2014: Italy Study Tour

Tuesday, May 20 

• Travel from New Haven to Italy

Wednesday, May 21 | Ravenna

• Visit Basilica di Sant’Appolinare in Classe
• Introduction to Ravenna: Gabriel Radle, Peter Hawkins, Bryan Spinks
• Community Dinner at Ca’ de Ven

Thursday, May 22 | Ravenna

• Tour of San Vitale Complex
• Walking tour of the city: Sant’Appolinare Nuovo, ancient bishop’s residence, Dante’s tomb, Arian and Orthodox baptistries

Friday, May 23 | Siena

• Visit Contrada della Giraffa
• Lecture on St. Catherine of Siena by Margot Fassler, Intro to Palio and Contrado by Pazit Barki
• Walking tour of Siena–Palazzo Pubblico to San Domenico

Saturday, May 24 | Siena

• Visit Siena Duomo, Baptistery & Duomo Museum
• Tour of Tuscan vineyard

Sunday, May 25 | Florence

• Introduction to Florence by Gabriel Radle, Florentine litarary tradition by Peter Hawkins
• Optional: Attend Sunday liturgy at Duomo
• Small group tours: Pitti Palace & Boboli Gardens; Uffizi Gallery; Accademia and Museum of San Marco
• Optional: Visit to San Miniato Monastery; Vespers at San Miniato Monastery 

Monday, May 26 | Florence 

• Visit Florence Baptistry and Duomo
• Visit Santa Maria Novella
• Visit Santa Croce and Dante House
• Lecture at Duomo Conference Center by Giordano Mastocola on the Florentine Camerata

Tuesday, May 27 | Orvieto

• Visit Cathedral of Orvieto
• Travel to Rome
• Walking tour of central Rome

Wednesday, May 28 |Rome

• Tour of Vatican: Pio Christian Museum; Pinacoteca; Sistine Chapel
• Tour St. Peter’s Basilica
• Optional: 90-minute walking tour with Yale professor Virginia Jewiss

Thursday, May 29 | Rome

• Visit to Caelian Hill, tours of San Clemente Basilica, Quattro Coronati, S. Stefano Rotundo, Santa Maria in Dominica
• Ancient Rome-small group excursions: Mosaics Yesterday and Today; Roman Forum & Colosseum
• Optional: Sleeping Beauty Ballet at Teatro costanzi

Friday, May 30 | Rome

• Tours of Late Antique/Medieval Rome: Catacombe di Priscilla; Basilica of Sant’Agnese Fuori le Mura; Mausoleum of Constantina
• Organ tour: Mascioni organ
• Visit to Pontifical Institute of Sacred Music
  • Roundtable discussion on “Studying and Living Theology and the Sacred Arts in Rome” with professors and students from pontifical universities and institutes Participants
  • Schola Gregorina choir rehearsal
  • First Vespers for the Feast of the Institute

Saturday, May 31 | Rome

• Renaissance and Baroque Rome: guided small group excursions to Borghese Gallery; Church of the Gesu and Chiesa Nuova; Caravaggio Walk
• Organ tour: Chiesa Nuova
• Guided tour of Lateran Complex and Santa Croce in Gerusalemme
• Tour of Trastevere area (Tiber Island, Santa Cecilia, San Crisogono, Santa Maria in Trastevere)
• Visit with leaders of the Sant’Egidio Community, followed by mass at Santa Maria in Trastevere

Sunday, June 1 | Rome

• Optional Visit to St. Peter’s Basilica for multiple simultaneous masses
• Optional solemn mass sung by Schola at SS. Trinita’ Dei Pellegrini
• ​Free time OR small group excursions: Borghese Gallery; Anglican Rome tour; organ tour of Santa Maria Trastevere
• Optional: Meet at Caravita Oratorio for ecumenical Evensong
• Optional visit to Jewish Ghetto
• Community dinner at Il Pompiere

Monday, June 2 

• Travel from Rome to New Haven

Being There

One of the more incredible music-related experiences we had in Rome was singing Palestrina’s Missa Ave Maria as part of the Sunday service at the Church of SS. Trinita dei Pellegrini, a church where Palestrina himself actually worked. Being able to sing in acoustic conditions Palestrina might have had in mind while composing the piece we were performing, standing in a choir loft Palestrina actually stood in, and hearing the music as he would have heard it while performing it—these aspects of the experience were truly amazing, more amazing than I could have imagined; however, they were also things I might have expected had I attempted to conceptualize what singing Palestrina’s music in one of the composer’s churches might mean.

