Roman Holiday

Easter in Rome has a number of solemn traditions, starting the Sunday before. (Well, starting 40 days before, technically, at the beginning of Lent, but who's counting?) The pope attends tons of ceremonies all week long, including a recognition of Palm Sunday (the day of Jesus's triumphal entry into Jerusalem).
On Good Friday, there is a pageant at the Coliseum called the Via Crucis or Way of the Cross. The pope presides over a ceremony where scriptures and other texts are read about Jesus's last few hours. There are 14 so-called "stations" of the cross, or events that happened to him from his condemnation, through his crucifixion, and ending with his burial. As the readers read the texts, screens showed people marching a cross from point to point, starting in the Coliseum itself, and eventually out through the crowd and across to the Forum, culminating next to the pope in his pavilion overlooking the Coliseum.

The Coliseum is on the left, and you can see the pope there on the screen, while across you can just barely make out his red pavilion. He is the little white speck under it. (He looked larger in real life, but this was with a wide angle to capture the whole scene.) There were probably close to 75,000 people right around there.

The next night was Holy Saturday. In St. Peter's Basilica, they hold what is called the Easter Vigil, which is a Mass, combined with baptisms and tons of other stuff.

 Saturday it rained quite a bit, so the Easter Vigil wasn't actually crowded (the square had thousands of chairs--all empty) so we might have been able to actually get into the Basilica, but it was two and a half hours long. We watched part of it on the big screens outside in the square and called it good.

It has been super crowded in Rome since we arrived over two weeks ago. Any time we go to any of the well-known spots, they have all been thronged with people. Well, last Saturday was the opposite of that. The rain had driven everyone indoors, and we ate an extended dinner while we waited for it to end. After the end of the Vigil, we rode our bikes through a quick tour of all of our favorite places, from the Vatican, by the Castel di Sant'Angelo (pictured) across the Tiber, to the Piazza Venezia, then down Via del Corso to the Piazza del Popolo, the Spanish Steps, Trevi Fountain, Piazza del Quirinale. We also rode down the Via Margutta, which is the street Gregory Peck lives on in Roman Holiday, a favorite spot of ours on our last trip here, and a place that probably deserves its own post. Finally we went home. We were enjoying so much having those places to ourselves that I forgot to take any more pictures after this one. I don't regret it a bit.

Then, Easter Sunday dawned. It was warm and sunny. We rode back down to the Vatican, and this scene awaited us:

You can tell the crowd had completely filled the square and then filled the Via della Conciliazione (the street approaching the Vatican) for about a half mile. I guessed there had to be 100,000 people there; we read the next day the crowd was estimated at more like 150,000.

Well, we pushed our way up to the front and eventually saw a disappointing sight: once the square had been filled (probably early in the morning), they'd blockaded it and wouldn't let anyone else in. A large empty space and plenty of guards separated the wise virgins with oil in their lamps from us poor sinners.

But if you think that stopped me, you don't know me very well. I slipped around to the side of the colonnade, and waited until the guards on either side were looking away from me, then jumped first one barricade, then the other.

Eventually, Trajan decided to join me and, after getting caught and sent back once, made it across as well. I have no idea why, but somehow he's still surprised each time I go someplace that I'm not supposed to.

If you look at the last photo, then this one, then the next one, it should give you some idea of the scale of St. Peter's Basilica. Most pictures make it look large, but it is huge.

You can see how far I had to zoom in to make out just one person. (In this case, Pope Francesco himself, delivering his "Urbis et Orbis" [the city and the world] blessing.)

This shot and the next are details from the corners of the Basilica.

In this shot, I got the bells ringing--something I've never actually seen before. It's a very dramatic sound and fills the whole square.

The pope took a quick victory lap in the pope-mobile, which at this point is a glorified golf cart. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

After all that was over, Trajan turned to me and said "Let's go back to Italy." I laughed pretty hard at that one. (For those who might not know, the Vatican is a separate country, one of the world's smallest. Its eastern limit is the outer border of the colonnade.)

It was a very cool morning, but we had to miss church to see it, so we went home and watched some of General Conference that we had missed, and then decided to go on a bike ride out to the Rome temple site. We discovered it's about an hour's ride to get there, which we didn't mind at all, especially since it got prettier as we went.

 Eventually, we saw the temple in the distance.

 There is a pretty high fence all around the temple site, which is a very good thing, since vandals will paint graffiti on anything they can here. So this is the best picture we could get.

Well actually, it was the best picture we could get until I decided to hop the fence of the building next door and climb up the outside stairwell to the fifth floor. Trajan, having hesitated, was caught by a security guard and had to stay behind.

The money shot, from where the temple looks oh so much more amazing, and where the air is rarefied and pure, and anyone who, say, came really close and missed out on, should forever regret his vacillation and ponder on where his priorities lie.

Well, obviously, it being Sunday, not much was going on around the site, so after taking our pics we biked it back home.

Today, the day after Easter, is also a holiday here in Rome. In Italian, Easter is called Pasqua, and the day after, Pasquetta. It's typically a day where Romans chill out and have a picnic and take it easy. We walked down by the Forum and Piazza Venezia, which was wall to wall with people. The roads all over town were closed to cars, and people were strolling about and seeing the sights, but I think I've put enough pictures in this post already. Suffice to say, we enjoyed it more on Saturday, when everything was empty. And it's only going to get worse--according to the news, over a million people will be coming to Rome this week in preparation for the canonization of two popes next Sunday.

I think we might have to get out of town for that one. Even people on holiday in Rome need a holiday.