of Byzantine Roman Empire). As work progressed on the new chapel, Sixtus took a few moments to attack Florence with his army. Tiny Rome attacking these commercial giants was rather like a flea attacking an elephant, but it was one way to get their attention. In a shower of laughter and good will, the leading citizens of Florence, including the Medici, sent an army of idealistic young painters and sculptors to pacify Rome. Among these were the Pietro Perugino, Sandro Botticelli, Cosimo Rosselli, Piero di Cosimo, and Domenico Ghirlandaio. They weren’t a moment too soon. Like the old St. Peter’s Basilica of Constantine from the Fourth Century, the new 15th Century St. Peter’s of Michelangelo was in danger of falling down because of shifting soil. The same was happening in the Sistine Chapel, which had to be reinforced with iron bars and a lot of prayer.
The interior of the Sistine Chapel was, not surprisingly, a gloomy keep—which ought to explain the need for riots of color. In fact, when the restorations of the 1980s revealed brilliant colors in the skies and garments of the figures, Michelangelo appeared to have been as much a fashion designer as a religious painter. (Not only that, but he was so frustrated with the bullying he got from Pope Julius that he painted all sorts of little personal touches, like a cherub giving a Sibyl an Italian version of the finger, the fig; or a picture of himself on a cloth being carried into heaven by St. Bartholomew; or a whole lot of pompous officials with the faces of Michelangelo’s persecutors, including Pope Julius, being sent the other way, to the Inferno. The bold and dramatic colors matched the breathtaking ambition of the ceiling’s themes. The ceiling was to tell a uniquely Renaissance version of the history of the world, using what you tend to see now as a mish-mash of Biblical literalism and the then-newfangled classicism. So, when you look up at the rather long, narrow vault whose natural gloom is relieved by vivid colors and light peering in through high windows, you see a pattern of panels. You see a row of eleven large Genesis panels along the central ceiling, stretching from Creation itself to the Drunkenness of Noah. The finishing splendor of the whole operation was a massive Last Judgment painted on the end wall opposite the portals, above the main altar. The Florentines painted twelve huge panels on the long side walls showing six parallel events from the lives of Moses and Jesus, in an effort to provide synthesis between the Old and New Testaments. One one side you have the baptism of Jesus, on the other side the watery journey of Moses into Egypt; on one side, the temptation of Jesus, on the other side the calling of Moses by the burning bush; and so on.
Finally, we can talk about those polytheist Sibyls. The mix of Classical polytheist themes with Christian themes astonishes you. This seemed perfectly logical and commendable to the intelligentsia of Michelangelo’s time. So, the Last Judgment has the polytheist boatman Charon canoeing people over to Hades, where the Infernal judge Minos sits waiting, as in Dante’s Inferno. In fact, modern English speakers may refer to a fire as an inferno, but in reality the word doesn’t mean something hot, but refers instead to something underneath—i.e., the Underworld. That’s why Christians point down when referring to Hell—it’s where the polytheist underworld of late Classical antiquity used to be. It didn’t go very deep in the Bronze Age (where three handfuls of earth was enough to get you buried and prevent you from stumbling around at night), whereas a thousand years later, Virgil has Aeneas spending the entire Sixth Chapter of the Aenead wandering around in Avernus. The better Roman villas had underground heating vents called hypocausts (from the Greek, meaning underneath-hot) and there is an Italic word forno, meaning ‘oven,’ so to hell with it all.
Certain austere moderns will have a hard time grasping what one finds next. The ceiling sits on the walls by means of little vaulted arches and niches, and these are also filled with figures according to a plan. The four corners inside the building contain Old Testament scenes of salvation (Punishment of Haman; Moses and the Brazen Serpent; David and Goliath; Judith and Holofernes). On each side (above the walls already mentioned, which compare Moses and Jesus) are four triangular insets, portraying ancestors of Jesus (Solomon and his mother; Parents of Jesse; and so forth). So far so good—now comes the kicker. Spaced among the aforementioned are two other sets of images. One set (seven panels) is of the Old Testament prophets (Jonah, Jeremiah, Daniel, Ezekiel, Isaiah, Joel, and Zechariah), establishing that all-important linkage between the Jewish Bible (Old Testament) and the Christian addition (New Testament). Now here’s the really grabby thing (and one finds this sort of thing in many Renaissance churches around Italy). The last set (five panels) are strictly pagan in nature: five of the ten most famous Sibyls, or prophetesses, of the ancient world. The most famous is the Oracle at Delphi in Greece, kind of the mother of all Sibyls to put a fine point on it. Then there are the Sibyls of Libya, Persia, Cumae, and Erythrea.
Of these, the quintessentially Italian (Greek, pre-Roman) one is the one at Cumae, a now-abandoned city near the Phlegrean Fields, where the volcanic emissions from Underground were enough to give Sibyls headaches and knock sheep off their feet. Also knocked off their feet are modern-era religious purists, of course. The fact is, though, that some of the finest Renaissance minds were extremely creative, if not a trifle overly so, in uniting the themes of natural and supernatural lore to form a seamless spiritual garment. Some of this had been going on since ancient times, when St. Augustine and the Church father Lactantius declared that Sibyls had foreshadowed Christian redemption. They foretold key things, including the Virgin Birth, the Passion of Christ, and the Last Judgment. Moslems feel that the prophets of the Jewish Bible also prophesied the Islamic creed that was to arrive in the 7th Century A.D.
One wanted to cloak the newly reborn ancient learning of the Renaissance in Christian respectability. The greatest of the Medieval scholars, St. Thomas Aquinas, rejected the notion of polytheist prophecy, much less its relevance to Christian doctrine, so this was by no means unanimous. But Thomas Aquinas was a Medieval man responding to Medieval concerns, whereas the Classicists and Renaissance thinkers were constrained to do what you want to do today: reconcile the natural discoveries of reason with the claims of faith.
(These were the very people who coined the term 'Gothic' to refer to the magnificent cathedrals and churches of the Middle Ages. This was meant as a term of contempt, a reference to the Goths who destroyed Rome and upended Classical civilization. Ironically, the term 'Gothic cathedral' today is generally a term of admiration, but it wasn't so in the time of Da Vinci and Michelangelo. 'Gothic' meant 'barbarous,' 'ugly.')
Aquinas might have argued that Jesus said "you should have faith like small children," so all the fancy stuff doesn’t matter one way or the other, but let’s face facts: people have been killing and maiming each other in the name of brotherly love for many centuries. The polytheist edifice was more than the Renaissance theologian could ignore—unless you were an iconoclast like the puritanical monk Savonarola. He, like Hitler’s book burners, and a fair share of zealots today, believed that fire cures all doubts. Savonarola coined the phrase 'bonfire of the vanities' but perished in his own flames. He ended up burning alive on the gibbet after raising hell (or is that Hades?) in Florence for twenty years—so much so that friends and neighbors had to stop Botticelli in the street one night as, with a mad look in his eyes, he was carrying an armload of his own priceless paintings to a bonfire of the vanities.
Your cell phone rings, and at first you almost don’t hear it, so engrossed are you in the mix of the modern and the ancient that is Rome. You answer in a dreamy state, awed by the city’s richness of time past, present, and future, and its hospitability to an endlessly unfolding pantheon of deities. At long last, Professor Darwin telephones you. The door that was closed to you will now open to let you in.
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