Via Romea Germanica Day 114: La Giustiniana - Roma

Auch ich in Arkadien!

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Italian Journey, upon arriving in Rome,  December 1786

It seemed fitting to introduce this final post from the Via Romea Germanica by quoting the exclamation of Goethe, who travelled a similar route from Germany to Rome in 1786, upon arriving in Rome. But there is nothing Arcadian about Rome in a Jubilee year, nor about the final stage of the walk into the city!

We had to backtrack a little way from our accommodation in La Giustiniana,  B&B Luminari, to pass under the railway tracks and back onto the Via Cassia.  We then walked along the sidewalk of the busy highway during rush hour for several kilometres. At a spot just before an important junction where a major traffic jam was developing, we turned off the road into the Parco dell'Insugherata, so named for its cork trees.... though we soon discovered that a more appropriate name might have been Parco dell'Infangata, for its mud puddles! And to think I only just threw away the rag I've been using to clean my boots, imagining that the walk into Rome would be entirely urban and I wouldn't get dirty. 🤦‍♀️

Cork bark

The path through the park was in fact barred with a barrier marked "work in progress - Rome Jubilee 2025", which previous walkers had pushed aside. But Rome will surely complete the work on the path in time and be ready for the Jubilee year - the next one, that is, in 2050! 🤣

Coming out of the Insugherata park, a short walk up a steep hill on the streets of a residential district brought us to Monte Mario train station, where we joined a cycling and pedestrian path along a former railway line that took us all the way to the Vatican. Enroute, we found ourselves in the middle of the inauguration ceremony for a new entrance to the Gemelli hospital, just in time to hear the mayor of Rome make his speech; and we got rained on, a little!

 

After almost five kilometres on the cycling path, we came to a café in the park on the hill of Monte Ciocci, the ideal spot for a quiet break before heading into the crowds of the Vatican. Continuing on from the café, we turned a corner and saw the view of Rome and the dome of St. Peter's below us. 

On this new alternate route into Rome, a steep staircase leads to a pedestrian and cycling bridge coming out right behind St. Peter's, at the point of arrival of the Vatican railroad, which disappears into the walls of the Vatican - a relic of the days when Popes travelled by train, and not by helicopter. From this "back door" of the Vatican, we walked around the walls to join the masses of people accessing the square in front of the basilica. 

For the Jubilee year, pilgrims arriving on foot are offered preferential access, and can skip the line. The instructions I had read said to identify the entrance for visitors with tickets pre-booked online, and go straight to the head of the queue. But it was hard enough to even find the queue, or get anywhere near it, as the flows of people in the square are all regulated by barriers! Eventually we found the right spot, with the assistance of the volunteers in green vests controlling the flows of people. We still had to stand in line for a bit before we could get to a spot where we could push through the crowds to get to the front of the queue. 

It's important to go to St. Peter's while you still have your backpack on, making you instantly recognisable as a pilgrim arriving in Rome on foot - if you dropped off your backpack first, I imagine you would have to be constantly waving your pilgrim credential to justify skipping the line to the people in charge of crowd control, as well as incurring the wrath of everyone in the line!

Skipping the line took us to security, where our backpacks were X-rayed and we walked through metal detectors as in an airport, to the office where you get your final stamp and your Testimonium, which is located on ground level, to the right of the entrance to the basilica. There, we were instructed to go and leave our backpacks before entering the church. This involved standing in another line at the bottom of the steps to the church, while the people in charge of crowd control let alternating flows of people through - during which time it started to rain quite hard, and we had already taken off our hats and ponchos and put them away! We whipped out our raingear again, but in all the confusion we couldn't find the coat check where we could leave our packs (it's actually to the left of the entrance, on the other side of the portico), and so we just went into the church with them on.

We returned to the underground level to visit the tomb of St. Peter: the reason for our pilgrimage to Rome (at least ostensibly).  Then we were back out in the square and it was time to say goodbye to Walter and Antonella, our new friends from Bergamo. They headed off toward their accommodations, while we walked another two and a half kilometres to the pilgrim hostel run by the Italian branch of the Confraternity of Pilgrims to Santiago in Trastevere, Spedale della Provvidenza di San Giacomo e San Benedetto Labre. It was delightful to arrive and find that the volunteers on duty there this week are two friends of mine, Maurizia and Sonia - wonderful to see familiar faces, after more than a month on the road!

La Giustiniana - Roma (Trastevere) 21 km

A bit of history: pilgrimage to Rome...

From antiquity until around 1800,  pilgrimage was a mass phenomenon. And until the invention of the railway, and then the motor car, pilgrimage, like all forms of travel, was undertaken on foot, or perhaps on the back of a horse or mule, and involved immeasurably more risk and uncertainty than it does today. And yet thousands of people took to the road every year, setting off to reach the holy sites of all the world's major religions. With the advent of Christianity, Jerusalem became the most important destination; but following the Arab conquest of Jerusalem in 637, it became difficult for Christians to reach their chief holy city. In the meantime, devotion to Saints Peter and Paul was growing in popularity, along with pilgrimage to the city where they were martyred, Rome. The church began to prescribe pilgrimage to Rome as a form of penitance for the worst kinds of sin, but many people embarked on such voyages voluntarily, out of devotion or in fulfilment of a vow. Pilgrims came from all walks of life, then as now, from simple peasants to rulers such as Charlemagne, who went on a pilgrimage to Rome in the year 774. The chief routes from northern Europe to Rome - and thence to the ports of southern Italy in order to reach the Holy Land - were the Via Francigena for pilgrims coming from France, crossing the Alps at Saint Bernard's Pass or Monginevre, and the Via Romea Germanica route from Germany and Austria via the Brenner Pass. 

Pilgrims to Rome, 14th-century fresco from the church of the Madonna del Parto in Sutri

...and Jubilee years

The word Jubilee comes from the Hebrew word Yōbēl, meaning a ram's horn: the instrument blown to announce the advent of a holy year of celebration, held once every 50 years, during which debts would be written off, slaves freed, and no work done:  A jubilee shall that fiftieth year be unto you: ye shall not sow, neither reap that which groweth of itself in it, nor gather the grapes in it of thy vine, for it is the jubilee; it shall be holy unto you: ye shall eat the increase thereof out of the field. (Leviticus 25:11-12). Pope Boniface VIII announced the first Christian Jubilee in the year 1300, declaring that Christians who made a pilgrimage to Saint Peter's Basilica would receive a plenary indulgence forgiving them from purgatorial punishment for certain sins. The papal declaration resulted in tens of thousands of people visiting Rome during the Jubilee Year, including such "celebrities" of the 14th century as Dante, Giotto and Cimabue. It is said that the streets of Rome were so busy, a one-way system had to be instituted - for pedestrians!

Pilgrims in Rome for the Jubilee of 1300, from a miniature appearing in the “Cronica” by G. Sercambi, in the library of the Archivio di Stato in Lucca

All this traffic must have been good for the economy of Rome, because subsequent popes, who held temporal as well as religious power, progressively shortened the interval between Jubilees, which was originally a full century: Pope Clement VI decreed in 1343 that a jubilee would be held every 50 years, and in 1470 Pope Paul II decided it would be even better to hold one every 25 years... hence the Jubilee of 2025!