With a special appearance of my patron John the Baptist, beneath one of the alabaster windows:

Okay, so it’s actually Orvieto, not Rome. You take my point. These are scenes from the life of Mary – the marriage to Joseph, and postpartum with Jesus – taken as the afternoon sun set the gold mosaic ablaze. And lest anyone miss out: clicking on the photos makes ’em bigger. Clicking on them again makes ’em bigger still.

Am I the only one who remembers an “Italy – Si!” tourism campaign a while (possibly a long while) back? I would like to humbly submit an updated version: “Italy – No.” We got told “no” a lot – not rudely, and not even dismissively. Just matter-of-factly. “No.” The nice part was that the “no”s were rarely final – usually, we found our way around them, or at least got close to realizing our initial desire. But dayum if we didn’t hear a lot of ’em. It became the great byword of the vacation, the surefire in-joke between marrieds, one of us turning to the other: “You want (fill in the blank)? No.”

Saturday night provided maybe the best of the bunch. We crossed Via Corso with its massed crowds of Friends with Boots (The Wife’s term for the endless parade of thin women tromping around in generally fabulous boots, often topped with even more fabulous patterned hose, mostly likely purchased at the one-on-every-streetcorner lingerie shops that dot Rome like so many 7-11s. Me: “It’s what they do here – lounge around in lingerie all day, then put on boots and go out for fabulous dinners. No one know just how they manage it.”), jamming the sidewalks and forcing the Lessers onto the street. And unlike those cobblestoned alleyways where pedestrian and driver enjoy a certain understanding, the Corso was very much an ordinary two-way street, only without enough room in any way for the buses, cars, taxis, and people that crowded it.

As we headed down Via dei Pastini to Er Faciolaro, I began to wonder. A pleasant enough street, but one tinged with tourism. For the first time, we were being hailed by smiling men in waiters’ uniforms, gesturing at the display featuring the evening menu. Sad that such an inviiting gesture should strike me as deeply suspicious, an indicator of sub-par performance from the kitchen. “If they were really good, they wouldn’t need to be friendly,” seems to have been my underlying thought – though I had never actually formulated such a notion, and certainly had no experience upon which to base such a conclusion. What I had from Zadok the Roman: “Only eaten here once with Fr. Z, but he recommends it as being a reasonably-priced place for lunch or dinner near the Pantheon. I certainly enjoyed my meal there.”

Nobody, welcoming or otherwise, stood out in front of Er Faciolaro – a good sign. Inside, we were seated quickly and attended to by a brusque, graying waiter sporting an excellent moustache. He softened up considerably when I ordered the Brunello di Montalcino – at 48 Euros, it was certainly not the most expensive wine on the list, but perhaps it gave him hope that I was not a complete and total barbar. (I had actually intended to order the less-expensive Rosso di Montalcino, but got flustered during a relatively difficult exchange – he had less English than most, it seemed, and we had woefully little Italian – and pointed to the wrong bottle. After that, there was little that could be done; I had to live with my delicious mistake.)

The menu devoted an entire section to game, which made me happy. Mmmm, quail. But oh – over here: another entire section devoted to beans! And here – beans with quailet! Perfect – if “quailet” was some sort of diminutive for quail. The Italian words were different in each case. So I tried to ask my waiter.

“Is this quail the same as this ‘quailet’?”

“No.” And with that, he reached down with his pen and ran a line through “Beans with quail.”

“Ah. Are you out of that? Or is it just that ‘quailet’ isn’t the same as ‘quail’?”

“No.” And with that, he reached down with his pan and ran a grand, emphatic X through the entire game section.

“Ah. I’ll have the beans with sausage.”

Looking back, I think the most likely explanation – certainly the one that fits best with the idea that he was happy about someone ordering the Brunello – is that the game had all been flash-frozen, and was not quite up to par. That also fit well with The WIfe’s experience.

“I’ll have the pork cutlet.”

“No. Spring pork.” At least he didn’t take a pen to her menu.

The Wife’s verdict: “Best Pork Ever. Sometimes when things are really tender, they don’t have as much flavor. Think filet mignon or veal. This was like a veal of pork, but it was super-flavorful. And it wasn’t even that it had that much sauce – it was just its own flavor, but it was tender enough that you could just pull it off the bone.” Which is not to imply that the sauce wasn’t awesome – a concentrated, caramelized reduction. Add to that a primi of cannelloni in a tomato-bechamel sauce – a favorite of The Wife’s from the legendary Garozzo’s in Kansas City (where we had our rehearsal dinner) – and you had one of her two favorite dinners of the visit. I was hardly less pleased – my plump, white beans arrived robed in olive oil of surpassing delicacy, and accompanied of rounds of dense, sweet sausage. Something like the kielbasa my neighbors used to smoke back in the hometown. And the Brunello just got better as the night wore on. A long, slow, happy end to the day. Zadok had served us well.