Things I never could have anticipated—graffiti carved into the front of the loft by fifteenth-century choirboys, the smell of the wood, stone, and dust where we were standing, the way that the treble solos in the Benedictus somehow embodied the clear softness of the shafts of light falling from tall windows through incense to the altar, the fact that the music we sang was an integrated, expected part of prayer and service—these were the rich details I never could have anticipated without participating in the action of that particular moment. The whole of the experience added up to something even more incredible than the sum of its incredible parts. It was a gift.

As much as I would like to share the whole of the ISM study tour experience, it’s just not possible to do so—it must be impossible to truly share what any experience means. But in the end, I think that this inexpressibility was a large part of the point of the study tour: to show rather than tell, to let us in on the details we couldn’t have known.

Symbols of the Heavens

“The faithful will feel a need to daub the symbols of their heavens onto dark cellar walls—to ensure what is around them will fortify the truths within them.”

Alain De Botton, The Architecture of Happiness, 112          

This is a quote I had saved in the past, but I jotted it down again during one of our bus rides through rolling Tuscan countryside—in Italy it took on new weight. It seemed that nearly every surface in the cities had been marked in some medium by the “symbols of the heavens.” Weaving through the catacombs hidden under Santa Priscilla in Rome, we saw the spaces where the bones of early Christians had been laid to rest more than one thousand years ago. The dark walls and ceilings of the tombs hold some of the earliest Christian paintings, dating back to around 250 CE. The infancy of Christian iconography was beautiful in its simplicity—truly the daubing of symbols: three wise-men here, a peacock there, three men in flames, the Good Shepherd, a mother nursing her child. With their brushes these artists turned the tombs—a place of death—into a place of hope. Out of their symbols grew the tradition we know now. What started as simple marks on “dark cellar walls” grew into the constructing of domes, the covering of ceilings with glittering tesserae, the frescoing of walls, the mastering of the classical figure in paint, and the chiseling of massive blocks of marble into monuments and fountains spilling out into the streets.

We saw a vast web of symbols in Italy, drawing on classical, biblical, hagiographical, and natural sources. In Ravenna we saw shells with pearls symbolizing the virgin birth, kairos crosses, and crowns of glory in the Byzantine tradition. In Siena, the stars covering the vaulted ceiling of the Duomo drew our music and our minds up to the heavens. In Florence we saw the baptistery I cannot get out of my mind, in which a massive mosaic Christ sits in judgment on an octagonal domed ceiling. Around him swirl scenes ranging from creation to Christ’s life to end times. It is striking to imagine what it would have been like to enter that space for the first time to be baptized, firelight sparkling off the glass seraphim above you and the holy water surrounding you. Professor Tom Troeger noted in conversation how these artists understood transcendence. He said, “We are impoverished today.” I had to agree.

Then there was Rome, where symbols from long before Christendom can be seen. Some have been appropriated, incorporated, or converted, some destroyed, and others left. At times it is hard to make sense of all the symbols. Rome is wild to me; it is a city of paradoxes. It bears traces of the best and the worst of human history in one place: humanity at its most cruel, and most creative, its most polluted, and most pure. In Rome you weave your way through swarms of people from everywhere, and even more people, or their remains anyway, lie beneath the surfaces you stand on. It puts into perspective how small a sliver on the timeline of human history the life-world you occupy really is. Last Judgment depictions serve as reminders that our medieval and Renaissance ancestors had a more vivid awareness of their own mortality than we tend to. Rome possesses the strange power of situating your body and being in a narrative and then sparking questions of the meaning of your place in it. Perhaps this is one part of the reason why the still moment at the center of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel vortex has haunted pilgrims for ages. To me that symbolic image of the space between the hands is about the sacred gift of existence and the question of why we were each given that grace.

In Italy we encountered, and contemplated, and sought to be marked by the symbols we saw, but then had to leave. Home, though, is where it is our turn. It is where we are called to be the kind of artists who reveal, interpret, or create the symbols that inspire and fortify faith in our own communities, as our faithful forerunners did in theirs.

Living History

Every country and region of the world is rich with its own history, but when it comes to sacred music, worship, and art, Italy holds a special place. This relatively young country is brimming with artifacts of its ancient history; everywhere you look, you see the commingling of past and present. Whether it is driving down a modern autostrada and watching medieval hilltop towns pass by or looking at an apartment building situated on layers of buildings repurposed over the past two millennia, you cannot help being confronted with a sense of living history.

