I spent a day and a bit in Rome before heading off to Albano Laziale where the Specola is located. I visited various churches, walked the streets and did my back to school shopping (for me and for The Egg).
I enjoyed the irony of the guys dressed up in the toga and centurion outfits, outside the Pantheon, while someone thrashed modern music on an electric guitar a few feet away. Did I mention the heat? OMG. The Pantheon was packed, and despite the signs asking for silence, the whispers grew to a roar. The swallows flying up and onto the drum of the dome inside looked like something out of a Fellini film.
Despite the drought, at least some of the fountains were on, including those in Piazza Navona. I ducked into the church of Sant'Agnese in Agone, sited where Agnes was thought to have been martyred. The head of Saint Agnes is kept in a reliquary in a very plain chapel, in full view not five feet away from you, a crown of laurels framing her skull.
Then there was the body of St. Camillus in St. Mary Magdalene. Right there, from the 16th century, in impeccably clean clothes in a glass case. If it were not for the glass walls, I could have reached out and touched him. I left wondering who cleans and cares for these bodies, and why do we display them, so we can look upon a miracle, the incorruptible body of a saint?
The domes in the summer light which streamed through high windows. The man, the body of Christ, wrapped in a dirty sleeping bag half hidden behind a car on the steps outside of St. Augustine’s. His chest bare and his legs sticking out, he looked like he could be a Christ taken down from the cross. He slept fitfully in this heat. As I stood not 5 feet away, reading the sign about the church. Signore, pieta!
Rome's attractions are less attractive in the heat, I now understand why popes and emperors fled to the Alban hills in the summers. It's almost 10 degrees Fahrenheit cooler up here than in the Eternal City.
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