The Pantheon - home of all the gods

The Pantheon (Pan=all; theo=god) is a Roman temple for all of the gods. Tiberius, one of the Roman emperors and later another emperor wanted to put Jesus in the Pantheon as well as the Roman gods, but the Roman Senate did not approve of that. The Pantheon was made with 2 types of architecture mixed together, it had the columns in the front of the building and the building itself had a dome.

The Pan-photos of Rome!

Housed in the Pantheon now is the grave of the famous painter Raphael Sanzio (right), and the first two Italian kings (along with many other people, the Pantheon is like a graveyard because all around the edge are graves). The dome is 142 ft high and 142 ft in diameter, and was the inspiration for many famous cathedral domes like St. Peter's Basilica (Michelangelo) and St. Paul's Cathedral in London. There is a hole at the very top of the dome, and the floor drains when it rains. The columns outside the Pantheon are also enormous, and the whole thing is still original from Roman times!

Right next to the Pantheon is a church that looks pretty plain (Daddy's colleague Laura says it's the "Roman" style) on the outside, except for another Egyptian obelisk (this time on an elephant) that the Romans took from Egypt. But inside, the church was big (no church can claim to be "really" big after seeing St. Peter's!) and featured Christ the Redeemer by Michelangelo (right).

Circus Maximus

Circo Massimo (or Circus Maximus in English) is a place where the Romans had many chariot races and other contests. There are chariot races like the chariot race in the movie "Ben-Hur". One problem in that movie is that they do nine laps instead of seven. For counting the laps there is a contraption where you pull down either an egg or a dolphin after each lap. The laps are pretty big, so the stadium must have been very very big.

Run laps around this big flickr album if you can!

There's no end of neat stuff in Rome, or the Vatican in this case. On the left is the back view of Christ and the apostles above the entrance of St. Peter's Basilica, taken during our descent from the dome. While there, we also got some Vatican stamps and sent some postcards.
For those of you wondering, not only does the Vatican have its own post office, but countries like Canada have embassies to the Vatican. So in Rome, there's the Canadian embassy to Italy, and also the Canadian embassy to the Vatican. There's no way you can fit all the embassies into the Vatican itself!

Trevi Fountain

The day we arrived in Rome when we were heading back to the hotel we saw a big crowd so we went to have a closer look a we figured out that it was the Trevi fountain, and the story is that if you throw in a coin you will return to Rome so me and Zach did but then mom was out of change so mom and dad didn't get to. Zach thought that if you were a Roman soldier before you left to fight you should throw in a coin so you would return again!

The Swiss Circus Guards

The Swiss have always been the guards of the pope. Swiss mercenaries have been bodyguards, ceremonial guards, and palace guards. Michelangelo actually designed the yellow and blue "costumes" for the Swiss guards or the guards of the Vatican. The Swiss guards (The ones at the Vatican) are the only  Swiss guard left in Europe. The Papal Swiss guards are now at the Vatican but used to be in France.

The Swiss Guards also double as traffic cops for cars going into the Vatican, minus the court jester uniforms. Mommy is just outside St. Peter's Basilica with the Guard in the background.

St Peter's Basilica

On Monday (May 8) we went to Vatican City (country #15!) and St. Peter's Basilica. We were hoping to go to the Vatican Museum, but the lineup was so long that it went along the Vatican walls almost to St. Peter's Basilica (>1 km!). Daddy took the picture here during his February visit. We walked up all the 551 steps to the top of the St. Peter's dome, designed by Michelangelo and inspired by the massive Pantheon dome built by the Romans.

Our Roman Holiday

From the top there was a great view of the area around (we also though we saw the CN and Eiffel towers!).

After that we went into the Basilica itself. It's massive - each of the side naves were as big as other big churches! Remember the last blog about the words and letters? Around the whole basilica there are giant mosaics of all the words that Jesus said to Peter in the bible, and the letters are 7 feet tall! The letters were black and around them there was a gold outline.

