St Peters, cats, and the Pantheon - 31 March

Today to St Peters. Took the metro to the Ottaviana stop, hundreds and hundreds of people all in the morning commuter rush. Some confusion (mine) led me to be on the wrong side of the platform for the direction I wanted, so I had to go back and buy another ticket and start again, under the line to the correct side. Annoying people at the ticket dispensers, beggars 'helping' you with the machine then asking for money. They 'help' you even if you don't want help and are perfectly able to do it yourself.
   Anyway, got out at Ottaviana stop, beautiful day, already quite hot enough for me. The Romans think it's chilly though, they're all bundled up in boots, scarves and puffer jackets.
   St Peters is very big. Everything on  a grand scale, huge statues, huge tombs of long-defunct popes and cardinals, the whole idea to impress the viewer with the might and power of the Church Triumphant. And it is impressive, but you do wonder what could have been done for the poor if the money put into just one of these tombs had been used to alleviate poverty. (Still, I suppose it kept generations of stonecarvers and labourers in work that they otherwise wouldn't have had). Went down into the crypt, lots more dead popes; the only one I 'knew' was Pope Marcellus, for whose funeral Palestrina wrote the 'Missa Papae Marcellae'.

Baroque funerary art par excellence - swirling draperies, figures gesticulating, high drama.

  Head whirling (yes, OK I am impressed) I looked at Michelangelo's beautiful Pieta, but sadly it's now behind bullet-proof glass and some way off from the viewer, so the full pathos and beauty of the sculpture is lost.

A quick walk and lunch in Bernini's colonnade, large group of priests walking through, some kind of conference I guess. Only one of about 150 stopped to give a beggar some money, but these days beggars are 'run' by organised crime, or so 'they' say. I'd be curious to know how much the Mafia make with his, it would hardly be worth it I would have thought.

Walked to Castel Sant'Angelo, had a little rest and a sit down, forts are not my thing, they're usually fairly boring bits of masonry and brick. 

The only notable thing for me was that this was where the Borgia family retreated when anti-Borgia riots broke out among the people. Popes were not always popular; Pius IV's head was hacked from his body post-mortem and kicked around the streets of Rome. He brought the Inquisition to Italy, and was a fanatic of the first order. He famously said that if his own father had been an heretic, he would have helped gather the wood to burn him, a theology entirely antithetical to the Italian heart and mind. 

 Walked to Piazza Navona, a bit of a tourist trap with the usual tat and beggars, but the little streets to the west of the Piazza are charming. I had a gelato at Piazza San Salvatore in Lauro, nice to sit in the sun and rest my weary feet. Somehow I went wrong on my way to the Pantheon and ended up at Largo Argentina instead, where a colony of cats snooze in the sun on the ruins of three temples.  The cats are fed by volunteers and have their own website.

This poor baby only had three legs.

 Cat paradise

Coming away, I walked up a street that was full of shops selling priestly vestments, window displays of what the best-dressed priests will be wearing this coming year. Only in Rome!

Bernini's Elephant holds up an Egyptian stele, surmounted with a cross to symbolise the victory of Christianity over paganism.

And I had to revisit the Pantheon, which I saw on my last visit to Rome. That amazing dome! It's only 2000 years old, but looks as if it was built last year.  Attempts to turn this into a Christian church have failed dismally; everyone ignores the saintly statues around the perimeter and gazes upward at this triumph of Roman architecture.

Last stop, one of those serendipitous things, "just as I was passing" I went to an exhibitiion of Modigliani and Soutine's works at the Palazzo Doria Pamphilj. It included other artists from their circle in Paris, particularly Suzanne Valadon, whose paintings I hadn't seen much before. Modigliani and Soutine's paintings very different, Modigliani serene and classical, Soutine wild and expressionist.

Am I tired? Yes,  and the Roman cobblestones are very hard on the feet.