Rome January 2020
Our pricey hired tour guide who looks like a Botticelli angel herself, has left us to drift at our own tempo through the enormity of St. Peter’s Basilica after shepherding us at a brisk educative pace through the many halls of the Vatican itself, and so the first thing Peter does is to go off in search of more ancient manuscripts, sumptuous floor tilings that tell a story, small intricate details his hungry eyes will discover as only his eyes can….and the first thing I do is : I sit down on the nearest wooden bench and pray that I may not collapse from the sheer fatigue of
digesting an entire world of beauty in one interminable morning….I realize I was not built to be the enthusiastic tourist I once was….and this is okay with me, as long as I can find wooden benches to sit on….I have learned the Italian for “I need to sit”…”Ho bisogno.”…..I need. And our ethereal our guide whose name might have been Angelina or something equally appropriate, is very kind and she pulls in favors from all her Vatican guards for chairs for “the Signora”…i was the only seated member of our audience group in the Sistine Chapel…at the feet of an altar no less….Angelina…she tells me she thinks my age has brought me wisdom…she makes sure I know she admires me….and, of course, admires that I have a husband who is so gorgeous and so much younger than I am….Italian women
know a good thing when they see it…
Speaking of which…. my eyes close for a much needed rest, a clearing of the visual field so they can soak in yet more astonishing gorgeousness if I ever feel like opening them again, and i feel a slight gentle buzz at the back of my neck: sort of like an energetic finger nudging me to take a deep breath and simply gently turn around, and so with my eyes still closed, I do turn around, letting the stretching of my back muscles bring me what joy they can…..i can breathe again, I realize…and I want a gelato. A lemon one.
My eyes open…..and my desire for a lemon ice becomes explicable as I realize I have sat down mere feet away from the world’s most glorious sculpture, bathed in some sort of golden yellow light that seems to have no other origin than from within itself: Michelangelo’s Piéta. I gasp so loudly I can at least hear myself. At the same moment that some ethereal music seems to fill the space. Obviously there is no string quartet, no window to let the sunlight in to cover the sad mother and her agonized child…..all sensory cues are coming from a place within me that clearly needs to let itself be known.
And tears begin to creep onto my face.
Dammit!
I seem to leak anytime I get near a Quattrocento work of art by one genius or other.
My first Giotto Madonna left me moistened and breathless at the Uffizzi Gallery….my initial sighting of the David in Florence nearly drowned me breathless…beauty dampens me to a degree I find mystifying…beauty seemingly from God drowns all other of my senses…..i need a lifeguard, not an art gallery guard…my mouth waters too, but its the tears and sweat that nourish my desire to grow greener in the presence of more Renaissance glory. Clearly i knew these artists when I lived among them. The memories that are coming forth- I realize as I sit in the presence of the Piéta- are not modern.
But for that moment, I recall thinking (did I imagine speaking it out loud?) oh Lord, what a blessed piece of marble to contain such human agony and pain and love and love and love….what astonishing pure relentless beauty I am in presence of…” and my fatigue simply disappeared.
Art and the imagined sunlight embracing it, had made me whole again.
A memory forever etched inside my soul.