After a lesiurely breakfas went to the station and had a lesiurely wait for the train. The time and freqency of trains seems to bear no resembnlamce to the timetable! We headed to the Tivoli fountain, unfortunatly it is currently under attack from the tribe Scaffoldi. Whillst the restoration work is being done, you can't see much or throw coins in. Today is turning into another scorching day, hopefully it will get cooler as we head north tomorrom. We had a walk around and ended up at some more ancient ruins, the forum eof Augustus.
We got the bus from there to St. Maria Sopa Minevera. Outside the church is a statue of an elephant with an Egyptian obelisk on its back. The statue is bt Berini. The obelisk on its back comes from the nearby site if an egyptian temple to the goddess Isis. I thought the elephant had a very happy smile.
The church itself contains the shrine of St. Catherine of Sienna, who worked to bring the papacy back to Rome from France and to establish peace among the Italian city states. She is one of six patron saints of Europe.
The Chuch is Rome's only gothic style church and is built on the site ofa previous temple to Minerva. We only had time for a quick look round before heading to the Vatican.
After a quick stop for an ice cream we approached the swiss guards and after security checks were allowed into the vatican. Here we reported to the archeological office with whom we had booked to go on a tour to see the tomb of St.Peter. The tour tool us deep into the Vatican. The first church here was built by Constantine, who built it on top of a necropolis. Parts of the necropolis have been excavated and are fantasticaly preserved. It really is a city of the dead with streets and mausolems the size of houses. You can see the sarcophagi and mausoleums where some of the wealthier citzens would bury their dead. The mausoleums silll have mosaic floors and frescos painted on the walls. Families would come and eat and drink on top of th graves, so the would be celebratring with the whole family, alive and dead. They brought fresh flowers to mask the smell, and we still put flowers on graves today.
The current altar is built on top of one by Gregory and the one by Constantine. However before there was even a church a simple structrure hads been put up to mark the grave. The archeologists dug under the altar and found a buriel space, surrounded by smallwr buriels, suggsting that this was somneone important that people wanted to be buried near. The main grave was basicallly a hole in the ground, nothing much to mark it. Archeologists are convinvced that this is the grave of St. peter. After alll Peter was killed at the height of Nero's persecution, anyone trying to make the grave special would probably have been killed as well. However, the grave when discovered, was empty! So where was St. Peter? A wall had been excavated before the grave was found with some writting and a little niche on it with bones in. These had been put in a box and put to one side whilst the main excavation took place. It was only later that someone bothered to look at the inscription on the wall, although damaged, it could well read "here lies Peter". The bones were then annalysed and found to belong to a 70ish year old man, who died towards the 2nd half of the first century and would have been of a large build, suitable to be a fisherman. Is this St. Peter? Whilst there is no conclusive proof the circumstantial evidence seems to fit and the bones are considered by the Vatican to be St. Peter's. A priest in our group led us in a prayer before we left the site where the bones are. After that we made our way out, past several lovely side chapels and the tomb of "the old pretender" son of James 7th of England and 2nd of Scotland. The final side chapel we stopped at contained the original altar built on the site by Constantine.
After all that excitment we headed back to the hotel for a rest and to get packed ready for our departure tomorrow. Decided to venture a bit further in search of food this evening and got the train to Flamenico. We found a nice looking tratorria. I had pasta and Andrew had pizza, and as he couldn't eat it all, I has some pizzza to. The food was very good and cheaper than other places we ha been to. So after dinner and a few beers headed back for an early night before our departure in the morning.
from my LiveJournal, Jane Williams - The Wombling World of Madness
No comments:
Post a Comment