Today we go to see il papa, the pope. We inject just the right amount of bedlam into the hotel lobby as we gather, and then we board our buses, John calls in the Light and distributes the big red tickets that mean that we get to join the throngs in St. Peter’s square in a kind of soccer match without the competition or aggression. It’s a celebration, although I’m not sure what we’re celebrating. I think it’s ourselves and our love of God at the same time.
We go through underground areas and mass toilets (only one euro charge to get in), and John addresses us in the oddest places, such as an underground bus drop-off point, where he does a blessing. Then we go through security and slip out into the famous huge open square with the obelisk in the middle and the circular stands of columns, packed with God-knows-how-many humans all trying to get a glimpse of il papa.
Luckily there are big screens where you can get a better view of him, because as a short person I can’t see a thing except heads and lifted cell phones. I give my camera to Win Hampton, one of the tallest people in our group, who holds the camera above his head but he doesn’t know how to point it, and I get more shots of tops of heads.
We can see on the screens that the pope is riding around in the white popemobile waving and blessing babies that are held up to him. Cheers go up from different parts of the crowd as the popemobile passes them. Rumors fly through our group that Julie Lurie or Ron Bernstein got shots of him. I put the biggest lens on my camera but all I get are that sea of heads. Later on I manage to get a few distant shots of the pope in his pope gazebo talking on the microphone. He reads from the Gospel of John, which as I recall Pope Francis did when we saw him in similar circumstances a few years ago.
It’s nice to have an American pope. He seems easygoing and un-solemn, riding around and blessing like a friendly politician at a parade. There’s no urgency, no world problems to be mourned or fixed. It’s a happier, more neutral scene than there was around Francis, although that may have had greater emotional depth. There’s something amusing to me about having an American pope. It’s sort of like having a comedian as an army general, or a homeless person as a corporate head. It sounds more like the premise for a movie script than reality. It’s refreshing.
On the bus I get some shots of Roman street life and the Coliseum (check out the bride with the long white train being photographed against the backdrop of the Coliseum) and the Circus Maximus, where 150,000 spectators watched chariot races. To this day the Coliseum is the biggest sports stadium that humans have ever built. At one point the bus stops so we can get out and get photos of the Circus Maximus, and I get a shot of all the people lined up in the sun, all taking the same photo of the same subject in the same flock-like behavior that animated the horde at St. Peter’s.
Then we head out to the ocean for lunch near a marina. Excellent pasta with a pistachio cream sauce. Italian life is still family-oriented. There are often activities for children right next to areas designed for grown-up activities. There’s a shot of a kind of carnival booth where you can shoot a gun and win big stuffed animals, standing in the middle of nowhere. And on the other end of the marina there’s a colorful slide/jungle jim thing, also standing alone in the middle of nowhere.
There are lots of things in Italy “in the middle of nowhere.” It’s an unplanned, slightly disorganized place where things suddenly pop up without context or a relationship to the whole. We’re often told that certain tourist sites require a passport, or that they’re strict about what you can carry with you into building, and then there’s nothing like that when you get to the site. It seems like there’s a level of society that makes the rules, and then another level that actually mans the site, and the people that man the site don’t necessarily follow the rules. It’s the opposite of the more Germanic structure that you find further north, or even in the USA. In the USA you may rebel, but you’re still aware of the rules and the larger context.
In Italy there’s more of an unconscious, in-the-moment, almost primitive lack of concern for context and principle. Parks are often a bit unkempt—not wild, not dirty, but not designed and maintained with the aim of imposing human ideals of beauty onto the natural world. The largest park in Rome doesn’t have the soft, romantic aura of, let’s say, Hyde Park in London. There are areas of weeds and a seeming lack of overall planning. There are also fewer police, fewer signs, and a general sense of just letting nature take its own course.
The afternoon is devoted to our favorite MSIA travel activity: ghostbusting. We visit the remains of one of the largest, best-preserved ancient cities, Ostia Antica, still an active archaeological site. There are baths and temples, large commercial areas divided into booths, beautiful mosaic and fresco work, an amphitheater that’s still used today for concerts, and, from what I can sense, lots of disembodied people still hanging around unconsciously doing the same activities that they did a couple of thousand years ago. It’s a vague sense, not something I can confirm visually, but we tend to be drawn to these types of places for the purposes of Light work. Confirm with your local psychic for better accuracy. Fortunately in MSIA we just get to send/bring/inhabit Light without having to know about the reason or purpose or circumstances.
Then it’s on to the Abbey of the Three Fountains, where St. Paul was beheaded, for more ghostbusting. Dark, quiet church interiors and tree-lined paths. There are some more street shots on the way back; please ignore the reflections of the bus lights in the photos.
