Best Church

Despite the unfortunate Cardinal Bernard Law associations (bleh) I have to give this one to Santa Maria Maggiore, the gold church, in Rome. It has everything: a couple of dead popes, an important relic (the crib of Jesus), and the quality of being simply drop-dead open-mouthed spectacular.

Feel free to take the tour. (Don't forget to look up.) Although the best part, one of the side chapels (called the Sistine Chapel thanks to Pope Sixtus, although of course it is not the Sistine Chapel) is not visible on the virtual tour. That's the room I stood in for ten minutes, staring up, just gaping.

(This is Tim's picture. Pretty amazing, right?)

Best Dead Saint

Saint Catherine of Siena. She was always my favorite saint; I took the name Catherine as my Confirmation name. (I would have to look up my little "lives of the saints" book to remember what it said about her, and why she appealed to me so much. I do know she was crazy, charming, and lived through the Black Plague.)

Catherine beat out Saint Ignatius Loyola, whose university I went to, and whose grave features the largest single block of lapis lazuli in the world. So this was a serious competition.

Best Dead Pope

Well, Pius V had this one totally in the bag, having been dipped in silver and put on display behind an Advent-calendar-type flap at Santa Maria Maggiore:

However, exactly one day after we left Rome, Pope John Paul II snatched the award right out from under him. By, you know, dying.

I am afraid we may have killed the pope, because of all our dead pope jokes. ("Will we see any dead popes?" "It's Rome! You get a dead pope in every hotel room. They leave them on the pillows, like mints.")

We almost bought lollipops with the pope's face on them (lollipopes). But we got distracted by gelato (there needs to be a whole entry for gelato and beer) and never did it. Can you imagine how much a lollipope would get on eBay? We could have financed the trip right there. I guess that was karmic retribution for all the dead pope jokes.

Best Use of Corpses

The crypt of the Capuchin monks. (Trivia: the brown color of the robes worn by the Capuchin monks is the origin of the word "cappuccino." Which, since we were in Rome, we ordered later that day.)

The Capuchin cemetery is comprised of several rooms decorated with the bones of approximately 4,000 Capuchin monks. Each room has a different theme--like thighs and pelvises, or collarbones and vertebrae. The object is to get the visitor to meditate on eternity and mortality. A sign in the last room, which stuck with me, says: "What you are now, we once were. What we are now, you will be."

We weren't allowed to take pictures in there, out of respect for the dead, but this page has good photos.

Worst Non-Dead-Pope Joke

The guide book: "In Saint Peter's Square, the tops of the colonnades are lined with 96 statues of saints and martyrs..."

Us, singing: "96 statues of saints on the wall, 96 statues of saints! Take one down, pass it around.."

Most Ironic Moment

Having a terrible coughing fit (and I have no idea what caused it, either) while standing directly in front of the building where John Keats died of tuberculosis.

Here, the moment is reenacted for the camera:

Best Picnic

I mocked Ian for wanting to fly to Rome in order to eat a sandwich. It is so shameful to me now, that I mocked him. But as long as I've known Ian, I've been hearing about "the sandwich." I thought, how could a sandwich possibly live up to all this hype? And yet, it did. It was the perfect gustatory experience. It was Sandwich.

It wasn't even a restaurant that made these Sandwiches, either; it was a deli. And once the delightful deli people had made us our food, we took our Sandwiches, side dishes (I have to say a word in favor of the marinated eggplant, which was beyond description), and a bottle of wine to the park around the corner, and enjoyed ourselves an impromptu picnic.

For more information on the Volpetti deli, or the Sandwich, consult Ian's entry on the subject.

Best Fountain

Everyone's heard of the Trevi Fountain, right? Well now I understand why.

Best Cat

We saw cats everywhere. We saw cats in stores, cats in bars-- we even saw a cat sitting in the middle of the Coliseum floor. And many of them were friendly (believe me, Tim tried to befriend them all).

But the best cat was one of the ones that populate the Protestant Cemetery, as "friends and guardians of the departed." This one lives right by John Keats:

Runner-up: the cats of the Torre Argentina Cat Sanctuary, an ancient Roman temple (well, the ruins of four ancient temples, really) that has been turned over to the cats:

Best Gravestone

The inscription on Keats's gravestone (which does not have his name on it, and famously calls him "one whose name is writ on water"), and the nearby acrostic poem in his honor ("K-eats! if thy cherished name be 'writ in water' / E-ach drop has fallen from some mourner's cheek...") are both chill-inducing. But my favorite gravestone, designed by W.W. Story to cover the tomb of his wife Evelyn, is this one:

Here are a couple of other cool cemetery pictures (who can resist?):

This pyramid was erected over the grave of, basically, an ancient Roman nobody. His job was to "organize festivals" so I guess he was the ultimate party planner. He just happened to have enough money to build himself a pyramid.

Favorite Arty Rome Pictures

Just a few, I swear...