My wife and I just returned from our first trip to Italy.
It is a very beautiful country. We spent time in Rome, Florence, Venice, Messina, the Amalfi Coast and a couple of other small towns. We also spent one day in Sibenik, Croatia. It is just across the Adriatic Sea from Italy. Very pretty place.
Seeing the Colosseum was a great treat for me. As with so many other buildings in Italy, it is an amazing example of engineering, particularly considering the time at which it was built.
I had not considered, before embarking on the trip, that most of the sites I would tour would be focused on the Catholic Religion. I know, you were just about convinced I was a smart guy! Anyway, never gave it much thought.
The tours we took were all very similar. Churches, Cathedrals, and Basilicae. Being an areligious person, these soon became quite boring although the buildings were all quite beautiful.
A few comments, in no particular order of importance.
When viewing the Colosseum I was reminded of the "bread and circuses" style of governance. Keep the people fed and entertained and they will not complain too much. Seems like not much has changed in 2000 years as massive numbers of citizens of the welfare West are on the dole and kept cheaply entertained.
The Sistine Chapel was an odd experience for me. It is very beautiful, very elaborate. Every inch of all the walls and the ceiling is covered in art produced by many masters. It all looked very similar to what I had seen in the many other churches we had visited.
While Michelangelo's ceiling is clearly an enormous feat of human endurance and productivity, the artwork itself looked to me quite ordinary. The usual assortment of humans, angels and other religious objects. Really much ado about not so much, in my opinion. It was an Emperor's New Clothes moment for me. Then again, perhaps I am just a philistine, incapable of appreciating real art.
The David was a similarly odd experience. It is massive, 17 feet tall. Another demonstration of Michaelangelo's ability to take on and complete huge projects. It has less detail than any child's plastic super hero doll mass produced today. Well, except for his genitals. Nude men appear to have been an obsession of Michaelangleo's. According to one guide he is said to have stated that the male body is the most beautiful thing on earth. Not in my opinion.
In the Uffizi museum in Florence hangs the only individual picture authenticated as Michaelangelo's work. It is a strange painting. The background is full of naked men. One might draw conclusions, might one not?
The Vatican Museum contains an incredible array of art and religious artifacts. Much of the place, like many of the churches we visited, is gilded. There are elaborate gold and silver pieces everywhere. It occurred to me that much of the gold and silver these items were made of was stolen from the Americas. Much of the rest, not to mention the buildings themselves, were funded by the tithe. In other words, money extorted from working people to benefit the priestly class in exchange for promises of a heavenly hereafter. A disgrace, in my opinion. The Catholic Church is, in my opinion, a giant criminal enterprise.
I mentioned that we had visited Sibenik. Croatia is, apparently, a very Catholic country. Our guide was a lovely young lady of 32. She mentioned her age in passing. While in the most important church in the area she was asked where all the beautiful statuary had come from. Her answer was confirmation of my opinion of the Church. She said that some local nobles had donated some of the statuary but that most of it was paid for by the tithe. She rolled her eyes as she said it. An acknowledgment, in my view, of the basic unfairness of taxing working people for the churches' aggrandizement.
One last thing, in the nature of a tip on being a white tourist in Italy.
At many tourist sites there is a substantial army of very tall, handsome Nigerian men with beautiful smiles and arms full of trinkets. They will approach you and say "I like your shoes". The approach is intended to disarm you and cynically prey on the inherent niceness (and perhaps racial guilt) of white people. I never saw any of them approach a person of color. Tell them to fuck off and turn away. It is, unfortunately, the only method I found to stop them trying to guilt me into giving them money.
