Neither Here Nor There (20 page)

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.

I wandered down the wide central aisle, agog at the scale of the place. It is 730 feet long, 364 feet wide and 438 feet from the floor to the top of the dome. But as Mark Twain noted in
The Innocents Abroad,
the trouble is that because every bit of it is built to such a scale you have to remind yourself continually of its immensity. The four grand pillars that support the dome don’t look that mighty in such a setting until you find yourself backing up to one and suddenly realize that it is fifty feet wide, and the baldachino does indeed look, as Twain said, like nothing more than a magnified bedstead, but it is more than half as high as Niagara Falls. It was only when I looked back down the length of the church to where more visitors were coming in, and I saw that they were like insects, that I had a sudden, crushing sense of just how big this place was. It occurred to me, too, that although the building was nearly silent and seemed almost empty – every clutch of visitors had an area of floor space about the size of a football field – there were none the less hundreds and hundreds of us in there.

I had a look at the ‘Pietà’ – in a side vault behind a glass screen and a barrier that keeps you so far back you can barely see it, which seemed a bit harsh just because some madman attacked it once years ago – then went to the Sistine Chapel and the museums, and they were naturally impressive, but I confess that all visual experiences were largely wasted on me after the spacious grandeur of St Peter’s.

I walked back towards the neighbourhood of my hotel along the Via della Conciliazione and was pleased to find the street crowded with souvenir shops. I have a certain weakness for tacky memorabilia, and in my experience no place is more reliable in this regard than shops specializing in religious curios. Once in Council Bluffs, Iowa, I agonized for an hour over whether to pay $49.95 for a back-lit electric portrait of Christ which when switched on gave the appearance of blood flowing perpetually from his wounds, before finally concluding that it was too tasteless even for me and at any rate I couldn’t afford it. So I thought I might find some suitably tasteless compensation here – crucifix corn-on-the-cob holders or a Nativity pen and pencil set or a musical ‘Last Supper’ toilet-roll holder or at the very least a crucifix paperweight that said
MY DAD WENT TO THE VATICAN CITY AND ALL HE BROUGHT ME WAS THIS LOUSY CRUCIFIX
. But all the shops sold a more or less identical assortment of rosary beads, crucifixes in 120 sizes, plaster models of the basilica and Pope John Paul dinner plates, none of them in remotely bad taste (unless you really went to town and bought a dozen papal plates for use at dinner parties, but that would cost a fortune), and so I trudged on. One of the worst parts about living in the 1990s is that crappy souvenirs are
so
hard to find these days.

On my final morning I called at the Capuchin monks’ mausoleum in the church of Santa Maria della Concezione on the busy Piazza Barberini. This I cannot recommend highly enough. In the sixteenth century some monk had the inspired idea of taking the bones of his fellow monks when they died and using them to decorate the place. Is that rich enough for you? Half a dozen gloomy chambers along one side of the church were filled with such attractions as an altar made of rib cages, shrines meticulously concocted from skulls and leg bones, ceilings trimmed with forearms, wall rosettes fashioned from vertebrae, chandeliers made from the bones of hands and feet. In the odd corner there stood a complete skeleton of a Capuchin monk dressed like the Grim Reaper in his hooded robe, and ranged along the other wall were signs in six languages with such cheery sentiments as
WE WERE LIKE YOU. YOU WILL BE LIKE
us, and a long poem engagingly called ‘My Mother Killed Me!!’. These guys must have been a barrel of laughs to be around. You can imagine every time you got the flu some guy coming along with a tape measure and a thoughtful expression.

Four thousand monks contributed to the display between 1528 and 1870 when the practice was stopped for being just too tacky for words. No one knows quite why or by whom the designs were made, but the inescapable impression you are left with is that the Capuchins once harboured in their midst a half-mad monk with time on his hands and a certain passion for tidiness. It is certainly a nice little money spinner for the church. A constant stream of tourists came in, happy to pay over a stack of lire for the morbid thrill of it all. My only regret, predictably, was that they didn’t have a gift shop where you could purchase a boxed set of vertebrae napkin rings, say, or back scratchers made from real arms and hands, but it was becoming obvious that in this respect I was to be thwarted at every turn in Rome.

I checked out of my hotel and walked to Roma-Termini. It was, in the way of most public places in Italy, a madhouse. At every ticket window customers were gesturing wildly. They didn’t seem so much to be buying tickets as pouring out their troubles to the monumentally indifferent and weary-looking men seated behind each window. It is amazing how much emotion the Italians invest in even the simplest transactions.

I had to wait in line for forty minutes while a series of people ahead of me tore their hair and bellowed and eventually were issued with a ticket and came away looking suddenly happy. I couldn’t guess what their problems were, and in any case I was too busy fending off the many people who tried to cut in front of me, as if I were holding a door open for them. One of them tried twice. You need a pickaxe to keep your place in a Roman queue.

Finally, with only a minute to spare before my train left, my turn came. I bought a second-class single to Naples – it was easy; I don’t know what all the fuss was about – then raced around the corner to the platform and did something I’ve always longed to do: I jumped onto a moving train – or, to be slightly more precise, fell into it, like a mailbag tossed from the platform.