As I said: “Italy – No.” But that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Okay, maybe it’s a dumb question. But still. If you saw this poster:

And if you noted that the only actual place mentioned on the poster was Chiesa S. Spirito in Sassia, AND you knew that said church was just down the street from St. Peter’s, AND the poster said that the Holy Father would be leading the Regina Coeli, would it be too amazingly stupid for words to assume that the Holy Father would be leading said prayers in said church?

As I said, maybe it’s a dumb question. At any rate, the poster, combined with our woeful lack of Italian, explains why we were in said church from 9:10 a.m. to shortly before 1 p.m. on Sunday. What eventually convinced us to leave? They started a second Mass. We hobbled – well, I hobbled (The Blisters and all) – home along the river, and hunger eventually drove us to stop in at a random trattoria, which provided our first culinary disappointment of the visit. Burnt vegetables, a couple of off mussels, and carbonara covered in what looked like separated hollandaise. We thought we’d reached Minimum Safe Dining Distance from the Vatican. Apparently, like young Skywalker, we were mistaken – about a great many things.

This one’s a little harder to prove, because I don’t have photos from the Before phase. But I have a pretty clear memory of our excellent tour guide telling us in 1991 that four alabaster columns had been donated by Someone Ruler of Somewhere when the church was being constructed. Two of the columns were used to flank the main doors, while the other two were sliced into inch-thick slabs, which slabs were used as windows. The effect was little short of magical. The windows glowed, and all that New World gold on the ceiling glowed back, and everything was gentle and luminous and lovely. All changed, changed utterly

Well, not really. The gold is still there on the ceiling, and the incredible mosaic still adorns the apse, and it’s still my favorite baldacchino. But none of it lives in the same atmosphere. Now, the plain glass windows let in light that blares like a trumpet; what was there before was more like a French Horn.

I can’t prove all this, of course. But before we left for Rome, our friend Ernesto told The Wife, “Be sure to stop into St. Mary Major. The windows are made of stone, and the light is wonderful.” You can’t go Rome again?

When I visited Rome in 1991, this was my favorite of the four major basilicas. I went on and on to The Wife about it. Alas. Problem number one: the rose window, installed in 1995:

Hey, look, it’s the cover from Today’s Missal! But leaving aside my own personal private assessment of the window’s particular aesthetic merit, I don’t think there’s anybody who still retains the use of at least one eye who can argue that this particular window looks anything but wildly out of place in this particular church:

I just don’t get it.

The Galleria Borghese. (We got in for two Euros instead of eight, because it was a Cultural Week. Another small blessing.) A brief moment to savor the secular before we went and got thoroughly Church Drunk (The Wife’s term). Photos were not permitted, so I’m going to work from Google images and just hit a few highlights for us. (Not that photos or Google images will do the pieces justice. Seeing the professionally shot postcards in the gift shops just minutes after leaving was enough proof of that. Something to this pilgrimage business – the necessity of presence…)

The Wife very much admired Canova’s Venus, modeled on Pauline Bonaparte Borghese. The first Google image result of any decent size brings up the following caption: “This is the petrified ‘corpse’ of his former mistress that a horrified Soliman encounters in the Borghese Palace in The Kingdom of This World.” For whatever reason, we were not horrified. I was especially taken with the incredible work done on the cushion upon which the lady reclines. So supple were its lines, so seemingly yielding its surface, that it didn’t even register to The Wife as marble until I started in marveling at it. I suppose this makes me a sad, modern soul, sighing over marble made to look like cotton while remaining woefully ignorant of the aesthetic dynamics involved in the piece as a whole (why was Soliman horrified?) But I’ve never pretended otherwise. Here ’tis:

And as long as we’re the subject of my aesthetic barbarism, I should say that my favorite piece was Caravaggio’s St. Jerome:

I tried to prefer other things. I tried not to be a pious pilgrim, unable to delight in good, honest pagan images because I was forever flitting after Jesus and death instead of full-blooded life. I stared goggle-eyed at Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne, and marveled at the fingers of Pluto gripping the thigh of his prize in the sculptor’s The Rape of Prosperina. I pondered the mosaic floors depicting gladiators plying their bloody trade, killing ferocious animals and each other. I wished that the 17th-century (I think) busts of the Caesars had some basis in fact, that I could imagine I was staring into the face of Julius, or Augustus, or Claudius, or even Caligula. I was at first fascinated, and then disturbed, by a black stone relief depicting a bacchanal of plump little children.

But in the end, I was a sucker for Caravaggio’s light, and for the skull on the desk. Over at The Lion and the Cardinal, Daniel Mitsui points to this comment on Caravaggio by Nicholas Poussin, whom Mitsui terms a “perceptive contemporary” of the artist: “I won’t look at it. That man was born to destroy the art of painting. Such a vulgar painting can only be the work of a vulgar man.”

Sigh. I am, it seems, a B-movie Catholic.