Читать книгу Italy from a Backpack - Mark Pearson - Страница 10

Vatican City

Sneaking Into St. Peter’s

adam emerson pachter

the Eternal City stretched out in front of us in the morning light as my friend Andrew and I arrived on the overnight train from Venice. As we looked at the vast number of sites on our map, we remembered that old saying: Rome wasn’t built in a day. Even so, we were going to see it in one.

We were in the midst of a three-week backpacking tour through Europe, a high-school graduation present sponsored by our parents. Careening through northern Italy, we had spent a couple of days admiring Venice, and had been on our way to Florence, when I said that it would be a real shame to get this far and not detour to Rome. We planned to meet another friend in the south of France in a few days, which left us only one brief opening, a single free day that we could use in between Venice and Florence. Armed with Eurail passes and a goatskin full of cheap wine, we decided to take the overnight train to Rome, wander around, and then reboard that night for the trip to Florence.

The ride down had been slightly uncomfortable. We couldn’t afford a proper sleeper car, so we made do with semi-fold-down seats that didn’t quite meet in the middle of the compartment, leaving a foot-wide gap that our sleeping bodies had to bridge. Generous infusions of wine made that bearable, but they didn’t prepare us for the 2 a.m. awakening a conductor had in store. Opening the compartment door as we pulled into a station, he started shouting at us in Italian, and then said something that sounded like, “Ay-oh, ay-oh, phht-phht!” while clapping his hands and pointing down the hallway. Panicked that we were missing some necessary train connection, we gathered our stuff and ran out onto the platform.

But it was empty, deserted except for the occasional glow from a street lamp. When we finally found a porter and asked him for the train to Rome, he looked perplexed and pointed back at the car we had just left. We reboarded the train in confusion, only to find the conductor comfortably ensconced in our old compartment, feet up, enjoying a smoke. He had locked the door, so we spent the rest of the night trying to find other horizontal accommodations and grimly plotting his demise. We never saw him again, and when the train pulled into Rome, adrenaline took over, momentarily compensating for our hangovers and general fatigue.

It was a blazing hot day, and Rome in the summer really knows how to blaze. We dressed in shorts, stowed our backpacks at the luggage counter, and set out across the city. Knowing we had to be back at the station by 5 p.m., we kept a brisk pace, walking through a number of nearby churches before making our way to more famous sites like the Spanish Steps, the Colosseum and the Roman Forum. In between, we tried not to get run over by the mopeds scooting everywhere, a task complicated by the fact that lack of sleep had dulled our reflexes. Eventually, we stopped for lunch under a sun umbrella at a quiet café, and I could see that the heat had taken a toll on my friend. After devouring a sandwich, he issued his ultimatum.

“No mas,” Andrew said. “I’ve had enough. It’s just too hot to walk anymore.”

“But we haven’t seen the Vatican. You can’t come all this way and miss St. Peter’s.”

“Sure I can. You go on if you want, and I’ll meet you back here. While you’re walking across half the city, I’ll be sipping a cold beer.”

While that thought was tempting, I decided I would feel foolish going to Rome and skipping the Vatican. So I took off with map in hand, marching along the road to St. Peter’s. The road did seem endless after a while, and the temperature continued to climb as I crossed the Tiber River. But when I arrived, the view made up for it all: an enormous central square encircled by statues, with the grand basilica beckoning me on. I raced up the steps of the church, noticing in passing that there seemed to be a lot of people sitting on the steps in clumps and bunches, most of them looking upset. But it didn’t matter to me. I had reached St. Peter’s, and I was going to make Andrew wish he hadn’t skipped this trip.

Preoccupied with my thoughts, I nearly ran into a guard at the entrance to the church. I stepped to the side but he followed me, holding out his arm and repeating that one Italian word that can mean almost anything: “Prego.”

“Scusi?” I said.

I was going to make Andrew wish he hadn’t skipped this trip.

