catching up on backlog! Sorry I didn’t post for a few days.

My French roommate told me about a really good breakfast place a short walk from the hostel, so I went to check it out. It was good, and cheap! I got hungry again too soon though. One croissant and a cappuccino is not enough food for me. 😭

After this, I was off to the Vatican!!

Sadly, it was really confusing and kind of overwhelming. They didn’t email me any instructions, and didn’t seem at all prepared for individual pilgrims. I probably should have packed scrubs to make identification easier on everyone, but it didn’t occur to me, alas.

The crowds were intense. I got in a line, but I was worried it was the wrong line, but every person I asked and showed my “pilgrim’s passport card” to didn’t recognize it, until I showed it to someone who then scolded me for getting in the wrong line, and put me in another line, that just ended up in the same place as the first line anyway. I was very overwhelmed and very afraid of doing something wrong. Like, coming and receiving a blessing at the church was the entire reason for my trip. I was so worried about doing something wrong and ruining the whole thing. But I managed to do everything right! (Though I wouldn’t know that for 100% sure until two days later.)

Also, St. Peter’s Basilica is so beautiful that it literally made me feel kind of nauseous with how dizzyingly gorgeous it was. I was so overloaded. Any individual fresco, statue, mosaic, pattern, even the smallest details would have been remarkable and noteworthy in any other context. In St. Peter’s Basilica it was just one tiny corner. There kept being more, and more, and more beauty and I literally couldn’t take it all in. I felt flattened by the glory of the place. That combined with the anxiety of messing up made it a kind of psychologically harrowing experience.

Like…the first thing that we walked past was the Pieta. The Pieta on its own is a pretty big statue, but in the setting of St. Peter’s Basilica it felt tiny. So many people were taking photos of it that I could barely wedge myself in to pray. And that was just the first thing. The pieta was positioned as an introductory piece. That’s how tremendous the building was.

Now that I’ve vented about the negatives, let me tell you about the positives. There were so many positives!

To properly receive the indulgence (if you’re doing the pilgrimage – there are also versions you can do at home): you have to go to one of the four great basilicas, perform the act of confession, and then exit through a specific door.

I ended up attaching myself to a small group of what looked like elementary school children and their chaperones, led by a priest. I picked them because they were the first group I saw obviously led by a priest, and if anyone knew what they were doing or where they were going, it had to be a priest, right? The chaperones gave me once-overs but as I was clearly not doing anything but humbly following along in their entourage, they let me come along without comment.

In front of the main altar, where the relic was, the priest stopped and led us all in a prayer. It’s probably one of the most religious experiences I’ve ever had – reciting the same prayers as everyone else but in a dozen different languages, in front of the body of St. Peter, on one of the most beautiful things ever made by human hands. Truly the definition of the word Divine.

After that, I discovered the confessional booths and made my way over. They said there was a queue to get in, and the booths each said what languages they could speak.

After confusedly waiting in one line for a while, I ended up moving to another line and speaking with the woman there. She said that she and her husband had come because this jubilee wasn’t just for healthcare workers. It was also for the sick, which is why they had come – her husband had Alzheimer’s, and her sister in law had terminal late stage cancer. I shared with them that I was an oncology nurse by training, and we had a really healing and productive conversation. She ushered me into the confession both because, she said, they were only open until noon, so I had to hurry. (This directly contradicted all of the signage for the event, which said that confession was all day until 9pm, but that was just kind of how the whole event went.)

So in I went. “Forgive me Father, for I have sinned,” I began. “Um, I wrote everything down beforehand, if that’s okay.”

“Oh, good,” the priest said after we got through some obligatory opening prayers. “Tell me.”

So I did.

“That was…very thorough,” he said.

😭😭😭😭 If I’m going all the way to Rome to do confession, you can get I prepared months in advance to give the best confession of my life 😭😭😭😭 To quote a meme, “I was going to get an A in Confession, something which is both normal to want and reasonable to achieve.”

Anyway he told me to do some Hail Marys about it, and I thanked him for his time and stumbled out of the confession booth shaking like a leaf from nerves.

Then the kindly couple from Connecticut showed me which door was the special holy door I had to walk through, and we said our goodbyes.

I know at least one person is going to tell me that I’m crazy for not attempting to get anyone’s contact information from this trip, not even my roommates. Frankly, I’m just not very interested? I know I don’t have the mental energy to add any more friends to my internal Rolodex. I’m barely good at keeping up with everyone reading this, as it is! If I wouldn’t keep up with them, I don’t want to get their information and lay false expectations. Idk.

