In you don’t count emergency trips home for family crises as travel (and I don’t) then this is the first real trip I’ve taken since February 2020 (the one where I returned from abroad and became mysteriously ill with some bronchial thing).
As usual with me, these are a combination of work and recreation. I started with an early morning tour through the Vatican Museums. Our guide was excellent, a true believer and Michelangelo stan who’d actually met the Pope and traveled with his retinue as an interpreter. He started by pointing out that the complex of museums is the largest in the world, with 70,000 exhibits over 10 acres. So you can’t see everything. And this is really the key understanding for a city like Rome. You. Can’t. See. Everything. Not in a week, not in a month, maybe not in a lifetime. That’s important, because like the typical American with not enough holiday time, there’s this urge to try to squeeze everything in.
And squeeze everything in really resonated with the museum complex as well. So much stuff from so many places. After the tour, which wraps, of course, in the Sistine Chapel (more on this below) we could freely explore the rest of the museum complex. And I became trapped in it, confused by crowds, sensory overload, and typically inefficient Italian signage and direction. Toward the end, I was completely overwhelmed… more pottery, OMG.
The thing that really struck me though was the Gallery of Statues and Hall of Busts. Here we have a long gallery full of statues from all over the classical world, many with shitty fig leaf dick coverups. All these likenesses of people, famous and anonymous, interspersed with Greek and Roman Gods, some of which still felt active. All staring at each other across what is effectively a large hallway like “what the fuck am I doing here?”.
I took many photos of course, and said hi to a number of favorites, but I really felt the loss of context. And context here is critical. Museums are, by definition, collections of things, so you can’t really hold that against them. But the best exhibits try to provide context… to resituate the objects in their time and place, at least imaginatively. I mean, I get that when you unearth a lovely marble Minerva from a highway project, you aren’t just going to leave Her there, but when you uproot things from their context, there’s a gap that you should at least try to bridge.
The Hall of dickless dudes at least was kind of local, avoiding the colonialist issues that many exhibits place on top of the context problem (here’s a bunch of cool stuff we stole from people we’ve been oppressing, nifty huh?). Still, I couldn’t help see the Vatican as kind of a rich hoarder’s warehouse. Like much cooler than normal, but still.
Interestingly, the Sistine Chapel also suffered from that lack of context. It’s amazing of course, and they at least try to enforce a sense of the sacred (you aren’t supposed to talk, tour guides go over what you see in advance on a series of helpful placards in the Pinecone courtyard, no photos). But it just didn’t feel like a working church. It didn’t feel holy. And I’m a church stan myself and have been in some pretty touristy spots through Europe. But they all felt like churches and the hoards of tourists in places like Notre Dam or the Pantheon clearly sensed it as well.
Now, maybe St. Peter’s is better, but I don’t know because I didn’t feel like standing in a line of several hundred people to find out.
Which, by the way, tourism is back, baby! My trip was dictated by work, but Italy conveniently dropped the majority of their their mask mandates, and entirely stopped requiring the EU’s digital vax passes, just a week before we arrived. The result? A huge number of British, German, and other European visitors pouring into the city (folks who can basically book a quick, cheap trip to Rome). On my flight to Europe, they announced that technically we should be masked since our destination — Germany — had mask rules for public transport, despite the German airports not requiring masks. But they were informing rather than enforcing (which meant that basically no one bothered). As the flight attendant said “the rules don’t make any sense right now.”
So airplane yes, airport no; museum yes, restaurant no; packed local train, yes, packed train station, no. This is more opportunity for context. How do we contextualize the messages about illness and safety across cultures and across the months and years since the start of 2020?
The thing I value most about travel is that sense of gaining perspective on what things mean and how they fit together. Of what your own context is and how that interacts with the context of other people and places. And when you’re going someplace old, like Rome, through time as well.
