Bella Italia

Sunday March 2 - Thursday March 6, Rome and Ravenna, Italy
Sunday
Ian and I arrive in Rome in the late afternoon. What should have been no more than a thirty minute taxi ride from the airport into the city takes a staggering two and a half hours. The main route had been closed off because of an accident causing complete chaos. “Mamma mia! Tutto bloccato!” our driver informs us, and on several occasions along the way he crosses himself muttering under his breath whilst shaking his head.

Monday - Tuesday
We are here to film at St. Peter’s Basilica, which has entailed negotiating no less than three separate sets of permissions beforehand from London. Filming inside the basilica itself, filming in St Peter’s Square, and finally the right to put a tripod down just outside Vatican territory facing St Peter’s from a slightly greater distance on Italian territory.
The final paperwork and payments all have to be made prior to filming in offices in the Vatican (having first been vetted by the colourful Swiss guards), and then further away at the Comune di Roma, where it comically takes no less than three people to process, sign and stamp a six page document before handing it over.
I had forgotten how simply vast St Peter’s is. Conveying its enormous scale on film is almost impossible. On entering the building the eye is drawn down to the focal point of the interior, Bernini’s monumentally tall bronze canopy known as the baldacchino which stands over the altar. It's 98 feet high, the same height as a substantial building such as Rome's Palazzo Farnese, and yet it fits comfortably inside Michelangelo’s vast dome which rises above it.
TU ES PETRUS ET SUPER HANC PETRUM AEDIFICABO ECCLESIAM MEAM ... (You are Peter and on this rock I build my Church) ... reads part of the inscription of Christ’s words to Peter in gold lettering over 2 metres high around the base of the dome. Of course the pun doesn’t work in English, but it does in French, Italian and of course Latin. I look up musing on what the equivalent English first name would have to be. Rock perhaps, as in ... Rock Hudson? It doesn’t quite do it. (Diana famously called Paul Burrell her rock of course.)
The following morning our wonderful interviewee speaks movingly about what St Peter’s means to him. Monsignor Roderick Strange was a student priest in Rome for much of the 1960s. More recently he was a chaplain at Oxford University for some years, and has spent the last ten as Rector of the Pontifical Beda College in Rome.

When we have finished our interview outside we are accosted by a local busker who, for no apparent reason, seems keen to let off steam and rant for some time at us about Berlusconi amongst other things. It is a little difficult to disengage ourselves from him politely (he is like the ancient mariner), but he could of course have a point about Berlusconi.

Later that afternoon we leave Rome for Ravenna, a drive which takes over five hours, departing Rome in warm sunshine only to encounter snow and hailstones just three hours later on the final tortuous stretch of road beyond Florence.

Wednesday - Thursday
It is freezing in Ravenna and our hotel resembles a mortuary. Our interviewee, a local art historian, Verdiana Conti Baioni, tells me that it was once a mausoleum, which only goes to confirm the ghostly feeling of the place.
The Basilica di San Vitale, however, is more than worth the journey here and the sub-zero temperatures. It is a tour de force. Here is a legacy of 6th century mosaic work arguably without equal anywhere in the world. Images, almost certainly decorated by Greek artists, include the retinues of the Byzantine emperor Justinian and his belly dancer-turned-empress wife Theodora. Sex and power at the court of Constantinople. And the vibrant colours – the gold backgrounds, the rich green meadows and deep blue skies – are dazzling. We think of the period when these mosaics were done as the dark ages, and yet San Vitale was a breathtakingly original departure and is quite simply exquisite.
In contrast with the distinctive octagonal shape of San Vitale, the next morning we film also at San Apollinare Nuovo built only a little earlier but in the basilican form with a long nave and side aisles (one of which helpfully has a tall scaffold tower obscuring a large section for restoration work). After those of San Vitale, the mosaics at San Apollinare Nuovo are the finest in Ravenna. One of them depicts urban scenes of the city, a reminder that Ravenna was once the capital of the declining Roman empire for more than seventy years in the 5th century and was later an important outpost of the Byzantine empire. It’s hard to believe today that this city’s career was so remarkable. It declined slowly and gracefully in the following centuries to be overtaken largely by Venice, and indeed it’s perhaps because the city was little heard from for a thousand years that most of Ravenna's art was left in peace.
It is still inhospitably cold and windy as we leave, and I am looked at with disbelief when I tell the hotel that we will be returning to significantly warmer and brighter weather in London.

And despite the blog editor's strictures ("enough food already"), the culinary highlight of the trip would have to be, for those that are interested, a small family-run fish restaurant that we came across in Rome’s Borgo Pio. “You have discovered Rome’s best kept secret,” an obviously well-heeled fellow Roman diner tells me. There are photos on the walls of a plethora of Italian celebrity regulars past and present, including Fellini and Marcello Mastroianni. I’m not sure I should reveal to you where it is, but I could be persuaded.
(Linda Zuck)