“Prego,” he repeated, and pointed at my legs. And then I got it. Virtually all Italian churches have a no shorts/no bare shoulders policy. Enforcement varies, but here at St. Peter’s they meant business. Burdened by the heat, I had dressed in shorts without thinking through the consequences. And now they wouldn’t let me in.

I tried to plead my case in English, but the guard didn’t speak any. “Prego,” he said. I looked for a way around him, but the other guards were busy turning away other tourists with their own clothing lapses. And so I, too, sat down on the steps to the church, for the first time noticing that every other dejected-looking person on the steps also was showing too much skin for the Vatican. All these days and all these miles, and all for nothing.

There were no nearby stores selling long pants, and even I wasn’t up to the challenge of trudging all the way back to the train station for a change of clothes. Besides, there wasn’t enough time for that before the 5 p.m. train we had to catch. So I got up and began the long walk back to the café where I’d left Andrew. And then I suddenly received the sharpest mental image of my life, a picture as clear and distinct as if it had been painted on the air in front of me. The picture was of Andrew’s face as I told him how far I’d gone, only to be turned back at the entrance to St. Peter’s. I could see Andrew pause and take a sip of some refreshing beverage, nice and chilled, under the sun umbrella. And then I could see his mouth open as he laughed and laughed.

No, that couldn’t be allowed to happen. One way or another, I was going to get in.

As I looked at the guards, I realized the folly of any frontal assault. There were too many of them, and I couldn’t just slip through. So I started to walk around the building, hoping for some sort of side entrance. I didn’t find any. But I did notice one interesting thing. The area covered by the guards was a sort of preliminary entryway. Once you passed their station, you crossed an open foyer and then went up a few steps, through an unmanned door, into the church proper. I was now standing to one side of this entrance and behind the guards, whose attention was directed entirely outward. If I could slip in this way, chances were they’d never notice. The only problem was the wrought iron fence directly in front of me.

I’d never seen such an ornate fence, and it stretched high enough that there was no chance of climbing over. Besides, that kind of maneuver would definitely catch someone’s eye. I didn’t see any gate, either, and when I shook the fence, nothing happened. I slumped against a nearby wall, watching other tourists pass through the guard station and into the church. So close, and yet so far. ... How was I going to get through this fence?

And then came a miraculous intervention. A member of the famous Swiss Guard, dazzling in his multicolored uniform, came up from behind, approached the fence, and began to make some adjustments with his hands. To my astonishment, an entrance suddenly appeared—a gate that the Swiss Guard opened and then closed behind him. He entered the church, never noticing me. But I had watched his movements carefully, and I went up to the fence and began to duplicate them. After a few agonizing moments, the gate re-appeared, and I slipped through it.

I then marched up the steps and into the holiest church in all of Christendom. Michelangelo’s Pietà, Bernini’s marble work; they all stood before me. I was so dazzled that I barely noticed the security guard waiting just inside the doors, pointing out directions to a tourist, about to turn around and notice me.

If I’d thought things through, I would have realized that of course other guards would be posted inside St. Peter’s. But I didn’t have time for second-guessing now. I scanned the church, desperately looking for a place to hide. A second miraculous intervention appeared. A narrow wooden corridor ran down the center of the nave, evidently so that wheelchair users wouldn’t scuff St. Peter’s marble floors. Two railings flanked the platform, and the wood extended solidly from the railings to the floor. I raced to the far side of the wooden corridor, pulling up behind a railing just as the guard’s head swung around. The solid railing blocked his view of everything below my waist. I smiled and walked down the nave, keeping the wood between me and any guards I encountered. For the next hour, I had a magnificent tour of the most magnificent church in the world. When it was over, I walked out of the church and back through the secret gate in the side fence.

I almost danced my way back to Andrew at the café. By the time I reached him, you would have needed a yardstick to measure the smile on my face.

ADAM PACHTER once spent an entire summer sitting in the office of Let’s Go: Europe, reading dispatches by people he’d hired and sent out on the road. He vows never to repeat that mistake. Adam lives with his wife near Boston and keeps his hiking boots nearby.