Alarms at 6:20 in the morning when you’re 77 are simply … required … if you want to see the Vatican Museum uncrushed by humanity short of getting a personal tour by Robert Francis Prevost. We wake and literally get a call from our scheduled taxi driver as we’re in the elevator down to our street. Which, of course, is blocked off from traffic so one of us has to run in his boot to the end of the street where our taxi awaits. We make it and 15 minutes later are dropped off at Cafe Candi near the Vatican City walls outside which large groups of people with various colored stickers saying “the walk” mill about feeding pigeons from their croissants and sipping tiny paper cups of espresso.
After we sign into our 7:45 “skip-the-line, small group” tour, we are given our aquamarine colored “the walk” stickers and introduced to Dario, our sparsely white haired, 45-year-old former archeologist, now MFA-all=things-Vatican, occasionally amusing, orange flag-waving Italian guide. We’re off.
We get to the museum entrance and join a line of 200 other “skip-the-line, small-group” tours behind guides bearing their own distinctive standards, and wend our way past the 750-person line trying to buy tickets. Our line moves pretty fast and, though it’s more people than we expected, it’s way better than being in that other line.
The most immediate unfortunate thing is that Dario spends our first 45 minutes OUTSIDE the museum rooms talking about the Vatican City, St. Peter’s Church, various “how-did-this-Catholic-tenet influence art”, responding endlessly to a die-in-the-pilgrimage-type couple who need to know immediately where and how to walk through the four doors of the Pope’s intention (ask us later if you want to know), rather than getting us into the museum to SEE the art.
But, once we get there, he delivers such comprehensive, insightful remarks without seeming to take a breath or pause for a moment, that almost everything you just learned about a given piece of art — painting, sculpture, map, —historical period, artistic wellspring, whatever — is overloaded by the five-minute core dump about the next thing.
Well … so … we got in and we saw a lot of stuff along with … not exaggerating here … gotta be 10,000 other gawkers, so we did see a lot of fabulous stuff and retained some info about some of it … but it was neither the tour we expected or wanted.
As you can see in the photos, the Vatican art collectors were into early Christian death. Death from battle, death of innocents (who actually may want to be Jewish), death of martyres. Soooo much death and afterlife …. Even the modern art collection seemed to emphasize a somewhat “skeletal” view of life.
Those descriptions of our tour and the art may all seem like a downer and in a way it was, but, we are grateful we had the opportunity to see such a trove of treasures again.
Getting a taxi home … the Chinese who butt into the taxi rank, the Norwegian blondes too beautiful to wait … yup: every cliche — fuggedaboudit.
We refresh ourselves back at the apartment and foray out to several Ottica so David can get sunglasses that suit his wanna-be-someone-famous-hiding-behind-his-shades persona. This involves walking around the Piazza Navona where we saw an Ottica, which we finally find, but it sells exactly the kinds of sunglasses only famous people who hid behind them can afford. So, no joy there. We give up the search and head for dinner at a small restaurant off the Piazza Navona named Cul de Sac that makes its own pates and other dishes. Oh, and right next door is Ottica La Filottica, where David finds the perfect pair for his peepers, bargains like crazy, and sits outside at Cul de Sac with our appetizer trio of pates: sweet and sour boar, partridge with peppercorns, and pheasant with truffles. Oxtail stew and a few glasses of various rosso later, we amble back to our pad and book ourselves tickets for the Pantheon’s opening bell.
Zzzzzzzzzzzz …………..
Two Tramps 