exo : blah

A Saturday afternoon in late October turns out to be a bad time to visit the Trevi fountain. We’d expected it to be busy but it’s not only the piazza itself but the surrounding streets that are jammed. Wall to wall people shuffling along to try and find some space where they can even see the fountain while volunteers blow whistles at the overly enthusiastic. We leave almost instantly having barely seen the fountain.

This is probably the worst of the excess of people found at the popular sites of Rome but the feeling of being in an endless queue of people slowly milling past sights is one that becomes familiar over a week.

The colosseum and forum lull us into thinking it won’t be too bad. There are queues and a lot of people but it’s not awful and well managed. There are moments where there is space around us and time to contemplate free of the press of fellow tourists. This is especially true in the forum which is large enough for the crowds to spread out. It’s also not really got a blockbuster sight so there isn’t the same funnelling of everyone to a single destination.

St Peter’s is a different thing. We visit on a Sunday morning so we can see the Pope give his little homily from a balcony far above the packed square. The shout outs at the end to the pilgrims from across the world are both charming and a little odd. It empties remarkably quickly afterwards and we wander off for some lunch while we wait for the church to open. It only takes five minutes walk to get to somewhere with a free table.

Lunch done we head back, wander through the now reasonably empty square following the signs for St Peter’s. There’s a load of x ray machines lined up under the portico and a queue that leads round the corner and onto a side street. And then down the side street. Really quite a way down. It’s at least eight people wide and extends far enough that we have time for a whole conversation about if this can really be the queue, if we want to join it and if we should do something else instead.

We join the queue.

In fairness it moves quite quickly and it’s probably only twenty five minutes before we’re through the security checks. There’s another brief queue on the other side for unclear reasons and then we’re walking up to the church. Inside it’s a mass of people. It’s not much of problem because the building is vast, and surprisingly quiet given the crowd. It’s hard to appreciate the size, partly as we are bad at scale and also because, magnificently, it’s been designed to look smaller than it is. It’s only looking up to see the people on the dome walkway that gives away the size. The crowding is made worse by the central floor being given over to a sea of clear plastic seats. I don’t know if they are always there or it’s related to it being a Jubilee year but the main body of the church is essentially closed to visitors, which is a shame as I very much wanted to see the markers on the floor to shame other churches for being so smol.

The crowds mean that you have to actively step out of the procession of people to view things. You can’t really just stop and look without the throng pressing round you. Possibly other times are better but it’s still a bit off putting.

The next few days we avoid the sights and just roam. It’s a lovely city to wander round and a great place to sit and watch people.

We do go to the Vittoriano which I highly recommend as an example of the Italian inability to do subtle. It’s hard to avoid seeing it as it’s right next to the forum and huge. Monumental for the sake of being monumental; both impressive and comedic in its scale. There are probably good views from the top but 18 euros to go up a lift seems a bit much.

On our last night we go to see the Sistine Chapel. This was the only bookable slot we could get despite booking weeks in advance. We turn up an hour before, walk past the enormous queue of people without a booked time and get to the slightly less enormous queue of those with booked slots. Having been assured we can join 15 minutes ahead of our slot we go for a coffee, and return with 25 minutes to spare to a queue of hundreds. Once again it’s fairly well managed and it moves reasonably quickly and we get in only ten minutes or so after our booked time.

Inside the museum again feels line one long line of people processing through. We try to check out of it where we can which is reasonably often as they route you through pretty much the whole place before the main event, and the place is huge. I assume this is deliberate to keep a handle on numbers in the chapel but it does lead to the feeling of being in the longest, best decorated queue in the world. In total we are in there two and a half hours and only scratch the surface. The Pope has collected a lot of stuff. We barely look at the modern art section after the chapel as it’s late and we’re tired, hungry and all out of looking, but even with the barest glances you sense it’s got another hours worth of stuff.

The Sistine itself deserves the hype. It is luminous. We’re in there for I guess half an hour and only leave because it’s closing time. Getting to wander in when it’s empty is surely one of the great fringe benefits of being the Pope.

It’s 25 years since either of us have been to Rome. We’d expected it to be busier, not least because previously it was mid March, but it’s slightly shocking to see how much more so. We didn’t do much touristing then but I recall popping into St Peter’s for a quick look in a way you clearly cannot now.