Vatican City

             I entered the spiritual heart of Roman Catholicism and looked around: Vatican City. Christened as a papal state in 1929, the state itself is actually only a piazza long, consisting of just St. Peter's Basilica and the Vatican Museum; a direct contrast to the amount of history there. Statues were piled on sarcophagi, and as Maia and I walked ahead with our tour group, the suns glare jagged the bronze saints before us: leaving me shadowed in a gray pattern of belief.
             How do you work the audio tour again...?
             La Cappella Sistina, Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel, is by far the most famous stop in the Vatican Museum. The Chapel is the last point in the Museo's tour, and stands right before the Gift Shop--a valid marketing strategy for Italians and Americans alike. The entire ceiling, walls and pulpit of this room are frescoed, with each character conveying its own identity and narratives from the Book of Genesis and Last Judgment. Benches were built into the walls, and as I stared up at the ceiling I saw a Greek-looking God touching fingers with a frail Adam; a stream of Christianity still prominent today. Both characters stretched to find one another, with separation suffering ever contour of their face, and leaving the word "achievement" in my mind. The Sistine Chapel took Michelangelo 15 years to fresco, and strained his back in the process. It was finished in the 15th century, and originally criticized for the amount of nudity displayed. The opposition got Daniele de Volterra to cover the genitals of specific characters which, when discovered by Roma's artistic community, earned Volterra the nickname "trouser-maker," along with no outside commissions. The alteration has since been removed, and Michelangelo's four-sides of biblical thought have been restored, leaving me to wonder at their artistic tour de force.
             The four rooms before the Sistine Chapel are the Stanze di Raffaello, the Raphael Rooms. They are allegories on the humanist ideals of theology, philosophy, poetry and justice, and show four great leaders in all these fields: Plato, Aristotle, Da Vinci and Michelangelo. The walls and ceiling are frescoed  in gold paint and shadows from the sun, leaving each corner illuminated beautifully. The limbs and expressions in the characters are defined, drawing the main idea of humanism clear: faith with freedom. They are a beautiful build-up to La Sistina.
             La Cappella Sistina e Le Stanze di Raffaello are the most notable achievements in the Vatican Museum--but every work in the Museo has earned its place. The Egyptian mummy, with its bandages undone, heightens statues from the Etruscan Years, and the Jesus of the Contemporary Art Wing abstractly extracts emotion from Botticelli's Renaissance frescoes. Belief was a common theme throughout all these works, and as cities and empires crumbled, corners of their culture remained, wrinkling present space with past thought, and showing that human existence is just one pattern of faith overlapping another--the darkness between them just a separation from concrete to cloud.