Holy holiday

John Ryan's impressions of a Roman autumn as Holy Year 1975 neared its end
The clocks at Rome Ciamnino Airport said 8.32 p.m. as I arrived from Gatwick and took my place in the customs hall queue. Half an hour later when the customs official arrived through the marble portals on his bicycle it was still 8.32. All the clocks had stopped.
As aircraft landed and left with faultless efficienCy this slightly dilapidated airport was an appropriate introduction to the contrasts awaiting
me in the Eternal City.
Rome is an astonishing mixture of old and new, grandeur and brashness, quiet courtyard and roaring bumper-tobumper traffic.
Ordinary Romans are kindly and cheerful. Even towards the end of a hectic Holy Year the bus conductors shrug and smile at the almost total absence of small change and the waiters present their quite moderate bills with a courteous flourish.
Yet there are reports of robbery in every tourist crowded piazza.
Pickpockets lurk even in the Holy Doors of St Peter's and visitors are urged to leave their valuables at home.
ladies are advised to carry their hags on shoulder straps to thwart the youthful motorcycle bag-snatchers.
wear suits so tight-fitting that they too have taken to carrying handbags.
Perhaps the greatest contrast isthe scale of the buildings and the ant-like proportions of the myriads of pilgrims and tourists swarming among them. If I were to use the whole of this page to draw the facade of St Peter's, a man would stand just three lines of small print high. So I decided to leave the architecture to those who can draw it so much better and concentrate on the people.
This Holy Year has been successful beyond all expectation. Five million pilgrims had come by October and many more were expected. I had an impression of pervading middle age, but was told the young had dominated during the summer months.
In the vast melee small parties were easily dispersed and lost, forcing group-leaders to carry their own identifying symbols, a placard on a stick, a scarf-decked umbrella, even an ice-cream.
One German group had no need of such gadgets. They were led by their bishop who stood a head or more taller than his flock and his purple skull-cap was visible in the thickest crowds.
Even so the system is liable to break down in the endless vistas of St Peter's where the little processions cross and interweave, with flockless leaders meeting to compare losses and hungry middle-aged ladies yearning for the ice-cream stalls beyond the piazza. However, no one is lost for long. Volunteers run information centres in many languages and the stray pilgrims are soon united with their group.
Rome is not a big city but there is so much to see that feet suffer. By the evening the hotels creak with exhausted hobblers. The more fortunate swoop from shrine to temple to basilica in smooth air-conditioned coaches bearing the sign "TV installed". One wonders at the merit of TV's in the midst of Rome's marvellous scenery.
Most tripper-pilgrims walk or use Rome's public transport.
To the novice it is bewildering and wayward, though once understood it is efficient and reasonably frequent. But the buses are crowded and the 64 which runs to St Peter's is a nightmare. You board at the rear, pay, and then, clutching your valuables press through the dense pack to reach the front exit in time for your stop. You are lucky if you make it and even the bashful British have to scrum down and cry "Permesso to force their way through the last few yards.
. Not all visitors were so shy. It was fascinating to observe the different mannersisms of each nationality. The English are quiet, respectful and respectable. The Irish rather less so. The French appear forceful and sometimes querulous, while the Italians seem to make a jolly party of everything. The Americans, neither so numerous nor so ostentatiously wealthy as of old remain characteristic in appearance and utterance. The Gerrn-ans are tightly knit, move forward as one, and sing in disciplined unison. Few of them one feels ever break ranks to seek a cool drink or the sacred goodystalls.
Through this changing kaleidoscope of mingled races move the clergy and the nuns in every shape, size and clothing. Then there are the hawkers who sell everything from illuminated models of St Peter's to roast chestnuts. There are women and children gypsies whose monotonous begging cry can be heard outside every pilgrimage centre. Even if you part with a piece of preciously hoarded change they mutter and cry for more, yet it is said that they arrive in car-loads in the morning at the outskirts of the city, driven by their men-folk, and then change into their gypsy gear and begin the day's work.
The average pilgrim can seldom manage more than a week in Rome, and I set myself during my week to observe and record the phenomenon of holiday holiness in the more obvious places. As a cartoonist, I met with a problem for
Rome is indeed a Holy City. There is little or no vulgar commercialisation within the sacred buildings and however comic the ordinary pilgrim may appear in person and behaviour there is nothing to mock at in his pious practices. When he gets down on his knees to climb the Santa Scala he ceases to be fair game. And whether or not those Holy Stairs are indeed the ones which Our Lord trod to confront Pilate, the antiquity of the belief and the practice is sufficient to make it valid.