 As the ISM made our way through a cross-section of Italy, we encountered physical remnants spanning Roman antiquity to the present day: buildings, monuments, and ruins; mosaics, frescoes, paintings, and sculptures; and manuscripts and music. We also learned about liturgical practices from the entire history of Christianity: from house churches to Byzantine and Roman baptisms all the way to the diversity of contemporary worship practices in Italy, which we were able to joined in participation. Standing among ruins and inside these spaces, viewing artwork with our own eyes, envisioning and enacting liturgy in their physical contexts—these are the reasons why we travel. Nothing brings scholarship to life like engaging all five senses to live in and live out that which we study.

For me, the culmination of our experiences came on the final day of the study tour, when Schola Cantorum sang Mass at the Chiesa della Santissima Trinità dei Pellegrini. Notable from its sixteenth-century founding into the nineteenth century as a hospice for poor pilgrims coming to Rome, Santissima Trinità fell into disrepair after the hospice was closed in the early nineteenth century. The church regained significance in 2008, when Pope Benedict XVI singled it out from among Rome’s more than nine hundred churches to be the parish church of the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite. Schola Cantorum had prepared Palestrina’s Missa Ave Maria for the service—perfectly suited for a Rite that dates to the same time period—but we did not know until the morning of the service that it was even more appropriate than we thought. Dario Paolini, the talented organist and cantor at Santissima Trinità, informed us that payment receipts in the church’s archives indicate Palestrina worked at this very church for a time. This was the closest we could get to performing Palestrina’s music as he would have experienced it himself. Between the beauty of the space, the smell of incense, and the sounds of polyphony and chant, it was a complete sensory engagement in the celebration of the Tridentine Rite. We were truly living history.

Blessings Without Number

“Sicut cervus desiderat ad fontes aquarum,

Ita desiderat anima mea te, Deus.”

These words from Psalm 42 were the theme that I held close to my heart throughout the recent study tour of Italy with the ISM. In visiting many of the historic churches, cathedrals and basilicas, I felt that I was in a place that was indeed like no other: a place that was frozen in time, from late antiquity to the Baroque.

When we sang Palestrina’s setting of the text from Psalm 42, I felt that we sang as one voice, despite any religious or denominational barriers. Many times when we sang this Palestrina anthem, we were in crowded churches in which the populous fell silent at the sound of this glorious music.

Personally, the most poignant performance of the Palestrina was in the Florence baptistery, where we were allowed in the building before it was open to the public. We sang at the end of our tour, given by the venerable Msgr. Timothy Verdon. It was in that moment of singing, in a room filled with biblical mosaics, that I felt many of us connected beyond our earthly friendships into that of one spiritual voice, along with the atmosphere of the baptistery and its meaning; this being a room that served as the birthplace of faith for many generations: A modern journey to an ancient font of the water of life.

Following the many adventures of the study tour, which included visiting historic churches, museums, and even a winery in Tuscany, the organists had the opportunity to spend four days visiting and playing different historical organs of northern Italy. This tour took us to the beautiful cities of Cortona, Mantova, and Bologna.

Alongside our fearless leader Martin Jean, Francesco Cera, who is a well known Italian organist and teacher, accompanied us on our tour. Cera demonstrated many of the various organs and provided small coaching sessions on Italian organ music to help us better understand these organs and their music from the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Italian organs represent a unique corner of the organ world, a corner that is often trumped by the French and German traditions of organ building. However, these organs offer some of the sweetest, most beautiful, and clearest sounds in the world, in my opinion. The sound of Italian organs contains a certain vocal quality: their sound is gentle, never forced; they sing, but never shout.

In the beautiful old-world city of Cortona, we visited four organs representing four consecutive centuries. The first organ we played was built in the nineteenth century. During this era in Italian history, it was common to play pieces from different popular operas to accompany a liturgy. As a result, the later Italian organs are much more diverse in tonal palette to accommodate these pieces. The first Cortona organ we saw has stops representing all four families of organ pipes: principals, flutes, reeds, and even a string stop! The three remaining organs in Cortona were similar in character to each other, in comparison to the nineteenth-century instrument. These instruments of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were much smaller in size, but their beauty was in no way diminished.

To close out our time in Cortona, several of us gave a performance at the Church of San Domenico, which houses an organ that was built in 1547. It was a fabulous experience to perform on one of these beautiful organs from the Italian Renaissance.

