First Day

Yesterday mass in St. Peter’s was incredible, mostly because St. Peter’s is incredible. We got there at 7:15, only 15 minutes after it opened, so we saw the morning sun hitting the largest façade in Rome sans the horrendous crowds and 3 hour waiting line one would find later in the day. The building is the largest I have ever seen. You feel like an ant; the lettering around the top of the interior (sorry, I have forgotten my Art History vocab for the moment) has E’s that are 14 feet tall, but look like 2 inches from the floor. The dome is 10 stories, the distance from one pillar to the next along the nave is the distance from the first to the last pew in St. Al’s at Gonzaga. Fr. Maher told us all this and we all looked at him skeptically – it almost doesn’t feel so big because EVERYTHING is so big that it looks like it’s in perfect proportion. But then you see how tall you are and realize you don’t even reach the top of the base of the pillars. And then you see the massive statues and the heights of the ceilings…it’s a building to make you believe in the height and majesty of the divine and the puny nature of mortals. As Fr. Maher says, you can’t swing a dead cat in Rome without hitting someone saying a mass, so we quietly had mass in a side chapel before walking home. We’re only a few blocks from the Vatican. Fr. Maher reminds us how to get home by pointing to St. Peter’s as step one. Step two is that “the Jesuits are always RIGHT” so take a right until you find home. We spent a lot of time yesterday figuring out the lay of the land. After mass we breakfasted on fruit, bread, and cereal and then headed out for a walking tour of the neighborhood. The Tiber runs nearby, a bunch of hospitals and neat churches I don’t remember are also close, and we found the bus stop and learned what to do about pickpockets, swindles, etc. We ran into a homeless man who started talking to Fr. Maher as he walked through our sidewalk blockade. He found out we were American and told us in passable English that he loved Americans because he had no food and we fed him during the Marshall Plan. For lunch we ordered pizza: thin crusted in the Roman style. Then we began our most queer expedition of the day: groceries a la suitcase. We took the bus to Carrefour (imagine my delight when I found the same grocery store from Belgium operates here) with empty suitcases in tow. We then proceeded to fill them with 20 jars of tomato sauce, fruit, flour, onions, cereal, milk, and other dry goods for the next month or so. We sure got some strange looks from the cashiers; after all, 16 American students with a priest filling luggage with food don’t walk in every day. A word on the buses. I love European buses. This one is air-conditioned, clean, and beautiful. May America figure out how to do this. When we got home Fr. Maher marshaled the troops to begin cooking dinner. We cooked in our apartment last night, with the girls from the other apartment. We made pasta with a beautiful red sauce with sausage, caprese (tomatoes sliced and layered with mozzarella), and salad. We learned to believe in the powers of olive oil and onions. The pasta here is like the chocolate in Belgium – even the cheapo stuff tastes like America’s expensive stuff. Also, we learned that Italians eat much less sauce with their pasta. It’s more of a flavor rather than the main event. The proper order of courses is pasta, salad, main course. It’s usually served around 7 pm. It tasted so fresh and healthy. Fresh ingredients make a big difference. We had fun even though we are all still jetlagged and footsore. Overall we have a group of exceptionally friendly and mature students; it’s a great group to be cooking, living, and learning with. After cooking and cleaning up our tiny kitchen we all collapsed into various states of rest until 8:30, when Fr. Maher took us to Old Bridge to get gelato. This shop is cheap and liberal with gelato. 2 Euros for 2 huge scoops – it’s a great deal. And the gelato is so good, with more flavor than ice cream and not as heavy as its dairy cousin. I had nutella and banana. Each tasted exactly like what it said it would. We walked past the Vatican, all lit up and empty again after the tourists had gone home. Fr. Maher told us stories about saving Ratzinger from getting run over by a motorcycle, how the dome used to be lit and the workman’s comp associated, and how Pope Francis has moved out of the Vatican palace in order to facilitate a change in the Church’s communication style, not because of it’s luxury (the ‘luxury’ is a tiny little piece of real estate, maybe 2 rooms, that the pope gets to himself). The buildings and columns were beautiful. A delicious end to our first day.