Rome Sweet Rome-Up On The Roof
Rome · Vatican City · Field Notes
Foreign LandRome Sweet Rome: Up on the Roof
A climb into the dome of St. Peter's becomes a layered journey through altitude, memory, belief, technology, and the comic distance between salvation and lunch.
Not many folks realize it, but you can take the stairs to the top of the dome in St. Peter's Basilica—which is exactly what I did.
It is the highlight of my trip so far in Italy. That is saying a lot, since yesterday I was in magical Venice.
The climb changes the scale of the place. Marble becomes altitude. Ceremony becomes weather. Rome stops being a postcard and turns into a point of view.
Journey Equation
Height + History + Humour = Perspective The climb is physical. The change in scale is the real arrival.The Ascent
The Dome Is the Destination
Stairs, stone, bells, and the city unfolding below.
The cure for anything is salt—the sea, sweat, or tears. Roofline field note
The Archive Returns
Rome, Seven Years Earlier
Reprinted from September 18, 2009I'm thinking of starting a Christian rock band. I have the perfect name—Heritic. Do you guys know any bass players?
Broken Arrow
I spent this morning at the epicenter of Roman Catholicism, Saint Peter's Basilica.
People were queuing up for Kodak moments. The only place where there were no lines was at the confessionals.
CNN Versus the Alphabet
Religion is so pre-September 11th. Of course, twentieth-century psychology has replaced sin with guilt.
The fusion of cyberspace and spirituality is a happy accident—a magical realm where all is possible. First there was the Pope of Software, Bill Gates. He created an electric Gaia, or global brain: a collective unconscious that makes what is deeply personal universal, the uncensored, distributed self, and cyberspace—the location of the virtual self and community on the web.
Sartre said, “Hell is other people.” Gates might as well say, “We are God—or at least made in his image.”
Deus Ex Machina vs. Electric Gaia
Home isn't where your heart is; it's where your BlackBerry is. Landlines are places; cellphones are people. The fundamental “human-friendliness” of the Machine-God starts with email—a metaphor for networked, global, uncensored communication—and continues with Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, and yours truly, Kid Blogger.
Furthermore, the Dalai Lama of Integration, Steve Jobs, created a celestial jukebox on tap: iTunes absolution for 99 cents. The Goo Goo Dolls' Better Days, for instance, hands out blessings: “Everyone is forgiven now... tonight's the night the world begins again.”
The bloggerati voices coming to us from the frontier of human experience form the largest uncensored form of communication in history. Although I am physically travelling, I get to swim in a new geography of existence on the net, shattering time and space. Thus the moniker Hotel @nyware. Does it really matter where we are when this kind of existence is location-neutral?
Welcome to Infinite Smile
Putting the sin back into sincere, I decided to step into the English-speaking confessional to receive “penance,” the place where sins are forgiven. The basic requirement for a good confession is the intention of returning to God like the prodigal son and acknowledging our sins with true sorrow before the priest.
At that very moment, the Monsignor came out and hung a sign saying CLOSED. LOL.
There wouldn't be a second chance to make a first impression. The power of intention, however, was enough to provide salvation. As Woody Allen once told me in 1980 at Stromboli's Pizzeria in Greenwich Village, “Showing up is 99%.”
I figured it was 11 a.m., just in time for an Italian Mass. Let me tell you: sometimes the movie—King of Kings (1961), with Jeffrey Hunter as Christ—is better than the Good Book. I started to cough, thought I had better let these pious people pray in peace, and headed out.
Did you say your prayers today in Rome?
MeNo, but I ate my lunch.
I'm a Nobody
It was a Zencrafters moment—instant enlightenment in less than an hour. You see, nobody's perfect, and little me in that big church felt like a nobody.
You gotta be a somebody first before you can be a nobody. What is sin, after all? It is an old archery term. It means missing the mark.
Cut to song: “Who else is gonna bring you a Broken Arrow... we got mountains to climb.”
Mother Mary Comes to Me
I am standing in line, listening to my iPod, before I set off the Swiss Guards' metal detectors with Euros, my Google Phone, and MP3 player.
Let It Be is the soundtrack to the waiting. Yet I can't help but have John Lennon's “Imagine there's no religion” lyric creep in.
Putting the Odd Back into God
I'm feeling a lot better now that I know God is a white man with a grey beard. That Sistine Chapel is, as we altar boys say, “off the chain,” mos def.
Stay away from the light. The light is dangerous. Don't go near it. Don't even look at the light.
Check, please!
The Elixir
Climb high enough and the contradictions stop cancelling each other out.Rome holds the sacred and the comic in the same frame. The dome gives the long view; the field note brings it back down to human scale.