Anyway, once we’d said our goodbyes, I then went around to pray at basically every single altar I could find in the place. This took a long time. There were…a lot of altars.

I didn’t realize this until later, but on the day of the jubilee they actually opened up areas of the church that are usually closed to the public. I was able to get REALLY close to things that you normally never get close to. For example, Bernini’s Tomb of Pope Alexander VII:

This isn’t zoomed in, I was just that close. I could have touched it. (I did not.) Please note that Truth to the right is directly stepping on England, lol.

If I had known it was rare to be so close, I might have taken more photos of things. As it was, I was so busy trying to keep my eyes from falling out of my head that I mostly prayed a lot and stared a lot and tried to take it all in. The mosaics were otherworldly with their detail and skill.

I loved this corner of the church the most. My other favorite thing was The Altar of St. Leo the great, which I got to get close to and pray in front of. It’s HUGE (like almost everything else in St. Peter’s), and I loved the look of the pure white marble, and the figures rising out of it like from the surface of a vertical lake.

The ancient Romans loved to ornament every single surface, floors walls and ceiling, with riots of mosaics and stuccos. It was fascinating to see that impulse carrying forward through time, and leaving its mark on Catholicism as well. No inch of any church is unadorned. Every tiny space is used for beauty. It’s sumptuous, maximalist, and I love it.

Like, this was the ceiling of the gift shop:

I think all told I spent three or four hours in St. Peter’s. Then, dazzled by beauty and more than a little dizzy with hunger, I stumbled outside… Through the proper Holy Door!

I did it! I received my indulgence. For at least a few minutes, I was free from sin and as clean as the new driven snow. 😂 Okay, but really, it was quite moving.

The outside was also interesting, and there were swiss guards! These gentlemen are the Pope’s official bodyguards, and I love their outfits.

I bought many gifts and trinkets, both for myself and for others. It was here that I finally found the mascot for the Jubilee year, my bestie, Luce!!!!!

I also sent some postcards from Vatican City’s post office:

I’d been told by my roommate that I shouldn’t eat anywhere near the Vatican because it was all tourist traps, so I wandered quite far before settling on a place. I had lasagna, and a little wine.

The food was well enough, but the most impressive thing was the sparklingly perfect service of the waiter. He was prompt, his English was perfect, he served everything with flair – he even chilled the wine glass with ice cubes at the table before serving me. Little details like that. I said that I was from New York City and very impressed with his level of service, which I hadn’t seen from any place in Rome up to that point. He seemed to light up when he understood how much I loved food, and told me quite a lot, including maybe some things which he wasn’t supposed to. He explained that in the city center, it’s mostly been completely taken over by tourists, and as a result most citizens of Rome feel very bitter towards tourists and the city center area. He said that for example, Rome almost never did any health inspections – their restaurant had opened two years ago, and in all that time not ONE inspector had come. They kept high standards because they cared, he said, but most places didn’t, and the general stance was, the tourists are going to leave soon anyway, who cares what they eat or how much they’re overcharged for it? If they know you’re Italian they’ll treat you better, but when he went out to eat with his Russian girlfriend he could sometimes go to places as an incognito tourist, and he was shocked by how horrible the food and service could be. He said the reason he personally gave such good service was because he normally worked in the highest class hotel restaurants in Rome, where they’re not even allowed to smile as they serve, because everything is so heavily codified! He said he worked at the small trattoria when he wanted a break from all the rigidity.

But since I clearly cared about food, he said I shouldn’t go to any restaurant that had only star reviews without any writing, and to avoid any restaurant with less than three years of good reviews. Any place could buy review bombers to artificially inflate their Google score, he said, but the places of true quality would have longevity.

With this wisdom imparted, he served me a truly delicious dessert of tozetti (homemade wheat-hazlenut biscuits) and Moscato sweet wine:

Oh, this was so good. You’d nibble the tozetti, and it wasn’t so sweet and a little bland, and then you’d take a sip of the Moscato and the flavors of both would change and harmonize. I think at its best, Italy is about simple dishes executed to perfection, with the best and freshest possible ingredients. It’s truly a delight.

After that delicious meal, I was still a little hungry, so I went to a recommended pizza place to eat. I lost a lot of time talking to friends online, so much so that a pigeon actually came over and pecked at my gone-cold pizza. The nerve!!

That was really it for this day. I was so tired from all the beauty of the day that I just passed right out.

I will try tomorrow to finish catching up on my blog posts! I care very much about properly recording my adventures so I can accurately remember them in the future.

Ciao! (I still know zero Italian)