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Posted: March 14
(Rome) For years the David Letterman TV show has featured a "Top 10" list as one of its opening bits. I can't count that many reasons for knowing that spring has almost arrived here in Rome, so we have to settle for a Top-Five-Signs-of-Spring list, half as good as what the pros in New York television can do. So here we go. You know that spring has almost arrived in Rome when...
1) The iris plants outside my window have sent up tall stalks with two to three buds per stalk (they are just about to bloom their intense purple flowers.)
2) The plum tree above them popped up the first three blossoms; I saw them yesterday morning when I opened my windows.
3) It was not raining when I opened the windows so I could see the blossoms.
4) When I went bicycling on Sunday, I went out in shorts for the first time. (A bit chilly when the sun popped behind a cloud, but a clear promise of warmer cycling days to come.)
5) And the top reason for knowing that spring is near: groups of students from the United States start appearing on the streets of Rome.
Yesterday I guided one of those groups on my regular tour that starts in the rooms of St. Ignatius (where he wrote those thousands of letters and composed the Constitutions of the Society and where he died) and then continues to the Chiesa del Gesù and the Chiesa San Ignazio. There were 12 high school students from a private boarding school in the East, led by a former Jesuit who worked with me for awhile and now teaches at the school. They were a good group, more mature than their age, perhaps because they are already used to living away from home, so traveling to Rome was not an excuse to go crazy. But they did not know much about Jesuits or our history. I quickly realized that I needed to adapt my normal tour. It is amazing how the skills developed from seven years of teaching high school remain in full force. I can turn on a dime, pedagogy-wise, when I realize what students know. Instead of explaining a lot of facts, I just started asking questions about what they were seeing in front of them. They responded well and we had a great time together. And I learned something as well.
Earlier in the day they had done a full tour of the Vatican Museum and the Sistine Chapel with a professional guide. I found myself thinking, realistically, "Well, Andrea Pozzo, the Jesuit artist who painted the frescoes in the corridor outside the rooms of Ignatius was a very good artist, but not Michaelangelo. Pozzo's corridor cannot compare with the Sistine Chapel." And what would young people with little knowledge of religion think of the Baroque splendor of the Gesù?
The answer is, they loved it. They were enthralled with Pozzo's figures that look in perfect perspective when seen from the very center of the corridor but reveal themselves to be greatly distorted when you come right up in front of them. The students reveled in being able to get up close to the art and see it at first hand. They were amazed by the artistry of the Gesù, but they most liked the fresco on the ceiling of San Ignazio where Pozzo shows the whole world going up with Jesuits and St. Ignatius to God. It is a masterpiece of perspective painting, even more so than the cleverness of the corridor outside the rooms of Ignatius. And what the students liked best, and what surprised me most, was the simple fact that they could lie down on the floor to view it clearly. They wanted to do that in the Sistine Chapel, but of course would not been allowed to, even if the press of all the visitors had not made it impossible. So this very fine group of students really enjoyed our bit of Jesuit Rome. And I enjoyed seeing how much it spoke to them.
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