A brief cold snap after weeks of relatively warm weather has summoned the delicious colors of autumn from the local trees.  It seems to have happened overnight although I'm sure it's been weeks in the making.  The gathering leaves on the ground form a light padding that subdues the all too common footsteps from the likely tapping to a dull steady  thud.  and so with autumn comes the damp.  I first noticed as I stepped out this morning to grab some milk from the market across the street. I can't recall ever having a market that close.  Even as a child, the nearby neighborhood market, Todds, was a drive away. An entire quarter of a mile away.  And while I think of markets as having produce that was farmed during the Eisenhower years, this one, or rather these as there are two right next to each other, always surprise me with fresh cheeses and chorizo.  And yes, milk.

That first step out onto the walkway was litererd with damp leaves and mud, and that wonderful smell of falling leaves and decay.  Like Autumn is supposed to smell.

Having spent 8 years in Catholic school, I never really thought that much about ancient Rome.  I don't remember it really being covered or being pressed as important in school other than "they killed Jesus!"  But touring through ancient Rome, one is given a fascinating picture of a society that valued, among other things, family and the reverence for the dead.  The necropolis under St Peters was a look into the society of the dead.  Families would brig picnics to the mausoleums and pour wine and food through holes in the floor to their dead relatives in the afterlife.  Some mausoleums were for erly Christians, made clear by the symbols left on the engraved plaques commemorating the life of that person.  They were quick to praise.  One man's epitaph listed him as "joking with everyone and never quarreled.  He was a dear brother," the stone claimed.  Many were left by husbands to "chaste" wives, who were assumed to die in childbirth as the birth rate was high to combat the infant mortality rate which was about 75%.

The necropolis was discovered while trying to make the Popes' burial grotto bigger and more enjoyable for visitors.   The excavations took a place in the fourties and fifties.  This too was amusing as I remembered being in high school and having the younger girls freak out over the rumor that they had run out of burial space in the Vatican for Popes, so when John Paul died, that was the end of the world.   The nuns perpetuated that rumor, maybe they even believed it themselves.  But when he was shot, the younger girls were seen sobbing in the corridors, crying the end was near.

What struck me too was the idea that Jesus was a religious person in this era of gods and demi gods, of superstitions and luck; a Jew who was persecuted.  And the town that I knew as the center of the Roman Empire soon became the center of the church of a completely different religion.  Everything was then taken over buy the new church.  The Pantheon, which was at one point was the center of learning and community became a basilica.  Which we were reminded is what kept it in such great shape.  No one had the money or the interest in maintaining the secular building, but anything that became a church or otherwise struck the interest of a Pope or one of the powerful, wealthy families was saved from eventual ruin.

The Castle and the Colosseum are great examples of ruins subsequently adopted by the church.  The latter receiving giant cross as a memorial to all those early Christians persecuted there.  Although the audio guide tells us that it wasn't the the main show there.  It was more about gladiators and hunting.

Our necropolis tour ended with a peek into the grave of St Peter.  The bones found there, the guide tells us, were tested by Vatican scientists who verifies that they are of a man in his late 60s who a had worked hard during his life.  That seems to be enough to convince the Vatican that they are in fact those of St Peter.  And therefore, only the Pope can say mass in St Peters on that altar which stands over the grave. But the altar adjacent to it, which is not over St Peter,  has and thousands and thouxans of priests say mass.  

The Vatican was huge and beautiful but did sort of run under it's own rules.  It was as if there was a whole different state within the city of Rome.  Oh wait...