Pentecost in Rome

Our last full day in Rome was Pentecost. A week earlier, we'd celebrated the Ascension in a catacomb with our Cistercian hosts...

... more precisely, the Catacombs of Callixtus, one of the oldest and biggest. We took a tour too, albeit in Italian. I was particularly glad about it because I'd never been to any of the catacombs of Rome before. The walk to the catacombs, on a quiet Sunday morning, out the Via Appia Antica beyond the old city walls was like slowly going back in time:

Sunken Roman road and a mile-marker on the Via Appia

On the walk back, I got to talk with a retired French abbess, the only Cistercian nun staying at the house while we were there. Somehow being in Rome without knowing any Italian made me less shy about speaking French, and more excited to be able to speak to anyone at all! We heard all about her monastery in the south of France, which sounds completely beautiful, but especially enjoyed hearing some of her wisdom about the life of nuns and Christian life in general.

Along the way, we passed the 'Quo vadis' church. The story is that St. Peter passed this place as he was fleeing Rome during a persecution of Christians. On his way out of town he saw Jesus heading back in. When Peter asked him, "Lord, where are you going?" ("Domine, quo vadis?") he said, "To Rome to be crucified again." So Peter turned around and went back to Rome to continue his apostolic work there, eventually being martyred.

The next week, on the morning of Pentecost, we traded Roman burial grounds, a site of martyrdom outside the walls, for a former Roman temple at the center of the old city--we went to the Pantheon.

They have a Pentecost mass there every year that's quite popular, for reasons you will soon see. It was packed, so we had to stand during the mass. We ended up rather close to the center of the dome. After the dismissal, the third-century Pentecost hymn, Veni Creator Spiritus ("Come Holy Spirit"), was chanted...

...as rose petals began to fall through the oculus of the Pantheon's dome.

They fell for what seemed like ages! Some of the roses weren't fully pulled apart: T got smacked in the shoulder with one particularly solid symbol of the descending Holy Spirit. Here's a short video of it:

By the time the petals stopped falling they were several inches thick right in the middle where we were. The area right under the oculus is roped off, I imagine because the floor is often wet from rain there, but some of the security guards started letting little kids in to play in the roses:

It was a beautiful end to our time in Rome and a moving send-off for the last few months of our travels. Many thanks to Br John and the rest of the monks for hosting us!

 

Walks in Rome

We did actually work in Rome too; in fact quite a lot. I was working at the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. It's inside Vatican City, which means it's obviously super cool but also meant it was a 45-minute walk from the Cistercian house. There were buses, but I wanted to take full advantage of any excuse to walk around the city. My walk usually started through the public rose garden on the Aventine, which was often deserted and still dewy when I left (we were on a monastic schedule, remember):

On my way to the library, I often walked through the city while it was still cool, and because I was trying to get to the church of Sant'Andrea della Valle in the morning, when the sun turns the church all golden.

 When I arrived, security at the library was pretty crazy. It also doesn't have an address, and doesn't appear on Google maps. So on my first day, after passport control and Swiss Guards at the border, I was left wandering around the gates, saying "Dov'è la biblioteca?" to anyone who looked like they might either help me or throw me out if I went somewhere I wasn't supposed to. Eventually I found the library and ended up explaining my dissertation project to a kind librarian in French, because he didn't speak any English and I don't speak any Italian. But he gave me a library card, so it all worked out.

On that note, here's my one and only photo from inside the Vatican:

It's from the courtyard outside the library--of course no cameras are allowed in! So you will just have to believe me that the reading rooms were frescoed Renaissance halls with industrial metal bookshelves and sleek modern security equipment added in. I really did have to access the library's collections, because they include the one and only extant copy of the Draco Normannicus, the twelfth-century history I am going to (I hope) write about. There's a good edition already but I needed the manuscript to see whether other texts were copied alongside the Draco from the same source. And they were! I had suspected and hoped as much but the manuscript made it really clear. Now I can confidently use those texts to explain some of the Draco's context. Historian triumph!

Also I copied hundreds of names of people enrolled in the confraternity of the abbey of Bec, at least a third of whom were named William, in the hopes that I will be able to trace them elsewhere as donors to the monastery or something. Less triumphant.

On the way back, the walk usually looked something like this:

Colonnade photo especially for Mel!

If the line wasn't too long, I could drop in:

Or head back along the Tiber:

And then past the Circus Maximus, with a view of Nero's palace, the Domus Aurea, and up the hill back home:

Meanwhile, on many of our working days, T followed Br. John to school to study at the Pontifical Gregorian University, aka "the Greg":

Philosophical and theological lunchtime conversations ensued, I understand.

Of course, we went on a few walks to see parts of the city that weren't on the way to work. To the Spanish Steps:

To some ancient Roman places, which of course are EVERYWHERE in Rome and everyone acts like it's just normal for them to be sitting there:

We found a street where Verdi lived:

And churches. So many churches. Here are just a few, some favorites and some new to me.

