As I was heading down the Via della Conciliazione from the Vatican I stopped on the sidewalk to listen to two men playing guitars outside the Castel Sant’Angelo; I threw 2 Euros into their guitar case and headed in towards the entrance. As soon as I walked in and turned the corner I saw the long line for ticket office. A woman kept trying to usher people who had reserved tickets into the other line, but no one there had thought to buy tickets ahead of time. I could feel the back of my neck burning as I was standing in the hot sun and felt the sweat run down my back. One man tried to get past the ticket line to bathroom without buying ticket and he was sent outside. I had just come to the museum after climbing St. Peter's dome and my feet were tired, so standing out in the sun on the hard stone was not something I was happy about. I rubbed the back of my neck and pulled my hand away to smell the nickel from my necklace, rapidly degrading while soaked in sunscreen and sweat. Soon enough I got through the ticket line and hurried to the entrance of the museum, constantly keeping an eye on the time to make sure I’d be to the Colosseum metro by 2 PM. As I walked the round of the building to the stairs an American couple in front of me bickered about where their tour started and how the other was at fault for not planning properly. Sometimes I really do get why people get tired of American tourists. I walked up the stairs and it took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the light when I walked into the Bastion of San Marco. As I walked further up the stairs my eye was caught by an old catapult on top of the bastion. I wonder if it had ever been used or if it was just for show. I looked over the edge of the wall into the gardens and I realized I had only really seen the gardens at night, and that it was much more welcoming during the day. As I pass through the museum I tried to read the Latin inscriptions documenting something Pope Clement X did to this building, but I couldn’t really make anything of it. He would have had to have changed much of the old mausoleum to get it to what it looked like now in its present form. Another classic example of something surviving in Rome because it’s been repurposed. I wondered what this place would have looked like when it was built before all the marble was taken, and before it was made into a fortress. My best guess was something like the mausoleum of Augustus, surrounded by cyprus and dominating the skyline.
Rounding the corner to the other bastion I was blinded by sun. As my eyes adjusted I barely caught a pigeon nearly knocking a guy over, and he had to heavily duck to avoid being hit. The birds in this city really are fearless. I made my way up another small staircase into the courtyard with an angel sculpture. I guess this was the original angel that sat atop the fortress. I continued walking and passed the café of which I was tempted to eat at, but I stopped myself because I wanted to try Grekos for lunch. After encountering another set of stair I slightly regretted going to Castel Sant’Angelo after climbing St. Peter’s Basilica, but what was I going to do at that point? Turn around? Walking through some of the chambers I thought how some of the wall paintings were very reminiscent of the third or fourth style of Roman frescoes and wondered if the Pope and his designers were trying to imitate that.
As I started on the descent from the fortress I saw fragments of marble sculpture from Hadrian’s tomb depicting a bull’s head, and it made me think of the inside relief of the Ara Pacis we saw two days before. I didn’t read anything in the museum about it but maybe the mausoleum was a place of religious ceremonies and sacrifice if it included a bull’s head motif. Before I was able to leave I was stopped by two tourists taking photos in the stairwell and not letting anyone pass until they got the photo they wanted. Again, it was moments like these that made me really sympathize with the native Romans who have to deal with people like this all the time. While leaving the fortress I could hear a different musician playing the flute from the entrance of the museum. Walking out through the garden I checked my phone and saw it was just noon, and at that moment I heard the cannons on the Janiculum Hill go off.
(Castel Sant’Angelo 5/24/19)
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