THE DOME OF ST. PETER’S

Comparatively few people realize how easy it is to ascend the dome of St. Peter’s, and to obtain the necessary order for the ascent, which is given at the office of the works (Reverenda Fabbrica di San Pietro, via della Sagrestia, No. 8, on the first floor). There seems to be no reason for the formality of getting an order; it is given to any respectable person as a matter of course, for himself and party, not exceeding so many persons. The dome can only be visited from eight to eleven in the morning. You enter through a door by the tomb of Maria Clementina Sobieska, wife of the Pretender, which is almost opposite the monument of the last three Stuart Princes, and close to where you enter St. Peter’s. The first part of the ascent is up a spiral inclined plane, and it is very easy until you get to quite the end of the ascent. Indeed, it is easy to the extent of uninterestingness until you reach the roof of the church and that part of the ascent which is performed between the outer and inner shells of the dome. The dome rises three hundred and eight feet above the roof. It is four hundred and four feet from the ground to the top of the lantern; four hundred and thirty-five feet to the top of the cross. Its diameter is slightly less than that of the Pantheon; and the spire of Rouen Cathedral is seventy feet higher.

I made the ascent very early, so as to linger a long time upon the roof of the great church, with its bird’s-eye view of the Vatican and its superb panorama of Rome.

There was a lady with me who firmly believed in the San Pietrini--the children of St. Peter’s, who are supposed to live in houses on the roof, and who supply the steeple-jacks and the men who swing themselves about the ceiling cornices of St. Peter’s, making shots at the places they want to repair until they hang on to them like birds--a sight which makes you quite dizzy. These people are said to live on the roof of St. Peter’s all their lives, and hardly ever to leave it, except when they go to do their marketing and when they are plying their perilous trade. I have the highest authority for declaring the whole thing to be a myth. Moreover, there are no houses on the roof of St. Peter’s. I made a close examination when I was there last year. In fact, there is hardly a single building on the roof which is not an essential part of the church. That these steeple-jacks, and the men who work at a great height in the interior of St. Peter’s, are the sons and grandsons and great-grandsons of men who have served St. Peter’s in the same way is pretty sure to be true. For it is a business to which no one would be likely to aspire if it was not in his family and in his blood. And most of the people employed about the Vatican are apt to have a hereditary connection with it. But there are no San Pietrini living on the roof.

The roof of St. Peter’s makes quite a huge Piazza; and the views from it over Rome are very fine, especially that which carries the eye across the Piazza of St. Peter’s between Bernini’s superb colonnades to the Tiber and the Castle of Sant’ Angelo, and the crowded roofs of the great city, and the blue mountains behind. Yet how this view would be enhanced if, in place of the three mean streets which lead from the Tiber to the Cathedral, we still had the colonnade, many yards long, which led up to Old St. Peter’s. Perhaps some day the municipality of Rome will drive an avenue the whole width of the three streets from the river to the Piazza.

The plan of the Vatican itself is better seen from the gallery of the cupola. From it you realize the majestic size of the Pontifical Palace; the vastness of the original Cortile of the Belvedere; the magnificent proportions of the Cortile of San Damaso.

It is most eerie as you make the ascent to step into the gallery which runs all round the dome; unless you have a strong head you hardly dare to look over the railings into the abyss below, where Bernini’s swollen baldachin, which is nearly a hundred feet high, looks like a drawing-room clock. The mosaics of the dome look far better from the floor of the Cathedral, for which their effect was designed. Seen close to, they are coarse and flabby; but it is easier, of course, up here to study the way in which they fit in with the vast conception of St. Peter’s.

In one part of the ascent you climb straight up the inner dome--like a hill--up steps, of course. When you come out on the gallery from which you enter the staircase up to the cupola it is highly interesting to look out on the metalled surface of the dome, which has rows of knobs used in supporting scaffolding and illuminations. The great illuminations of the old days seem to have been erected by steeple-jacks without any thought of the risks arising from the immense height. There was, indeed, need of a hereditary caste of San Pietrini.

Only twenty people at a time are admitted into the cupola, which is a sort of hollow copper globe approached by a ladder-like staircase. When you are inside you feel as if you are in a great copper football with the seams showing, which sways about quite disagreeably. It requires strong nerves to stand on the floor of the cupola; you feel as if you were going to topple it over. Most people are quite glad when they get back to the little outside gallery from which they made the final ascent--seen from which the exterior of the Sistine Chapel looks as plain as a packing-case.

As is well known, Michel Angelo did not conceive the dome in quite its present form; he completed its drum and left the drawings and models for carrying it up to the lantern. The dome was actually finished thirty-six years later by Giacomo della Porta; he changed the design of Michel Angelo, which was much lower, flatter, and heavier, like the dome of the Pantheon, to something more after the style of Brunelleschi’s beautiful dome on the Cathedral of Florence. It is considered the finest of all domes; not only for its gigantic size, but for its perfect proportions. And it is hardly less remarkable for the feverish haste with which it was built to gratify the restless ambition of Sixtus V. “The actual dome,” says Murray, “was begun on July 15, 1588, and completed in twenty-two months. The Pope was so anxious to see it finished that he devoted a hundred thousand gold crowns annually to the work; and employed eight hundred workmen upon it night and day.”

In that same month of July 1588, while the Pope was inaugurating the apex of his mighty Cathedral, Philip II. of Spain was inaugurating the parallel mighty project to restore heretic England to the Catholic Church. The Spanish Armada left Ferrol for the conquest of England within a week of the commencement of the dome of St. Peter’s. Sixtus and Philip were working together.

It was in the workmen’s haste to complete the building that the tomb of Urban VI. was violated, as told in another chapter. They wanted a receptacle to hold water, and blandly emptied his sarcophagus.

The ascent of the dome of St. Peter’s is a thing which no visitor to Rome, whose health allows of it, should omit. It is so gradual that it is no great physical effort; and the experience it has to offer one is unique. Though the first part of the ascent is ordinary, the last part is as curious as going down a mine: the views are astonishing, and those who are insensible to vertigo could not want a finer opportunity of testing their nerves than by looking down on the floor of the Cathedral from the highest point at which they can get a peep of the inside. Before 1870 the illumination of St. Peter’s at the close of Lent used to be one of the most splendid and animated spectacles in Rome. Story has immortalized it in his _Roba di Roma_.[22]

Galleries of its piers are ascended. _From Pistolesi’s “Il Vaticano.”_]