During our time in the city of Mantova, we visited two organs, one of which was built by one of the most important of the Italian builders: Graziadio Antegnati. The Antegnati organ at the Basilica of Santa Barbara was built in 1565. Once again, I must note the astounding vocal quality of the Italian organs from the Renaissance and Baroque eras: it is absolutely sublime. The second stop in Mantova was a visit to the Basilica di Sant’Andrea. The organ at the Basilica, dating from 1850 and similar to the nineteenth-century organ in Cortona, is best suited to the playing of pieces from popular operas. However, this organ is almost unique among Italian organs for the sole reason that it contains two manuals (keyboards) and a large pedal board, whereas the large majority of organs in Italy have only a single manual and a small pedal board. Uniquely, it also contains four unison foundation stops, or principale, compared to other organs that only contain one principale stop.

The final destination of the organ tour was the charming city of Bologna. We were able to visit three beautiful Renaissance organs, two of which were situated across from each other in the chancel of the Basilica of San Petronio. Of the two organs in San Petronio, the organ built in 1471 was a personal favorite, both among the organs we visited in Bologna and of the organ tour as a whole. The sound of the principale was enough to melt one’s heart and soul (mine included): the sound was so very smooth and lyrical. The overall sound of the 1471 organ was rather mellow, especially when compared with the organ located directly across the chancel, which was built in the sixteenth century and has a comparatively brighter quality. We had the opportunity to hear these organs in dialogue with each other, when Francesco Cera and Liuwe Tamminga played music of Gabrieli and others from the keydesks of these two beautiful organs.

The next morning, we spent a couple of hours at the Basilica of San Martino with its sixteenth-century organ, which is housed in one of the most rickety galleries I recall entering over the course of the tour. The final musical adventure of the organ tour was a visit to the Luigi Tagliavini’s personal collection of musical instruments, housed in the former Church of San Colombano. At this museum, we saw many different keyboard instruments representing various eras of music history, as well as several mechanical instruments. Cera and Tamminga demonstrated many of the collection’s holdings, which included harpsichords, pianos, clavichords, and a portativ organ in the gallery.

There is simply too much to write about this study trip to Italy. To put it simply: I feel this trip fell perfectly at the intersection of academia and religion and music. From Peter Hawkins’s reading of Oscar Wilde’s “Ravenna” at the Basilica di Sant’Apollinare in Classe to the closing concert performed by Schola Cantorum in Venice, consisting of music by Palestrina, Vivaldi, and Bruckner, I was reminded of the vast and varied resources of the Institute: hearing from both students and teachers alike, all of whom shared their expertise throughout this study tour of Italy. What a wonderful blessing to be part of this family!

Soli Deo Gloria.

Rappresentazione: Thinking Dramatic Liturgy and Liturgical Drama in Italy

The Sienese cathedral’s baptistery lay in wait beneath the hard floor of its nave, necessitating a little underground detour from our museum tour path. In our haste to descend the stairs we had nearly missed the small cross, embedded in the stone steps, marking the place where St. Catherine of Siena had fallen when tempted by the devil. Our attention was fixed squarely on seeing what might have seemed, in comparison, an unimportant architectural accident: a hole in the baptistery ceiling. As Professor Margot Fassler had explained to us just the day before in lecture, medieval Sienese Christians had made special use of this hole in celebrating the assumption of the Virgin Mary into heaven. They would descend to the baptistery and, at the height of the liturgy, rapt in song and prayer, would pull a statue of the Virgin up through the hole, restaging the very event whose feast they commemorated. Surrounded by frescoes of cherubs and angels, this “ascending” Virgin would bring the whole space to life. Devotional statue turned prop turned actor—this dramatic reportrayal of the Virgin’s assumption enwrapped the faithful in a network of relationships traveling the length of heaven and earth, a communion of saints. Prayer, visual art, music, architecture, and drama coalesced, vivifying dogma by putting worshippers in the thick of it all.

This was not the only juncture at which liturgy met the stage during our travels. Indeed, the tales only seemed to increase in number and extravagance! While visiting the cathedral in Florence, for instance, Msgr. Timothy Verdon described for us the dramatic machinery Filippo Brunelleschi was commissioned to create for one of city’s late medieval sacre rappresentazioni, or holy performances. As recounted in the Vite of Giorgio Vasari, Brunelleschi’s machine was used to dramatize the Annunciation, when the archangel Gabriel appears to Mary and announces that she will bear Jesus Christ. The machine consisted of an inverted dome, complete with clouds and twinkling lights—and real children strapped in on its perimeter as cherubs. When operational, the whole dome descended, rotating all the while, with Gabriel aboard and children dancing!

