Population Control and the Vatican Museum: It seems to happen on every trip: that breathtakingly--and often comical--Philistine moment when, moved by exhaustion or exasperation, I utter something that makes me sound like the quintessential ugly American. Yesterday it happened in the Vatican Museum. My sister Linda and I arrived at 8:30 in the morning, stood in line for 45 minutes before gaining admittance, and then spent the next four hours wandering through the labyrinth of highlights from Art 101. Some of them were predictable (the Sistine Chapel, the Raphael Room), others unexpected (the suite of rooms devoted to 20th and 21st century religious art--art that, because of its debts to abstract expression and primitivism, captures the power of Christianity in a way that (at least for me) the grace of 18th C and sentimentality of much 19th C religious art do not). But after four hours, my sister and I were well beyond our limits. It was time to go. Unfortunately, at that point we were about halfway through the museum (we had missed the Raphael Room on our first swing through) and had to push our way through the increasingly crowded rooms to get out. I kept approaching guards. Uscita? Uscita? Then it happened: I realized that, in order to get out of the museum we would have to go back through the Sistine Chapel, which at 1:00 is, quite literally, wall to wall people. I turned to my sister and exclaimed, Dont tell me we have to go through the Sistine Chapel. Please, not the Sistine Chapel. Earlier, I had spent thirty minutes marveling at what must be the greatest single work of painting I have ever seen. Suddenly it was a chore, an obstacle, a cross to bear. I could not have felt more ungrateful, more embarrassed. The problem, at least for me, is all the crowds. The Vatican Museum has tens of thousands of visitors every day, and while the place is big, the hallways are fairly narrow. Living in the United States, and for the past fifteen years in Texas, I am accustomed to a good deal of personal space, space that is conspicuously lacking in a city like Rome. The funny thing is that I am extrovert. I like people and draw energy from interactions with others. But sometimes I feel overwhelmed by large numbers of people, particularly in enclosed places. It was fitting, then, that last night after my Philistine moment, I finished Dan Browns *Inferno*. I dont think much of Brown as a prose stylist, but the book seemed like a good choice for an academic headed to study manuscripts in Italy. As many of you no doubt know, the novel is also interested in overpopulation and sustainability. (I wont ruin the book (or, inevitably, the movie) for others by going into more detail.) It turns out that the novel, for all its fun as middle-brow vacation reading, also points to a real problem that the Vatican Musem, inadvertently, showcases: there may be too many of us.
Posted on: Sat, 26 Oct 2013 07:42:43 +0000
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