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The Vatican City
Introduction This is an succint overview of the Vatican City State. Use the Headings here:

St Peters Cathedral

Size and Dimensions

The infinite history of the Papacy

A Woman Pope?

A bizzarre icon

The Canopy over the Alter

The tomb of St Peter

St. Peters impossibility Syndrome

Michelangelo's "Pietà"

The Vatican Museums

The Sistine Chapel

Laocoon

Stanze di Raffaello (Raphael's Rooms)

This is a 5 1/2 hour tour of the Vatican state

The smallest state found anywhere in the world today, and it boasts the biggest church in the world at its center.

The tour takes you through 2000 years of Christianity in Europe. The glorious lives of saints are mixed with incredible stories, legends and secrets - "the sacred and the profane", of the Papacy.

St Peter's Cathedral
Over the centuries, the Vatican city, itself full of wonder, and with lively districts surrounding it, grew around the tomb of the Apostle Peter. St. Peter's humble tomb was part of an ancient Roman cemetery. In St. Peter's today we get a full view of the splendour of Renaissance and Baroque art. Michelangelo called the Cathedral "model of the universe". Beneath its vast dome, a masterpiece of Michelangelo himself, you will see what he meant. As a writer once said, "In St. Peter's we walk calmly, till we notice, that some statues index finger is your size". Right! It is bigger than a building, this church. As you walk it becomes a town, a vast open space, where the dome is the vault of heaven.

The incredible Size and Dimensions. But you certainly don't notice its splendour all at once. How is it possible? The answer is the perfection of proportion and measure. Built in almost two centuries by the greatest masters of the XVI and XVII centuries, particularly Bramante, Sangallo, Raphael, Michelangelo, Della Porta, Fontana, Maderno, and Bernini. It is a miracle of proportion that doesn't easily give away the secret of its real dimensions. Take for example the length of the central aisle -200 m, the height of the ceiling - 45 m, 133 m - the height of the dome. It includes 500 columns, 400 statues, and has the capacity of 60,000 people (more than the Colosseum).

The infinite history of the Papacy in early Christian, medieval and renaissance times is experience when walking from chapel to chapel in St. Peters.

Certainly the establishment of the power of the popes, the greatest political power of the past, did not go smoothly. There were times of exile and "crises of overproduction", when two or even three popes at a time where brought to St. Peters cathedral - thus a curious world "antipapa" came into existence.

A Woman Pope? Yes, there is even a story of a woman elected Pope - "Papessa Giovanna".

The story goes in the 9th century, that this brilliant and daring young woman dressed as a man, left home to go to study. Eventually, after the death of Leo IV, she became the Pope of Rome.

She had a love affair, which wasn't such a rare thing among the Popes, but unlike other Popes she became pregnant and gave birth to a her child right in the middle of a solemn procession from St. Peter's to St Giovanni in Laterno.

From this, a legend is born - a folklore commentary on the curious tradition of making a newly elected Pope sit on the marble chair with big round opening in the center of the seat, possibly resembling a special chair used by midwives in the middle ages? It was supposed to symbolise "Ecclesia Mater" - Mother Church. This tradition continued till the XV century and today we can see this famous "obstetric chair of the popes" in the Vatican Museums.

A bizzarre icon. St. Peters cathedral holds another example of this ambiguous notion. There are eight images at the bases of the columns, holding the bronze canopy over the Papal alter. Seven of them show the face of a woman in labour and the last - a new-born baby. What is it? "Ecclesia Mater" as the official church declares or portrait of the niece of the Pope Urban VIII Barberini, as the popular story goes? A theological idea or a joke of the great architect Francesco Borromini? The XVII century, the height of Baroque era, was a great time for jokes, and a joke made in stone is extraordinary.

The Canopy over the Alter is another indirect indication to the size of the cathedral - it is higher than the Egyptian obelisk in St. Peters Square - 22 m high.

The canopy is a masterpiece of Bernini, and is made from the Bronze stripped from the dome of the Pantheon, the oldest and most well preserved buildings in Rome. It was done on the orders of Urban VIII Barberini. The name resembles the word "Barberi" which means "barbarians". This gave rise to a famous joke "quod non fecerunt barbasi, fecerunt barberini" - "What barbarians didn't dare to do barberini did".

The tomb of St Peter is situated directly beneath the alter, where recent excavations came upon the stone slab with the words "Peter is here" in Greek. This is how the early Christians, in these times of persecution, marked the grave of the fisherman from Galilee - the man whom Christ called to follow him and who had come all the way to Rome to preach Christianity in the heart of the great Empire.

St. Peters is impossible to comprehend in one visit. This impossibility even has a clinical name - "Syndrome du Stendhal" after the famous French author who wrote in 1827: "If a visitor to St. Peters hopes to see everything there he will get a terrible head ache and soon tiredness and pain will render him insensitive to any form of beauty."