As if this were not enough, Msgr. Verdon recounted to us the Florentine cathedral’s continuing invocation of its dramatic heritage, describing with vivid detail the Scoppio del Carro, or explosion of the cart, by which the cathedral marks the Easter Day liturgy to this very day. In the middle of the Mass, the clergy light a rocket-fitted mechanical dove attached to a wire stretching all the way from the high altar of the cathedral to a cart laden with fireworks in the middle of the square outside. The dove shoots down the nave, shimmering sparks sending it flying toward the cart whose explosion sets off a splendid display of light and noise. (There are must-see clips of this available on YouTube!)

During our visit to the Pontifical Institute of Sacred Music, Fr. Paul Murray recounted to us the words of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: “I am a pilgrim of the future on my way back from a journey made entirely in the past.” Teilhard’s sentiment here is an apt description of my experience of this year’s study tour, which found in the many historic ecclesial spaces we visited startling and fantastic germs for future liturgical creativity and theological reflection.

These three—the ascending statue of the Virgin, Brunelleschi’s Annunciation machine, and the Florentine cathedral’s liturgical pyrotechnics—cast fresh light for me on the nature of worship, their sheer fabulousness foregrounding the performative dimensions of all our attempts to offer God praise and be re-formed by grace. And they recalled me to a perspective on liturgy that did not see in “performance” and “praise” a relation of opposition but of synergy, that found in drama not falsity, illusion, or insincerity but a means by which the church re-presents the mysteries of its faith. These kinds of realizations are the privileges we students owe to interdisciplinary experiences of the sort the Institute of Sacred Music makes possible, born of the irreplaceable opportunity to feel these pasts reverberating through our bodies as we walk through the spaces they brought to such fantastic life.

“One Gleam of the Glory” (Paradiso 33.72)

As a student of religion and literature, I’m alert to words. I care for narrative. Hooked on books, etc. A large part of my excitement over the ISM’s 2014 study trip to Italy had to do with the group’s plan to “follow in the footsteps of Dante”—the patron saint, you could say, of our highly esteemed religion and literature professor, Peter Hawkins, and thus a kind of grand-saint to me and to those in our group with literary inclinations.

And it was delightful to pay homage to “il Poeta” in a journey reversing his timeline. First we visited his spare, simple tomb in Ravenna, just around the corner from a street sign proclaiming the area a restful and respectful “Zona del Silenzio.” After several days in the steep-walled city of Siena, where Dante stayed during part of his exile from his native Florence, we roamed the Tuscan hillsides by bus until we reached the great poet’s birthplace. Once in Florence, we shut ourselves in the dark-sparkling mosaic interior of the octagonal baptistery where the infant Dante had been received into the body of Christ (and the city-state of Florence) dusky decades before his expulsion and exile. I did not linger long in front of the grand and empty cenotaph dedicated to Dante in the Florentine Basilica of Santa Croce, but I did spend some minutes squinting up at his stone likeness glowering against the sharp blue sky outside the church, feeling keenly how impossible it is (and yet, impossible not to try) to capture a soul in time, in space, in stone.

After two semesters’ worth of coursework flirting with apophatic theology—all that cannot be said about God, plus investigations into the quality of that sacred silence—I was on the alert for Italian solutions to the problem of capturing, or even witnessing to, spiritually charged reality within the finite reach of human expression. Dante’s Commedia is a magnificent and theologically expressive achievement in this vein, beautifully balanced between two great silences, as Prof. Denys Turner would have it: the frozen waste at the pit of hell and the quiet smile suffusing the Godhead.

But apart from Dante’s straddling of the ineffable and the expressible, the Italian renderings of spiritual matters that struck me most were the carvings, statuary, and mosaics in each city we explored—Ravenna, Siena, Florence, Orvieto, and Rome. The legions of angelic orders and saintly processions shimmering in mosaics in Ravenna, Siena, and Florence … hundreds of sculpted heads lining the upper edge of the nave in the Sienese Duomo … august statuary peering down from sun-bleached façades … everywhere I felt surrounded and towered over by rank on rank of truth-seekers from salvation history—including such pre-Christian patriarchs as Plato and Aristotle, who survey Siena from their perch atop the city’s spangled Duomo. Never before have I felt so palpably the size and number and spiritual heft of all who have come before.