Personally I found it painful and distracting. Would the elderly priest ahead of me reach the top without kicking me in the teeth and was the youth behind me intent on picking my pocket? But there was nothing to laugh at.
You can hear Mass at almost any time in any of the great basilicas though perhaps "hear" is not the aptest word. In St .Peter's the huge crowds throng all around the centre where a congregation is doing its best to attend a concelebration in its own language. The surrounding clatter and chatter is continuous. "The inside would make a nice ball-room," Ruskin observed, "and is fit for nothing else."
One wonders whether he visited the crypts below and felt the innate sanctity there which even the most vociferous human incursions cannot disturb.
A bishop dozed in the stalls during a sermon at St Mary Major's and cameras flashed among the flickering candles at St John Lateran, but the essential holiness of these places persisted and in the smaller churches more so.
In the Dominican church of San Clemente you descend literally through two levels of Christianity to the Roman houses and dank temple of Mithras below and in the Russian Catholic Church I heard singing so strange and beautiful as to make me regret all the more our own vanishing liturgy. But of all the centres of ancient devotion I visited the most remarkable and moving were the Catacombs where high narrow passages lead deep into the foundations of the Faith. The tombs are nearly all empty now, but the distant chant of pilgrims singing the "Alleluia" in an adjoining vault could well have been that of early Christians burying their dead.
By contrast the massive monuments of pagan Rome bring home the huge material efficiency of the imperial state machine, and its transience. In the warm mid-day sunshine I wandered through the stony wastes of the Colosseum and, like millions before me, contemplated the bestial cruelties it had witnessed. Nowadays the ubiquitous Roman cats prowl and bask on every ruined surface and enterprising Italians have set up a discreet snack-bar in the centre of it all so that one can lunch among the ruins and wonder what happened to all the vast audiences of ancient times. In a city of such antiquity the spectre of millions of previous inhabitants lingers.
Their memorials are everywhere and nowhere more than in the Vatican Museum, a monstrous depository of the past whose endless corridors have to be negotiated if one is to make the essential visit to the Sistine Chapel. The notice "Capella Sistina" leads one optimistically onwards through a maze of statuary, pottery, tapestry, sarcophagi, mosaics, books, paintings and a gigantic agglomeration of priceless bric-a-brac. I found it exhausting and dreary even though every object might have been, on its own, a delight to see.
My crowded odyssey was punctuated by occasional glimpses through the windows of charming corners of the Vatican Gardens and less attractive views of courtyards and rusty tin sheds bursting with discarded carvings and objets d'art. I arrived with several hundred others at last at the Sistine Chapel, already full of weary tourists and pilgrims collapsed on the benches or fervidly using mirrors, periscopes or cameras to observe Michelangelo's ceiling without dislocating their already over-strained necks. I was glad to get out.
A week in Rome passes like Rome's traffic, at disquieting immobility. Such for the most part with patches of intense Such a time was the Papal Audience which I attended on the Wednesday afternoon. The enormous crowd waited in St Peter's Square, exhorted to patience by band music and to piety by the public address system. Yet sadly it seemed that only about five of the fifty people nearest to me joined in the singing of the Latin Credo. It was a mere murmur by contrast with the great roaring chant which I had heard on a similar occasion ten years ago. But the appearance at last of the distant figure of the Pope, scarlet clad and jeep-borne rapidly through the crowd was a moment of universal excitement and acclaim and the American bishop beside me leapt onto his bench to get a good snap. His Holiness mounted the dais, a shoddy grey canvas affair but well suited perhaps to frame the simplicity of Pope Paul who, scarlet discarded, greeted the gathering in the unique white attire of his office.
He spoke in many languages and greeted innumerable pilgrimages, then settled to a very lengthy address in Italian which must have been lost on many present.
My abiding memory of this occasion will be of the birds gathering in their thousands high above the adjacent Janiculum Hill, turning and wheeling in groups, merging and scattering, suddenly black and then evanescent in the evening sunlight. Finally the flock mustered in the form of an immense undulating fish and flew a thousand feet over St Peter's and away.
Final impressions? This great Holy City is also a secular city with its metropolitan bustle and din, its student demonstrations and workers' massive protest marches. But for the pilgrim at least it retains its sanctity.
My warm thanks are due to Michael Wilson the "Herald" correspondent and his wife Paddy who entertained me and gave me friendship and guidance. And to CIT the Italian travel agency who arranged my journey and my hotel with much efficiency. The airport clocks at Ciampino were still immobile at 8.32 as I waited for my return flight which was delayed for nearly four hours by English fog. But one could hardly blame the Italians for that CIT cared for us throughout the delay and 8.32 is not such a bad time to be stuck at when you come to think of it!