Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Eighty per cent of all the art thefts in Europe take place in Italy.
This casual attitude to the national heritage is something of a tradition in Rome. For a thousand years,
usually with the blessings of the Roman Catholic Church (which had a share in the profits and a lot to answer
for generally, if you ask me), builders and architects looked upon the city's ancient baths, temples and other
timeless monuments as quarries. The Colosseum isn't the hulking ruin it is today because of the ravages of
time, but because for hundreds of years people knocked chunks from it with sledgehammers and carted
them off to nearby lime kilns to turn into cement. When Bernini needed a load of bronze to build his
sumptuous baldachino in St Peter's, it was stripped from the roof of the Pantheon. It is a wonder that any of
ancient Rome survives at all.
Deprived of the opportunity to explore the interior of the Borghese, I wandered instead through the
surrounding gardens, now the city's largest and handsomest public park, full of still glades and piercing
shafts of sunlight, and enjoyed myself immensely, except for one startled moment when I cut through a
wooded corner and encountered a rough-looking man squatted down crapping against a tree, regarding
me dolefully. I hadn't thought about this much before, but Europeans do seem to have a peculiar fondness
for alfresco excretion. Along any highway in France or Belgium you can see somebody standing beside a
parked car having a whizz in the bushes only a foot from the road. In America these people would be taken
away and beaten. And in Paris you can still find those extraordinary pissoirs, gun-metal-grey barriers which
are designed to let the whole world see who's in there and what he's doing. I could never understand why
we passers-by had to be treated to the sight of the occupant's lower legs and upper body. Why couldn't they
build the sides six feet high? If a guy went in there we knew what he was doing; we didn't have to keep an
eye on him, did we?
I remember once watching a man and two women - office colleagues on their way to lunch, I guessed -
carrying on an animated three-way conversation while the man was standing in one of these contraptions. It
seemed very odd to me that they were talking as if nothing extraordinary was going on. In England, if such a
thing as a pissoir existed, the women would have turned away and talked between themselves, affecting not
to be aware of what their colleague was up to in there. But then, according to Reay Tannahill's
Sex in
History,
in eighteenth-century France aristocratic men and women thought nothing of going to the toilet
together, and sometimes would repair en masse to the privy after dinner in order not to interrupt their lively
discussions. I think this explains a lot about the French. As for the Italians, in the working-class argot of
Rome if you see an acquaintance on the street, you do not say 'How are you?' or 'How's it going?' but 'Had
a good crap today?' Honestly.
And at the end of that enlightening digression, let us make our way to the Vatican City and St Peter's -
the world's largest church in its smallest country, as many a guidebook has observed. I had always thought
of the Vatican City as being ancient, but in fact as an institution it dates only from 1929, when Mussolini and
the Pope signed the Lateran Treaty. I arrived wondering vaguely if I would have to pass through some sort of
border control and pay a steep fee, but in fact the only obstacle I encountered were two dozen jabbering
men all trying to sell me slide strips or take my photograph with a Polaroid. I directed them to a lady in a
Denver Broncos warm-up jacket fifteen feet away saying that she was my wife and had all my money, and
they all rushed off to her and I was thus able to cross the great piazza unmolested, pausing only to attach
myself briefly to an American tour group, where I learned the aforementioned fact about Mussolini and the
Lateran Treaty and was informed which balcony the Pope would come out on if he were going to come out,
which he wasn't. This was interesting stuff and I would have stayed with them longer, but the guide quickly
spotted me because I wasn't wearing a baseball cap, a warm-up jacket and trousers in one of the livelier
primary colours. She informed me that this was a private party, and clearly wasn't going to continue until I
had slunk off.
St Peter's doesn't look all that fabulous from the outside, not at least from the piazza at its foot, but step
inside and it's so sensational that your mouth falls open whether you want it to or not. It is a marvel, so vast
and beautiful and cool and filled with treasures and airy heights and pale beams of heavenly light that you
don't know where to place your gaze. It is the only building I have ever been in where I have felt like sinking
to my knees, clasping my hands heavenward and crying, 'Take me home, Lord.' No structure on earth would
ever look the same to me again.