Also in the Basilica were some bodies of dead popes who had been well preserved like Pope Innocent XI and Pope John XXIII (on the left), while most of them were actually below in the crypts.

Housed in St. Peter's is the famous Pieta sculpture by Michelangelo, of Mary holding Jesus after he had been crucified. There are many other sculptures and paintings in St. Peter's but the Pieta is by far the most famous. Next to it is one door that the Pope only opens once every 25 years for one year. At Christmas Eve he ceremonially opens the door and the next he plasters it up. The next time it will be opened is Dec 24, 2024 - mark your calendars!

The guy this whole place is named after, St. Peter. The Basilica is built at the site where Peter was crucified by the Romans (upside down as per his wishes, as he felt he was unworthy to be crucified as Jesus was). He is most often depicted with keys, symbolizing the keys to Christianity. The statue on the right is bronze and inside the Basilica, and the right foot is constantly kissed and rubbed by pilgrims, so it's pretty shiny.

 Everything is just BIG in St. Peter's Basilica. See the altar (up close on the right)? It's bronze and it's 7 stories high!

More big things at the Basilica. The left shows the shrine to the last Pope, John Paul II, who died in 2005. The painting goes almost the whole way up the whole huge wall, which is just unbelievably big. And speaking of big, check out the angels behind us!

St. Peter's - The Dome!

OK, St. Peter's Basilica and Square are soooo big and amazing that we need a couple of blogs. It's much easier and quicker to get into than the Vatican Museum, which is where the Sistine Chapel is. How bad is the VM lineup? At 1000h, it stretched along the Vatican walls pretty much the whole kilometre to the Piazza San Pietro! In addition to the Pope-mobile, the whole Vatican is guarded by the Swiss Guards with their very sharp and pointy pikes, not to mention their court jester outfits.

Roman Holiday

Jacob in the middle of the Piazza, me balancing on top of a concrete pylon in front of the huge obelisk in the centre of the round piazza. The piazza is surround by over a hundred columns, each adorned with prophets and saints. The Pope blesses the masses on Sundays and Wednesdays, so don't expect to get anywhere near those days!

This blog, we'll focus on the dome created by, who else, Michelangelo. It was inspired by the amazing Pantheon dome (see future blog). The scale of things in the Basilica is really, really mind-boggling. These photos are from the base of the dome looking down into the church to the smaller side naves, each of which are bigger than all but the biggest cathedrals in the world! Zach will tell you how what and how big those letters you see are in the next blog - give it a good guess in the meantime!

Again at the base of the dome itself. It's all mosaic tiles on the whole dome!

From the base of the dome, it's another 300+ steps to the top. We're not holding the camera at an angle on the left - the interior of the dome is on our right and it gets really slanted and tricky to walk inside! Once at the top, you get a pretty amazing view of all of Rome, including the Piazza below where the people are just itty-bitty-specks.

Colloseum

After Tuscany, we spent a few days in Rome before continuing to the Netherlands. On Sunday (May 6) we went to the Collosseo. The Colloseo was built on top of the place where Emperor Nero's house once was, but they built it over top to show how much they disliked Nero. We got our tickets at the Palatine Hill because there was the shortest (zero) lineup there. The ticket was combined for the Colloseo (or Colosseum in English), the Foro (Forum) and Palatino Hill (Palatine Hill). So when we got to the Colloseo we just jumped through the huge long lineup getting tickets there and went straight in!
Roman Holiday!

About 50,000 people could sit in the Colloseo. All 50,000 seats could be filled in less than 15 minutes by the 80 entry ways. There's the postcard photo attempt on the left, and us inside on the south end on the right.

The Emperor had private seats and entry all for himself on the north end on the ground floor (right side of left photo). The nine Vestal Virgins had seats directly opposite on the south. The entry was free but to get in you had to have a ticket, which was a piece of clay with your seat number on it. There's a couple of circus performers on the right.