Gazing at the mosaic program inside Ravenna’s San Vitale complex, we were invited to compare the depiction of “ordinary” humans to images of Christ and the angels. One of our excellent guides pointed out the surprisingly realistic grounding of Christ’s foot, which rests solidly on a clear blue globe thanks to the mosaicists’ use of shadow and shaping. Similarly, the angels had slightly more detailed faces and better-shaded, more flowing folds in their robes. By contrast, the human beings depicted in the mosaics appeared somewhat flat, stylized, and static. Whatever the original artists’ intent may have been, the meaning I took for my personal pilgrimage was clear—spiritual reality is vital, massively more dimensional than we can currently measure, and yet inseparably linked to “the journey of our life,” at whose midway-point Dante’s epic story begins.

It is so easy to think of literature, or even “story,” as something much less palpable than sculpture, far less visible than a painting, nowhere near as audible as music—definition through opposition and negation, in other words. But visiting the major sites of Dante’s life, many of which play a significant role in the Commedia, and developing a sense of the horrific divisions and infighting that characterized the fourteenth century, I gained a new appreciation for the actual, physical, historical realities undergirding literature like the Divine Comedy. Dante’s tercets are not just lovely, safely distant words printed on a canonical page, floating through the ages atop a foamy wave of translations. No; this work was written on the backs and heels and hearts of real people like Dante, who lived, loved, went into exile, and took risks to speak against injustice and corruption. And all this against the backdrop of the Black Death! Not to mention general mortality rates, fires, poverty, and the ravages of time and Tiber … how amazing it is that such literature survives at all!

As visual and spatial memories from the ISM Study Trip continue (regrettably) to fade, a solid nub of literature ripe for exploration and study remains—for which I am deeply grateful. So, too, I am grateful beyond words for Dante and for other writers who have tried to capture some glimmer of the vast spiritual architecture they see tilting toward silence; a stillness characterized not by failure, not by fear, not by the quiet loneliness of exile, but by unutterable, unending satisfaction.

The Italian city of Ravenna served as our first stop on the 2014 ISM Study Tour.  As our itinerary was designed to proceed chronologically through the cultural and artistic transitions of Italian history, we began with Late Antiquity.

Ravenna served as the Western Capitol of the Roman Empire in the 5th century, in the period following the Christianization of the Empire.  After the conquest of the Italian Peninsula by the Arian Ostrogoths, Ravenna served as the capital of the Ostrogothic Kingdom from 493-553.  When Emperor Justinian’s general Belisarius reconquered much of Italy during the Gothic War (535-554), Ravenna became capital of the Byzantine Exarchate of Italy, a position technically held by the city until 751, when it fell to the Lombards and decreased in importance.  The Byzantine Exarchate continued to survive in Southern Italy as the Catapanate of Bari.

Ravenna, now a small city of 160,000 inhabitants, contains many Late Antique monuments that attest to the translation of ancient pre-Christian artistic themes and motifs into a Christian visual language.  Renowned world over for its lavish mosaics, Ravenna is also home to an important school for the study of mosaic restoration.

After leaving Ravenna, we traversed the Apennine Mountains and traveled to Siena, a city that provided us with a window into the Middle Ages in Italy.

Although Siena was already settled in the time of the ancient Etruscans, it did not become a prominent city until after the collapse of the Western Empire.  Siena found itself along a commercial and pilgrimage route to Rome that became popular in the 8th century during the Carolingian period.  Like numerous other Italian cities in the late-first millennium, Siena developed into a city-state.  While the bishop of Siena served as de facto governor during the early Sienese city-state, by 1179 a republican government had developed with a written constitution that sought to balance both ecclesiastical and aristocratic interests.

Siena distinguished itself as an important center for trade, especially with regard to wool.  Both secular and ecclesiastical sponsorship led to the creation of one of the earliest universities in the world here in 1240, and artistic patronage thrived well into the 14th century.  However, political rivalry with Florence and the Black Death of 1348 contributed to Siena’s decline in power.  In 1555, Siena was incorporated into the territory of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany.

Contrada della Giraffa

The Republic of Siena was divided into districts, know as contrade (sg. contrada).  Although their number and size have fluctuated over time, 17 districts survive to this day.  The contrade are tightly knit communities and rivalries between them abound.  This sense of competition is manifested in the Palio, a bareback horse race sponsored by the contrade and accompanied by much fanfare and Sienese pageantry.

