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Photos by Chris Naffziger
The Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza.
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Photos by Chris Naffziger
Dome inside the Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza.
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Photos by Chris Naffziger
Dome inside the Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza.
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Photos by Chris Naffziger
Altar inside the Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza.
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Photos by Chris Naffziger
The Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza.
I’ve been thinking a lot about lessons that I learned on my recent trip to Italy, and how those lessons from my travels can be applied to my thinking about life back here in America and St. Louis. Particularly, one aspect of culture that I have begun to examine is the role of perceptions, and how our perceptions of reality determine our actions. If we allow our perceptions to become misperceptions, our actions can prove detrimental to how we craft policy here in St. Louis as it struggles with a host of problems. Take the following example.
For over 20 years, I had been waiting patiently to see the interior of a very important church by one of the most influential but mercurial of 17th century architects, Francesco Borromini. The church is Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza, and it is only open for a scant three hours on Sunday mornings. I figured the best chance to get in the church would be right at 9 a.m., when it was supposed to open right before Mass, so I got up early (in tourist time) and headed out into the streets of Rome.
Rome early in the morning is a wonderful place, where there are only a few people out and about in the historical center around Sant’Ivo, which is a stone’s throw from the Pantheon. In the center of Rome, it seems as if every building was once home to a famous person, and my journey passed by the old palace of Vincenzo Giustiniani, one of Caravaggio’s patrons. The palace, along with many of its other neighbors, are now government buildings. I reached the front steps of the outer courtyard for the church, the Sapienza, or Wisdom (the church is part of the University of Rome), around 8:45, and prepared to wait. Under no circumstance should you ever sit on stairs in Italy! Around 8:50, other people began to show up, including at least a couple visitors who spoke English. It took only a couple of minutes for someone to say something condescending and dismissive about Italian culture that annoyed me.
“Yeah, it opens at 9 a.m., though of course that’s Italian time, and we’ll be lucky if it opens at all!”
Almost on defiant cue, the lock on the giant, ancient doors clanked open at 8:58 AM, two minutes early. It was worth the 20-year wait: Sant’Ivo is one of the most beautiful structures in the world, made a little more special by its brief visiting hours. If you visit Rome, you should definitely include it in your itinerary. Just please don’t lie down in the middle of the floor of the church like the one guy did to take a picture of the dome.
And this brings me to the point of this little anecdote: I have been traveling to Italy for over 20 years, since high school, and things have changed. The Italy of the mid-1990s was a little rough around the edges. There were thick layers of dirt clinging to famous sculptures and I watched as dust bunnies chased each other down the hallways of famous museums. The trains? Well, let’s not talk about the trains. I remember seeing the Leaning Tower of Pisa closed to the public because it had begun to lean a little too much. And the nearby cathedral was filthy. Taxis were a little like playing vehicular Russian Roulette.
I first started noticing that Italy was getting its act together, in at least some aspects, when I went back in 2009, after a fairly long hiatus. I was pleasantly stunned to see many museums had undergone a dramatic facelift, with new explanatory text in Italian and English, as well as beautiful illustrations to accompanying them. The dust bunnies had been hunted to extinction. The museums are now even better in 2018. Church facades had been cleaned for the Jubilee in 2000, and while air pollution is still a problem, they are still remarkably fresh in appearance in 2018. The train system still features extremely cheap fares on fairly rundown carriages for the budget traveler, but they do run on schedule. For a little more money, the Freccia system offers state-of-the-art train travel better than anywhere in the United States. Likewise, the anarchy of major train stations has been partially ameliorated by the placement of security gates that prevent people without tickets from entering the train platforms. The stress of using the major train stations in Italy is a fraction of what it once was. I even took taxis on several occasions, all equipped with GPS, and they were all professional, took the shortest route, and didn’t try to rip me off. I know—I couldn’t believe it, either. Even Pisa Cathedral has been cleaned.
I’m not ignorant of Italy’s continued problems. The economy is sluggish, the birthrate is low, the refugee crisis continues, unemployment is horrible, and many Italians fear for the future of their country. But I do know this: The improvements in Italy have taught me a valuable lesson about never resting on one’s laurels. At least in some portions of Italian culture and industry, leaders saw room for improvement, and slowly but surely fixed those problems over the course of several decades. Their hard work has paid off, and I have seen it. Things don’t have to stay the same.
I think you might be seeing where I’m going in relation to the history of St. Louis. The metropolitan region has apparently just dropped out of the Top 20 largest in the nation to 21st place. I looked at the list of the 20 regions larger than St. Louis, did a little research, and discovered that at least one of them had a population in the three digits back when our city was the fourth largest in the nation. In 1870, the population of Phoenix, Arizona was 240, while the population of St. Louis was 310,864. In 2010, the population of the city of Phoenix was 1,445,632, while St. Louis was down to 319,294.
I wonder if the people of St. Louis ever mocked the future prospects of Phoenix back in 1870.
Chris Naffziger writes about architecture at St. Louis Patina. Contact him via email at naffziger@gmail.com.