The official name of the Colloseo was actually the Flavian Amphitheatre, as they were the emperors that built it. What you see here are the underground "backstage." This is where all the prisoners, wild animals, gladiators, and stage sets would be. The actual stage is on top in line with the ground floor of spectators. It was a wood floor with nine inches of sand on top (sand is "arena" in Latin, which is where we get that word from). The performers would be hoisted up to the arena with trap doors and elevators.

The actual show is pretty gruesome. Prisoners, slaves, and others would be killed by wild animals from all over the empire, or else forced to dress up as famous people from history or mythology and killed. Then the animals would also be killed by hunters or gladiators, and of course then there's the gladiator battles themselves. Makes hockey seem tame!

A Little Limoncella Story...

Overall, it was a short but fabulous time in the Eternal City. Had a great talk, met and got to know interesting new colleagues, ate lots of Italian pasta, pizza, and tiramisu. And thanks to Christina and Inge, I had a great short and very wet tour of the Vatican and the Colosseum. Grazie Cri & Inge!

More Roma Pics

Cri in the Roman "Snow"

All the euros drink espresso, but I wimped out and just went with cappuccinos instead. Apparently, drinking cappuccinos after 1000h irreparably brands you as a gauche non-Italian (unless you're on a diet apparently, but the contradiction between having extra milk calories in a diet drink doesnt seem to register). Oh well...
For a speaker gift, Laura Capranica gave us a small glass jug of limoncella (an after dinner drink that's made from lemon rinds steeped into pure alcohol. Yeah that's got a kick!) that she made herself from lemons along the Amalfi coast. She also gave us a small ceramic tile and tumbler from the region. Grazie mille Laura!

Pasta, Pizza, and Vino, the holy trinity of Italian cuisine...

Unfortunately, as I only had hand luggage, there was no way that the limoncella was going to "fly" so to speak. Was humming and hawing about whether to even try to pass it through security, but the huge lineup convinced me not to take chances. However, desperate as I was to sample some of the lovely liqueur, I chugged a bit straight from the jug in the airport bathroom before pouring it all out. In retrospect, given my famous alcohol tolerance, drinking some hard liqueur in the airport bathroom stall (hopefully not video-taped), pouring the yellow liquid into the toilet, and then weaving through the security line with alcohol steaming out of me likely wasn't one of the greatest decisions I've made in my life!

Giving my lecture on heat stress and exercise in the tiny hotel dining room due to the university being closed due to threat of snow. I guess it's appropriate, as my research is all about adapting to environmental extremes!

Michelangelo's "Pieta"

Despite my being a bit of a Philistine when it comes to actually understanding great art and what makes it great, some things just smack you upside the head and leaves you quaking at the knees and in no doubt of its greatness. That was absolutely the case when I walked into St. Peter's Basilica, turned right, and saw Michelangelo's "Pieta" of Mary holding the dead body of Christ.
Commissioned to Michelangelo in 1499, when he was all of TWENTY-THREE years old, it's a cliche but I just could not take my eyes off of this stunning sculpture.
There's the sheer technical mastery (check out the incredibly intricate folds of the clothing) and the utter realism (look at Christ's right shoulder and the way it "hangs" on Mary's hands - the body is so clearly dead and limp). Yet there's the magnificent composition and unity, with Mary grieving and yet having the strength to hold up her dead child. Wow, wow, and wow again. In going through my Rome pictures, I just keep coming back to Pieta over and over again and staring in wonder.

smART history's piece on "Pieta"
The Roma Flickr

Ponte Milvio - That's Amore!

The Hotel Farnesina is on Via de Farnesina, which is a block up from the river and the very nice Ponte Milvio (Milvian Bridge). I'm going to need to look up some history of the bridge, but it certainly was incredibly beautiful walking across it in the late afternoon sun.

The Roma Flickr

 Being the bridge of love, there are well over a thousand locks tied up throughout the bridge. I love shots of reflections off the water like the one on the left, looking east from Ponte Milvio.