Palazzo Pubblico and Piazza del Campo

The medieval Palazzo Pubblico, Siena’s town hall (ca. 1297) reflects the secular context for which it was created.  Inside the palace, many rooms are decorated with frescos commissioned by the governing body of the city.  These paintings are unique in their depiction of secular subject matter, at a time when sacred art was the precedent.  The most famus of these Frescos, The Allegory of Good and Bad Government, serves as a potent symbol to highlight the value of Siena’s republican government.  The adjacent tower of the palace, the Torre del Mangia, one of the tallest towers in Italy at the time, was constructed to be of equal height as the cathedral, a symbol of the equal authority shared by Church and state.  At the foot of the Palazzo Pubblico lies a late Gothic chapel of the Virgin Mary, built as an ex voto by the Sienese who survived the Black Death of 1348.

The Palazzo Pubblico is at the center of the famous Piazza del Campo, one of the greatest medieval squares of Europe.  The remainder of the square is filled with aristocratic residences that date to the 13th ane 14th centuries, the height of Sienese wealth and power.  Twice a year, the Piazza del Campo becomes a crowded horse racing track for the Sienese Palio.

Basilica Cateriana di San Domenico

The “Catherinine” Basilica of St. Dominic was first built between 1226-1265, but enlarged in the 14th century.  Within the large nave of this Gothic church is the reliquary of St. Catherine of Siena, the most famous citizen of this city.  St. Catherine was a mystic, Scholastic philosopher and theologian.  She was influential in bringing the papacy back to Rome from the so-called Babylonian captivity in Avignon (1309-1378).  Together with St. Francis, she is the patron saint of Italy and one of the patrons of Europe.  While her body rests in Rome, where she died, her head and thumb were brought to her home city of Siena, where they are greatly and sincerely venerated to this day in the Dominican church of St. dominic, since she herself belonged to the Dominican Order.  Website

Duomo

The cathedral of Siena, or Duomo di Siena, designed and completed from 1215-1263, sits atop the site of a 9th century church and bishop’s palace.  The Black Death halted a massive expansion plan, whereby the current cathedral was to become a transept for one of the largest churches in the world.  Both the interior and exterior walls consist of alternating stripes of greenish-black and white marble, with red marble on the facade.  The black and white colors are symbolic of Siena and legend has it are etiologically linked to the black and white horses of the ancient founders of the city, Senius and Aschius.

Adjacent to the cathedral is the Duomo Museum, which contains some of the artistic masterpieces produced for the cathedral.  Among the masterpieces housed in the museum are the Maestà by Duccio and the stain glass window of Cimabue.

Florence was founded by ancient Romans in the 1st century BC and became an important commercial center during imperial times.  The most glorious period of Florentine history came centuries later during the period of the Republic of Florence and the Grand Duchy of Tuscany.

Between the 14th and 16th centuries, the Florentine state was one of the most powerful countries in the world.  As evidence of Florentine economic power, its currency–the FLorin (fiorino d’oro)–was used as a standard unit throughout Europe at the time and became the official currency of the Holy Roman Empire (Reingulden, later Reighsgulden).  Due to the literary tradition of Florence, its language became accepted as the preferred language throughout the Italian peninsula.

In 1439, Florence became the center of attention for the Christian world when it hosted the Council of Florence, an attempt to reconcile the Catholic and Orthodox Churches.  Patronage of the arts flourished in Florence at this time under the Medici, the powerful banking family of Florence who unofficially ruled the city until the Grand Duchy of Tuscany was formed in 1569, after which the medici officially ruled as Grand Dukes.

Florence is often credited as the cradle of the Renaissance.  Famous Florentine artists include Brunaleschi, Fra’ Angelico, Donatello, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo.  As a medieval city-state that turned into a Renaissance duchy, Florence has monuments that abound with stories of dramatic artistic transitions.

