IMPRESSIONI DI ROMA

It was late in the evening in Rome. High up on the rampart, at the two windows on the right, a bright light still burned. The rest of the façade was in darkness. The message it conveyed was one of urgency, of unfinished business.

Earlier that day we had stood on St Peter’s Square below those windows, and listened to Pope Benedict’s homily on his return the day before from Israel. He spoke of pain and violence, suffering and rejection, and urged us to pray for compassion, understanding and peace. One could not fail to be moved by the humility, directness and courtesy with which he addressed the crowd – a crowd, many in carnival mood, which had come to see the sights, and yet considered by the Pope to be worthy of sharing his vision to change the course of history.

St Peter’s Square is a grandiose architectural statement. It is conceived to lead the eye – and the pilgrim – to the basilica, where the bones of Peter are laid to rest. But the basilica itself is overwhelming, as is so much in Rome, by its huge scale. The simplicity of Peter and his vulnerability as a man is overcome by the statement of the power and the glory. And Peter’s tomb is not readily accessible to visitors.

There is the same counterpoint between statement and understatement in the Sistine Chapel. The approach to the chapel is through richly adorned galleries – not for living but for display – and the bigger than expected chapel itself, lacking in intimacy, is dominated by Michelangelo’s depiction of God’s finger reaching out to, yet not quite touching, Adam’s finger: A cosmic question mark, with the observer all too aware of the outcome of God’s pact with Adam. While the other frescoes are elaborate, this centrepiece is stark.

The Coliseum, the arena where the Emperors and the Romans organised lavish events, impresses by its concept and symmetry, but horrifies by the scale of its deliberate cruelty and wanton destruction of life, animal or human. How could a society with such artistic and cultural achievements live with this contradiction? The end came with decadence and the sack of Rome by the Goths in the 5^th Century. Yet it was Constantine with the Edict of Milan in 313AD, who gave Christians the right to worship freely.

Not far from the Coliseum, we came across the Mamertine Prison, a small subterranean cave where St Peter, and separately St Paul are reputed (with some credibility) to have been incarcerated. Now a good deal more pleasant and better decorated than in the decades after Christ.

While admiring the achievements of the generosity of the benefactors of the many massive churches, seemingly predominantly in classical Renaissance style, we missed the simplicity of pure Norman or the delicacy of Gothic architecture. Jewels of early Christian mosaic, for example in St Maria Maggiore or St Giovanni di Laterano threatened to be drowned by their settings. Not so, the exquisite 9^th century mosaics in the chapel of St Zeno in the church of St Prasseda where in the small intimate chapel the visitor is enveloped by exquisite, glittering craftsmanship.

Taking the 218 bus, travelling a few miles south of the city, we arrived at the catacombs of St Callisto. Peaceful, green countryside, flowers and foliage, crops interspersed with the familiar red poppies – it was a different world. Here, outside the city walls, the first Christians, those to whom St Peter was a recent figure, could practise their religion, free from persecution. They could bury their dead by tunnelling into the soft volcanic soil. According to Roman Law, they would rest undisturbed. Here, 20 metres underground, in the chambers with terraces of burial niches, were the hand-inscribed symbols of the risen Christ. The sense of faith against the background of hardship, insecurity and fragility of physical life in those times testifies to the strength of the experience. In the catacombs one feels this witness more strongly than in the great monuments in the city.

Then the visitor goes to the Trevi Fountain where the whole world continually passes by, and according to custom – or pagan ritual? – you throw in your coin (in today’s currency, a Euro), as a pledge that you will return.

Is the light still burning in those rooms above St Peter’s Square, and is the Holy Father still wrestling with the issues of our time, and are we ourselves doing our part?

Christopher Davies