St Luigi dei Francesci, home of fabulous Carravagio paintings but represented by this photo because it made me feel at home to see a medieval French saint in the middle of Baroque Italy:

Nearby, San Agostino, where St Monica, the mother of St Augustine, is buried! This fresco is otherwise not my favorite thing but I'm glad someone, somewhere has painted Monica and Augustine's vision at Ostia:

Santa Maria in Trastevere, because these mosaics:

Santa Maria sopra Minerva, where I didn't take any pictures of the inside, but I should've, because it's one of the only Gothic churches in Rome, with vaults painted blue with gold stars. Instead, have a Bernini elephant from outside:

Berniniphant.

St John Lateran:

Where we saw St James, looking a fair bit less weather-worn that I was used to seeing him on the Camino, and Boniface VIII, of Dante infamy, proclaiming a Jubilee for pilgrims to Rome in the year 1300.

But after all these wanderings, we were always glad to turn our faces back toward the Aventine and rest.

La citta eterna!

Then we went to Rome!

We stayed at the Cistercian General House, where we knew some monks who are in Rome for their studies. After our many months away from friends, family, and even English-speakers, a little monastic hospitality was a huge relief! The house is a former villa on the peaceful Aventine hill, which we were shocked to find warm, sunny, and full of flowers. It literally smelled like roses and orange blossoms everywhere. We northerners didn't know what to do. Above, you can see us in the orange garden of Santa Sabina which overlooks the Tibur from the top of the Aventine, and below, the courtyard of the house:

Our time in Rome was almost luxuriously full of beautiful sights and wonderful events. First, we went to see the Pope:

He's the really tiny one in the middle in white. Actually we were nearly crushed by the crowd, and exhausted by standing in the sun at this Wednesday audience. But on the way in he drove right by us! I decided to savor the moment rather than photographing, however. And it was exciting to hear his message for the feast of St Joseph the Worker--does our academic work count as labor?--in person.

Shortly thereafter, we were able to go to early morning mass in St. Peter's Basilica thanks to Fr. Thomas and Br. John.

 
For the first hour that the basilica is open each morning, any priest can show up and say mass at one of the many small chapels. It was moving to attend mass in the church itself, but when we did this a second time, later in our trip, we had an even bigger treat. We managed to duck into the chapel directly below the main altar and see the actual bones of St. Peter himself. The history of the tomb is super interesting (no one knew it was there until less than a century ago... and it turned out to be precisely below the main altar) and you can read more about it here.

We probably weren't really supposed to be allowed to see the tomb, and I'm not quite sure how Fr. Thomas charmed the guard (it was in Italian). We had failed earlier to get a spot in one of the tours of the excavations because they fill up so far in advance, so we were doubly glad of the chance! As it happened, the day that we visited the tomb of St. Peter was also T's birthday, and the day we had arrived in Rome was my birthday. We ate a lot of celebratory spaghetti and pizza.

 

On one occasion T ordered a pizza called "il Vesuvio," and this is what appeared:

Delish.

Anyway, shortly after our first morning mass in St. Peter's, we were able, through the generosity of Fr. Raphael, another Cistercian, to see the new Swiss Guards being sworn in...!

And that's not to mention the time we went to the Palazzo Barberini with a student and painter of Baroque frescoes and made sketches of the paintings to practice seeing. Or about our trip to "Fat Momma's" (it's the name of the restaurant, but don't call the owner that). As you can see, we were welcomed to the city very generously. We also of course visited a ton of churches and walked a lot, and I even managed to see some manuscripts in the Vatican Library. More of that later, but for now, here's the view from Santa Sabina's orange garden at twilight, when we often took a short walk to it:

Le Printemps du Rouen

After our week-long excursion in the Norman countryside we settled for three weeks in the city of Rouen, where E had work to do in the regional archives and the municipal library. The city has a charming medieval center, a few small museums, and a lot of really neat Gothic architecture.

I was most excited to get to see the cathedral that Monet made famous with a beautiful series of paintings.

E was excited to see it as well, because all the dukes of Normandy used to be buried there. Most of their remains have been moved to other places, but the heart - and only the heart - of Richard the Lionheart(!) is still buried there.

Rouen is probably most famous as the place where St. Joan of Arc was tried, condemned, and burned to death in the first third of the fifteenth century.

The tower of the fortress where Joan of Arc was imprisoned and its great view of the city.

Our apartment was only a block away from the central marketplace where she was executed. It now houses a tragically hideous modern church that looks like a mix between a huge water-slide and an enormous dead fish. We did not take a picture of it.

Unlike at the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, I was allowed to go with E into the libraries in Rouen. So on most days we walked together to the library in the morning, worked through the day, and made detours around the city on the way home in the evening. Our trips to the departmental archives always took us across the river into the more industrial part of the city.

The Bronx? No thanks. 

But on our way back from the archives we usually managed to find something medieval, like this massive monastery church.

 St. Ouen.

Our time in Rouen coincided with the city's annual three-week spring holiday, which turned out to be a mixed blessing. It meant that nothing was happening at the local theatre, orchestra, or opera (sigh), but it also meant that the art museums were free to enter and, most importantly, that everything was in bloom (sigh again).

There isn't much else to tell about our days in Rouen, since there was really very little to do there. E seemed to get a lot out of her time in the archive and library. I madly cranked out an article to send off to a journal for review. And we both had our patience tried by the tiny, tiny apartment we rented. We're definitely looking forward to returning to our 300-square-foot palace in Harlem.