Every square inch of St. Peter's Cathedral (as is virtually all churches and cathedrals we explored) is a work of art beyond measure. There is something about great works of art that keenly heighten my awareness and senses, and maybe that's a similar experience for everyone who sees them. Maybe that's what distinguishes masterpieces from other works--how they move us in our hearts, minds and bodies.

With the formal process of receiving our tickets behind us, we spent Christmas Eve day tooling around Rome and stopped at the Piazza Navona, in the midst of the highly popular annual Christmas festival. The large plaza was filled with festive booths and activities for the whole family, including a puppet show, a traditional carousel and carnival like games.

We ducked into a church near the piazza, the Chiesa Santa Maria Della Pace. (A 'chiesa' is a church and 'pace' means peace). Astounded yet again by the ornate and luxurious art contained within its walls, we learned then to never take for granted a bland exterior in Italy, because inside more often than not, treasures abound.

One of the cherished traditions of Christmas in Italy is the nativity scene, or precipe as it's called. These can be anything from a simple figure display of Mary and Joseph looking down on Jesus in a crib to highly complex scenes of life at the moment of Jesus' birth. Some intricate scenes include moving people and objects, like someone chopping wood, baking bread or spinning wool. Some include indoor and outdoor lighting, and we even saw one with running water.

The Vatican museums contain some 70,000+ objects of which only 20,000 are on display. That's an immense amount of treasures! We chose to visit the museum on the same day we retrieved our tickets for the Christmas Eve mass and needless to say, we were overwhelmed!

If the museums are, as the official website notes, to evangelize through art, then they far surpass this task. The intention with art, according to their site, is to promote not only the beauty of a spiritual life, but also the stories. Through time not all could read, but all could be moved by depictions of stories whether through paint or sculpture.

Great works of all sorts were commissioned to 'spread the news' to all walks of life, particularly the poor and illiterate.

In Papa Francesco's* terms, "...the poor are at the centre of the Gospel, which is the greatest thing we have; they are the privileged recipients of divine mercy. If we remove the poor from the Gospel, it no longer makes sense."(1)

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So, on another note, I have a confession to make...

{In December, 2019, I took a month long trip to Italy. It was my first trip there and along with visiting many sites of major significance, I met distant cousins and relatives from my father's (Saccato) side of the family. This is a series of insights from that travel.}

Just to situate things, I'm the youngest of six children in an Italian family. We were raised in the Catholic tradition in Northern California, but I think that by the time my parents had me, for whatever reasons, actively practicing that faith faded away as I got older.

My earliest memories are of my favorite pink taffeta dress that I used to call my 'church dress' and kneeling on the floor next to my bed saying evening prayers that began with, 'God bless mom, dad, Linda, Larry, Paul, Marlene, James and me.' It would then go on to include all of our pets, cousins, grandparents, friends and anyone or anything else that seemed important at the time. They were sometimes exhaustively inclusive, but I prayed with earnest.

From early on, my spiritual quest included exploring virtually all major religions, as well as some of the not so major or traditional.