a weighty mass

Italy

Bells ring out clearly,
Calling the faithful to mass,
The unfaithful, too.

This morning found us awake early again, and we were dressed for church. Well, not precisely, but we were wearing our nicest things (which, on this trip, aren't particularly nice) and were ready to go to church. 24-hour transit passes in hand, we hopped on a bus to Saint Peter's Basilica.

One simply walks in. There is a board in the front of the Basilica indicating mass times, and we decided to go for the 10:30 mass in Latin. Latin, my friends. So we strode past the barricades and guards and sat down.

It was much nicer than the mass we attended in Spain... St. Peter's is really bright and golden (why don't they use some of their gilding money to feed the poor they claim to care so much about? sigh) in stark contrast to the dark and almost scary church in Roncesvalles where we attended our first mass (see the blog post from 1 July). Also, the priests--here at St. Peter's, there were also bishops and cardinals and who-knows-what-else--had better outfits. Most had bright green robes and bright pink hats, but some had long white robes and Pope-esque hats. These hats ranged in decoration from absolutely plain white to excessively intricate and jeweled. We noted that it looked like some of the fellows had missed the weekly arts and crafts hour.

Although we didn't understand all the things said, we managed to follow along and stand and sit and kneel when appropriate, offering a "peace be with you" to our neighbours and shaking their hands when required. We even decided to take communion, lining up for a short exchange of "corpus christi"-"amen"-wafer. The wafers weren't very tasty.

That completed, we had resolved to visit the Sistine Chapel, which is part of the Vatican Museum. Alas, a board informed us that the Museum is closed on Sundays. :( So... no Sistine Chapel for us. I guess it's not a huge loss; we discussed that we both seem to wind up in Europe on occasion, so we will likely have a chance to see it at a later date.

Sigh. Anyway, it was only about 11:30 by this time, so we decided to wander past a castle we hadn't seen yet (it was fairly unremarkable, and we weren't willing to pay the 5€ each to see more of it) and head back to the hostel to do some Internets and get our bikes. After accidentally crashing their router while talking to my mom and dad on Skype, we left.

Our route out of Rome was designed to follow the Via Appia Antica, another old Roman road which led past some catacombs and other interesting sights. This plan was changed abruptly once we actually started biking the road, which still had some of its original paving. By that I mean to say that it was covered in rocks that were semi-flat and semi-connected and perfectly designed for bike destroying. A kilometre or so was enough to convince us to take the next road away, so we headed out on the Via Laurentina (yet another old Roman road) towards the sea.

The sun started setting, and we picked up some things for dinner. We're having pasta and eggplant-porcini mushroom-hot pepper sauce. Right now, we're set up in a pine grove that looks abandoned. It's strange, though... from nearby, in the middle of cooking dinner, we heard an exerted human grunt followed by the hee-hawing of an animal in excruciating pain... what is going on?