We got this photo of Evan from his first few days at camp. Jo said he looked like a wolf child. I know I am going to miss meeting him and Vivian when camp lets out. But not enough to stop me from going to Amalfi to sail for a week. So I left Jo in Austin to take care of camp pick-up and boarded by flight to Rome without a twinge of guilt.
I met up with Praveen and Renuka at Rome and Jen and my boat people - Richard and his family, in Salerno. The week long trip was amazing though it was hot as sweaty balls, there were a million other tourists (those pesky tourists) everywhere, and my back made doing everything painful. The beauty and charm of the Amalfi coast, as advertised, were stunning.
We stopped at Positano, Ischia, Capri (though we didn't spend the night due to the three thousand dollar mooring fee), Procida, and Amalfi. Procida was my absolute favorite - a tiny island and fishing town on the northern edge of the Gulf of Naples, stuck between Ischia and the mainland. Four of the photos above are from this beautiful place.
We had planned for an extra day in Rome on the way back. So Praveen and Renuka and I spent the afternoon wandering around St. Peter's and the evening taking in some of the other sights including the Pantheon.
The most famous church in Christendom, even after multiple visits, evokes admiration even from a stone cold atheist. Everything about it is massive. The building looks like a three or four story structure from the outside but it rises to the height of a 14 or 15 story building - and that's without the dome. The inside is similarly built to look much cozier than it is - the statues and cherubs at the higher levels are larger than the ones at eye level so that they don't appear smaller, thereby tricking the eye into believing that they are closer than they actually are. Bernini's bronze baldachin is the largest piece of bronze in the world and is almost ten stories tall - built from bronze that lined the ceiling of the Pantheon for over a thousand years. The baldachin covers the high alter under which St. Peter is believed to be buried. He was crucified during the reign of Nero and some sort of religious structure has existed here since about the fourth century. Construction on the current building started in the fifteenth century and was financed in part by selling indulgences which resulted in an uprising by Martin Luther and eventually led to the splitting of western Christianity. Michelangelo designed quite a bit of the building and most of the dome which he saw through the first phase of construction till his death. Incidentally, the most famous piece of art in this building full of treasures is Michelangelo's Pietà , which he carved when he was at the dawn of his carrier.
For a bit of global perspective, at the time St. Peter's was bring built, early wooden buildings were being built by white settlers in the New World. And by the time Bernini had decorated the inside of the basilica, Shah Jahan had almost finished building the Taj Mahal in Agra.
Michelangelo's dome at St. Peter's was designed after the two largest domes that he knew about. The first was about two miles away - the Pantheon. Built almost 2000 years ago, it remained the largest dome in the world for 1400 years and is the largest unsupported concrete dome even today. Michelangelo's second inspiration was Brunelleschi's dome in Florence, which displaced the Pantheon for the title of the largest dome about 100 years before Michelangelo, and it is still the world's largest brick and mortar dome.
Italians like big domes.
The morning after, I got on a flight to New York. After some temporary weather related hiccups at JFK, I caught a flight to Austin the day after. My back was screaming by then but I didn't protest when Vivian and Evan ran up to the door and literally jumped into my arms and gave me the longest hug of their and possibly my lives. We hadn't seen each other for 30 days. No domes in the white wooden house so I shouldn't make the pun, but here it is anyway: dome is where the heart is.