The train was crowded, but I found a seat by a window and caught my breath and mopped up the blood trickling down my shins as we lumbered slowly out through the endless tower-block suburbs of Rome, picked up speed and moved on to a dusty, hazy countryside full of half-finished houses and small apartment buildings with no sign of work in progress. It was a two-and-a-half-hour journey to Naples and everyone on the train, without apparent exception, passed the time by sleeping, stirring to wakefulness only to note the location when we stopped at some drowsing station or to show a ticket to the conductor when he passed through. Most of the passengers looked poor and unshaven (even several of the women), which was a notable contrast after the worldly elegance of Rome. These, I supposed, were mostly Neapolitan labourers who had come to Rome for the work and were now heading home to see their families.

I watched the scenery – a low plain leading to mountains of the palest green and dotted with occasional lifeless villages, all bearing yet more unfinished houses – and passed the time dreamily embroidering my Ornella Muti fantasy, which had now grown to include a large transparent beach ball, two unicycles, a trampoline and the massed voices of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. The air in the carriage was warm and still and before long I fell into a doze myself, but was startled awake after a few minutes by a baleful wailing. A gypsy woman, overweight and in a headscarf, was passing along the carriage with a filthy baby, loudly orating the tale of her troubled life and asking for money, but no one gave her any. She pushed the baby in my face – he was covered in chocolaty drool and so startlingly ugly that it was all I could do to keep from going ‘Aiieee!’ and throwing my hands in front of my face – and I gave her a thousand lire as fast as I could drag it out of my pocket before Junior loosed a string of gooey brown dribble onto me. She took the money with the indifference of a conductor checking a ticket and without thanks proceeded on through the train shouting her troubles anew. The rest of the journey passed without incident.

At Naples, I emerged from the train and was greeted by twenty-seven taxi-drivers, all wanting to take me someplace nice and probably distant, but I waved them away and transferred myself by foot from the squalor of the central station to the squalor of the nearby Circumvesuviana station, passing through an uninterrupted stretch of squalor en route. All along the sidewalks people sat at wobbly tables selling packets of cigarettes and cheap novelties. All the cars parked along the street were dirty and battered. All the stores looked gloomy and dusty and their windows were full of items whose packaging had faded, sometimes almost to invisibility, in the brilliant sunshine. My plan had been to stop in Naples for a day or two before going on to Sorrento and Capri, but this was so awful that I decided to press on at once and come back to Naples when I thought I might be able to face it better.

It was getting on for rush hour by the time I got to Circumvesuviana and bought a ticket. The train was packed with sweating people and very slow. I sat between two fat women, all wobbling flesh, who talked across me the whole time, making it all but impossible for me to follow my book or do any useful work on my Ornella Muti fantasy, but I considered myself lucky to have a place to sit, even if it was only six inches wide, and the women were marvellously soft, it must be said. I spent most of the journey with my head on one or the other of their shoulders, gazing adoringly up at their faces. They didn’t seem to mind at all.

We travelled out of the slums of Naples and through the slums of the suburbs and onwards into a slummy strip of countryside between Vesuvius and the sea, stopping every few hundred feet at some suburban station where 100 people would get off and 120 would get on. Even Pompeii and Herculaneum, or Ercolano as they call it nowadays, looked shabby, all washing lines and piles of crumbled concrete, and I could see no sign of the ruins from the train. But a few miles further on we climbed higher up a mountainside and into a succession of tunnels. The air was suddenly cool and the villages – sometimes no more than a few houses and a church in a gap between tunnels – were stunningly pretty with long views down to the blue sea.

I fell in love with Sorrento in an instant. Perhaps it was the time of day, the weather, the sense of relief at being out of Naples, but it seemed perfect: a compact town tumbling down from the station to the Bay of Naples. At its heart was a small, busy square called the Piazza Tasso, lined with outdoor cafés. Leading off the square at one end was a network of echoing alleyways, cool and shadowy and richly aromatic, full of shopkeepers gossiping in doorways and children playing and the general tumult of Italian life. For the rest, the town appeared to consist of a dozen or so wandering streets lined with agreeable shops and restaurants and small, pleasant, old-fashioned hotels hidden away behind heavy foliage. It was lovely, perfect. I wanted to live here, starting now.

I got a room in the Hotel Eden, a medium-sized 1950s establishment on a side street, expensive but spotless, with a glimpse of sea above the rooftops and through the trees, and paced the room manically for five minutes, congratulating myself on my good fortune, before abruptly switching off the lights and returning to the streets. I had a look around, explored the maze of alleyways off the Piazza Tasso and gazed admiringly in the neat and well-stocked shop windows along the Corso Italia, then repaired to an outdoor seat at Tonino’s Snack Bar on the square, where I ordered a Coke and watched the passing scene, radiating contentment.

The town was full of middle-aged English tourists having an off-season holiday (i.e. one they could afford). Wisps of conversation floated to me across the tables and from couples passing on the sidewalk. It was always the same. The wife would be in noise-making mode, that incessant, pointless, mildly fretful chatter that overtakes Englishwomen in mid-life. ‘I was going to get tights today and I forgot. I asked you to remind me, Gerald. These ones have a ladder in them from here to Amalfi. I suppose I
can
get tights here. I haven’t a clue what size to ask for. I knew I should have packed an extra pair ...’ Gerald was never listening to any of this, of course, because he was secretly ogling a braless beauty leaning languorously against a lamppost and trading quips with some local yobbos on Vespas, and appeared to be aware of his wife only as a mild, chronic irritant on the fringe of his existence. Everywhere I went in Sorrento I kept seeing these English couples, the wife looking critically at everything, as if she was working undercover for the Ministry of Sanitation, the husband dragging along behind her, worn and defeated.