Skip to main content

Depicting Rome, pt. 5

We got a late start on the morning of January 6th, and as we approached St. Peter's Square from the apartment Mom and Dad had rented we heard marching band music and noticed a large number of people bustling towards the square with us. Whoops! It was Epiphany, the culmination of the Christmas holiday, and we were arriving at the square with just enough time to soak in the scene before Pope Benedict gave his Epiphany address!

View Larger Map(scroll the map over to the West to get a sense of the scale of the square and basilica)
Almost the entire, massive square was filled with people, most simply standing clutching umbrellas, but many who were dressed in costume--whether the historical costume of their home region, or as La Befana, the Italian Christmas Witch, or as part of a theme with their club or organization (the giant lobster you see below was part of the local kayak club--it was chaperoned by people wearing kayaks with the bottoms cut out so they could walk around).




Finally, action! A large banner was unfurled from the window of the Papal apartment (top floor of the central building, second window from the right), and a figure emerged to speak! A quick check of the Jumbotron revealed that it was indeed the Pope! We hadn't bargained for this!



(this image is from the "wall of fame" at the City of Rome Sanitation Worker's Creche, the most beautiful in the city of Rome) The Pope gave a short message of greeting and blessing in Italian, German, English, and (most enthusiastically) in Spanish. Nothing too memorable. People started filtering out of the square almost as soon as he started to speak, which I hadn't expected--I had thought he would have a captive audience all the way through. The last to leave were the various groups in historical costume. It was something else to be walking down the Via della Conciliazione with people in full Renaissance-Faire garb smoking cigarettes and chatting on cellphones under their umbrellas.




Evening on Via dei Coronari.




Last family photo before Mom and Dad and Will split for the States. Not bad for a long exposure! We were in the Pantheon, just before we got dinner. Even though it was way touristy, we ate on the square--being part of the evening fabric, even as obvious tourists, was even more delicious than the food.

Comments

Paul said…
Am I the only one not seeing the flic?
Mr Tambo said…
Nope--the flick is en route. But soon! And for the rest of your life. The problems of one little flick don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy, mixed up world.

Popular posts from this blog

Family and Gender in Ancient Rome

I mentioned below that Prof. Diane Lipsett delivered a wonderful lecture on the conversation currently taking place between New Testament scholars, family historians, social archaeologists and the like. The title of this post is actually the title of en entire semester-long course taught by Prof. Lipsett, so for our, geez, ninety minute session she condensed her focus to Men, Women, and Children in Ancient Rome. With her permission, I am posting my notes from this lecture below, tweaked a little for readability. Prof. Lipsett is interested in studies of gender formation among non-elites as well as elites, those people about whom we know much less because they did not have the resources or clout to commemorate and study themselves, generally speaking. Roman households were much broader than we conceive of in modern terms, with a wide spectrum of people connected by family and employment living under one roof (the terms domus/eikos/ikea capture this idea of an indiscriminate household

New Post!

Of course I'll wait to update this damn thing until the end of the semester, when all the shit I've been putting off for the last few weeks and months is cascading down on me like a fountain of lukewarm Coors Light. After Tuesday, things will be a little less hectic, but frankly I'm just looking ahead to the end of the week. If anyone has any ideas about applying a psychoanalytic method of art criticism to the devotional aspects of Georges Rouault's Miserere (in particular Plate 23, Rue des Solitaires) and the pros and cons of doing so, I'd love to hear about it.

Be true to your school now!

This is a cross-posting of a comment I left on peacebang.com's recent post about my school, Starr King School for the Ministry. PeaceBang, who is apparently a UU Minister in the Northeast, posted a few days ago an item about my school's supposed "banning" of the term, "brown bag lunch," because of the racialized connotations of brown bags.* Her post was, to my reading, haughty and dismissive, and she seemed awfully pleased with her own wit and ability to take cheap shots at others with little to no basis for her opinions. I think the comments for that post are up to 40, and it's a pretty lively back and forth. So, here is my contribution: "This may not be the ideal forum for “deep, serious conversation,” but one of the cornerstones of Educating to Counter Oppression is the importance of having deep, serious conversations wherever they happen. The status quo of “waiting for the right moment or forum” to engage with these issues too often leads to