Pitti Palace and Boboli Gardens

The Pitti Palace was constructed in the mid-15th century, but became the official residence of the rulers of Florence, the Medici, a century later.  Accordingly, it contains the private art collection of these powerful patrons of the Renaissance, the so-called Galleria Palatina, or Palace Gallery.  The collection includes masterpieces of Raphael, Perugino and Titian, among others.  Within the palace grounds are the Boboli Gardens, one of the earliest formal 16th-century Italian gardens, filled with sculptures and fountains.  The gardens were first laid out by Eleonora di Toledo, the wife of Cosimo I de’ Medici, and have undergone numerous expansions and additions over time, today encompassing 11 acres.  Website: Uffizi Museum

Uffizi Gallery

The Uffizi (“the offices”) were designed by Geirgio Vasari in 1560 and were built as the administrative offices for Florentine magistrates, the Tribunal and state archive.  Because the Medici displayed a number of noteworthy pieces of art there, it quickly turned into a gallery.  Although the Uffizi were open to visitors since its beginning, it was turned into a public museum in 1765 and has become one of the most famous museums in the world.  Its masterpieces include works by all the great Florentine artists and numerous other Italian works.

Academia & Museum of San Marco

The Academy of Fine Arts in Florence was founded by Cosimo I de’ Medici in 1563 as a place for training and supervising the best artistic production in Florence.  In the 19th century, Michelangelo’s masterpiece David was brought to the Academy for purposes of conservation, but has now taken up permanent residence there.  The David, which measures 17 feet tall and was created between the hears 1501 and 1504, has achieved the status of being one of the most recognizable works of art in the world.

The Museum of San Marco is a former Dominican convent of Florence, famous as the house of both Girolamo Savonarola and Fra’ Angelico.  Each cell of the convent contains a fresco painted by Fra’ Angelico.  The museum also displays a number of other masterpieces from the 15th century. Website: Museum Website

San Miniato Monstery

The present Romanesque church of San Miniato al Monte was built in the 11th-13th centuries on one of the highest points in the region of Florence, affording its visitors impressive views of the city below.  It is adjoined to a monastery of Olivetans, a branch of Benedictine monasticism.  The cloister of the monastery dates to the 15th century.  Within the church is the tomb of Cardinal James of Lusitania.  Displaying a collaboration of several art forms, this chapel is considered a fine example or Renaissance funerary art.

Rome is said to have been founded by the brothers Romulus and Remus in the year 753 BC, although archeological evidence suggests there was a Latin village here from at least the 9th century BC.  The city is one of the oldest named cities in the world.  It is located upon a series of hills–traditionally seven–that overlook the valley of the TIber river.  Rome is regarded as having formed into a republic in 509 BC. A series of wars during its time as a republic (esp. the Samnite Wars and the Punic Wars) made Rome into a Mediterranean power.  By 146 BC, the city controlled the Italian Peninsula, Greece, and Parts of North Africa and Spain.

The Roman Empire emerged under the leadership of Augustus Caesar in the aftermath of the assassination of the Roman general-turned-dictator Julius Caesar (44 BC).  When Diocletian (emp. 284-305) split the administration of the empire in two, Rome lost its status as a political capital of the Mediterranean world, with Milan and then Ravenna serving as the capital of the Western Empire.

Rome continued to be regarded as the cultural mother of the Empire, and the prestige of the city was further continued through the seat of the bishop of Rome, the senior bishop of the ancient Christian Church.

When the government and population of Rome declined after the fall of the Western Empire, the popes became leaders of the city, a position confirmed by the “donation of Pepin” in the 8th century. Rome remained an independent papal country until the 1870 conquest of the city by the Risorgimento army.  A small portion of the Papal States survives as the Vatican City State, while the majority of the city of Rome today serves as capital of the Republic of Italy.

Due to its importance as capital of the Roman Empire and seat of the Roman Catholic Church, the city of Rome has known virtually every artistic movement that has crossed the Italian Peninsula since antiquity.  Some of the greatest masterpieces of the Renaissance are found here, including the Sistine Chapel and St. Peter’s Basilica.  Rome is also the birthplace of the Baroque movement and continues to thrive as a center for contemporary art. 

Vatican City

The Vatican is an independent city-state, the world’s smallest country.  The bishop of Rome, or pope, serves as absolute monarch, but delegates much of his authority to a Cardinal Secretary of State.

The Vatican hill was originally a necropolis.  Due to the presence of St. Peter’s tomb within this burial ground, Emperor Constantine leveled a portion of the hill and constructed a great basilica directly on top of the tomb of St. Peter in the 4th century.  Although the Vatican always contained a temporary residence for the pope adjacent to St. Peter’s Basilica, it was not the primary papal residence until after the end of the Avignon exile (1309-1378).

The Vatican Museums were founded in 1506 by Pope Julius II and are considered the second oldest public museums in the world.  Today, the complex of the Vatican Museums includes over 20 museums, galleries, and chapels containing masterpieces from major periods of Italian art history.