In the Vatican you need a guide to help you choose and see the best, and most interesting of the overwhelming mass of history and art.

Michelangelo's "Pietà" - one of 400 statues of the church and one of the most famous statues in the world, is a perfect example of this.

There is a deep mystery behind its perfect beauty - its unusual composition of the virgin, that is much younger than her son. There are several interpretations. When you know them all you can choose one, that will become your own vision of this great work of art.

The Vatican Museums

The Vatican Museums will reveal in their magnificence, The Eternity of Rome. With its superb collection of classic art of ancient Greece and Rome, the masterpiece of "Raphaels rooms", and the Sistine Chapel, which is the culmination point of all Vatican tours.

The Sistine Chapel "Before we see the Sistine Chapel we don't know what man is capable of". These words of the great German writer Goethe will make sense only when you see it. By "man" Goethe means one man - Michelangelo.

Though there are beautiful frescos of other famous painters who decorated the Papal Chapel built by Sixtus IV in 1470, the glory of the Chapel was made by Michelangelo practically alone he covered the 22 m high vault and the huge alter

walls with frescos depicting the history of the world from the act of creation to the Universal flood and the last judgement.

It is hard to believe now, that Michelangelo had never painted frescos before, that it was his first experience. Actually the pope was advised to commission Michelangelo by Bramante, a great architect but a mean man. He gave his advice out of envy being sure that Michelangelo, who didn't know how to paint frescos, would fail...

Hundreds of masterpieces comprise what is undoubtedly the worlds highest concentration of wealth in all its aspects - spiritual, material, and artistic accumulated over the centuries in the Vatican, the center of the occidental Christianity.

Laocoon This world famous sculpture group, as known since the 1st AD when Pliny the elder, a Roman historian, gave a detailed description of this work of art, setting it "above all that had ever been painted or sculptured".

The 16th century welcomed the advent of high renaissance, and these times could be called "marble rush" by analogy with the "gold rush" in America. These were times of feverish excavations in the hope of finding valuable pieces of classic Greek and Roman art. During this period, people always kept Pliny's description in mind, hoping against hope that some day they would stumble across it, while sceptics thought it was a legend.

So in 1506 when it was discovered, it became one of the greatest events of the time, and the bells of all the Roman churches rang as it was being carried to the Vatican. This work of art, of immense expressive power, takes us back to half real half legendary events of the Trojan wars and the 2nd millenium BC.

The Trojans, having been invincible under a long siege, accepted the wooden horse as a gift from the greeks. This was to bring death upon them,. The only man saved was Aneas, the ancestor of Romans, while the only man who tried to warn the Trajans against the wooden horse was Laocoon, Apollo's priest. The Goddess Athena, naturally, the protector of Greeks, sent two huge sea serpents that strangled Laocoon and his two sons.

This final scene of the tragedy is what we see in the famous group made by Rhodes sculptors somewhere between the 2nd and 1st century BC. It was discovered broken, missing various parts. In accordance with renaissance tradition, these missing parts were added. In the 20th century all statues were given their original look. Many people would remember seeing Laocoon reconstructed.

When the great Michelangelo saw the reconstruction he said it couldn't be true and suggested his own version. He even made some sketches. His advice was not followed then but four centuries later in 1905 a missing arm of Laoconte was found that proved Michelangelo had been right. A wonderful part of the story of the Vatican.

Stanze di Raffaello (Raphael's Rooms) Four rooms, painted by Raphael for the Pope Julius II, are part of our itinerary in the Vatican Museums. They are in the complex of buildings called Apostolic Palaces.

Alexander VI, elected in 1493, occupied the apartment right below Raphael's rooms. He lived there with four of his illegitimate children. There, in the very heart of the Vatican his son Cesare Borgia assassinated his sister Lucresias husband and lover. Lucrisia gave birth to the child called Infams Romanus, whose father remained unknown. Pope Borgia made his daughters' friend, 14-year old Jiulia Farnese, his mistress.

The Pope himself died under mysterious circumstances.

Alexander Borgia commissioned a famous artist Pinturicchio to cover his apartment with frescoes. In accordance with the style of his time, Pinturicchio painted the stories of lives of saints and the episodes of the New Testament, where all the main characters had the faces of the members of the Borgia infamous family.

When Julius II was elected new pope and moved in he had all these murderers and adulterers looking at him from everywhere.

So he moved a floor higher and invited a team of artists to paint his new rooms with frescoes. An unknown young Roman artist whose name was Raphael was included in the group.

When the Pope saw his work he dismissed the rest of the team and even encouraged Raphael to remove the frescoes already made by his fellow painters. In the course of this enterprise both died - first the Pope and then the artist, who was buried in the Pantheon..

Raphael's rooms are an absolute masterpiece this greatest master of the Renaissance left us.

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