Botticelli Blue Skies: An American in Florence

45. St. Peter’s Basilica and the Pope’s Fishing Cap

Seven hours after entering the Vatican Museum, we are popped out an exit into fresh air again. The students collapse on benches, moaning, flinging their heads in one another’s laps; even the marine takes off her steel-toed marching shoes and looks at her feet as if she expects to see snakes where her toes had been. Mrs. Pedrini offers around a bag of pretzels, and I take one, full of gratitude for every individual grain of salt I can pick out on the surface of the baked, brown crust. Just one small grain takes on a clarity and brilliance to the eye, then a sharpness to the tongue—a single defined experience exceptionally welcome after the blurry attack of images and colors upon my senses that entered and are still knocking about in my brain. I think I have been stricken with the disease common among visitors to Italy: the Art Overload Syndrome, or Stendahl Syndrome, named for the writer who, after visiting the tombs of the great 180 years ago in Santa Croce, wrote, “I had palpitations of the heart . . . I walked with the fear of falling. . . . I sat down on a bench.” The article I read reported that an attack of this condition makes the victim want to hop on a plane and go home. I definitely have all the symptoms. I have been overcome by art. 230 45 Saint Peter’s Basilica and the Pope’s Fishing Cap Stillness is the medicine to cure it (or, at the very least, sitting down on a bench). The afflicted person requires a stop, some kind of rest, a pause to let the colliding molecules settle, find some pattern and coherence . But for me there is only respite, not rescue. Now Nicoletta announces we are all to follow her to a pizzeria. After lunch, we must storm the portals of the great Saint Peter’s Basilica. The Pope is nowhere to be found. However, we learn that a huge flock of his brothers in the ministry, the priests who were ordained the very same year as he, fifty years ago, have been invited this very day to Saint Peter’s for an anniversary party. As we enter Saint Peter’s Square, we encounter the arriving throngs— hundreds of old men wearing long cassocks, heavy silver crosses, and white silk caps (much like the yarmulkes of the Jews), all struggling up the stone steps, all wearing plastic name tags on their priestly robes, all on their way to a grand dinner party at the Vatican. In Saint Peter’s Square, an orchestra is just now rehearsing for the celebratory concert to take place outdoors tomorrow. The entire square is roped off, barricaded, and filled with folding chairs. Around the periphery, media trucks are setting up enormous TV screens, speakers , microphones—wires are everywhere. I look up to the high balcony draped in red velvet from which I have often seen, via the miracle of TV, the Pope give his blessings to his people, his country, and the world. Nothing is up there but a pigeon, pacing back and forth, obviously distressed by the worldly clatter and commerce taking place below. Our class files into the church, with Nicoletta leading the way to Michelangelo’s famous Pietà in the chapel to the right. This is the first required stop on the list of attractions not to be missed. We have all read and looked at copies of this sculpture, the limp and just-dead Christ lying in his grieving mother’s lap while her one hand supports him and the other is held upward, open and relaxed, as if to accept her fate with supernatural grace. I am eager to see in person the Virgin Mother’s face (looking years younger than her bearded son) while she Botticelli Blue Skies 231 supports his lifeless form in the shelter of her embrace. Her expression of peace is most baffling to me. Shouldn’t the mother of a dead child be screaming in agony? Shouldn’t she be tearing her hair? When questioned about the beauty of this sculpture, Michelangelo wrote: “If life pleases us, death, being made by the hands of the same creator, should not displease us.” It’s clear to me he has never been a mother. Perhaps I will learn some critical lesson from looking closer at this contradiction in terms. But the problem is that...