Christmas in Rome by Philip Marsden
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Last year, to avoid the slightly sad scene of four adults sitting around a Christmas tree, my father-in-law suggested we abandon the traditions of his Hampshire home and go somewhere else entirely. "How about Rome?" he ventured.
So, come the dark third week of December, he and my wife and her brother and I left behind the saturnalian excesses of a Protestant Christmas and headed south. Not of course that Christ's birth goes uncelebrated in the Eternal City - it is just that it is refreshingly low-key and stylish. The 25th is a religious holiday among other religious holidays. Presents tend to be given at Epiphany. You eat fish on Christmas Eve and go to Mass at midnight and have a large lunch the next day. You drink a few glasses of wine. In the days beforehand there is none of the lurching, retching ugliness of London's pre-Christmas streets, nor the mall-battles of last-minute shopping. There are Baroque concerts in the churches, ranks of poinsettias on the altars, illuminated Madonnas and presepi (or cribs) everywhere.
Perhaps the most blatant concession to Christmas in Rome is La Befana, the children's fair in the Piazza Navona. Staying nearby in the creeper-fronted Hotel Raphael, we crossed the square each time we set out on or returned from our long ambles around the city. A merry-go round filled the piazza with its barrel-organ tunes, punctuated by the pop-pop of shooting galleries. Tarot-readers at low tables catered for the Romans' famous superstitious nature. Stockings for Santa Claus were available in an array of patterns (most popular were the red and gold of Roma football team, and the blue and white of Lazio). Vendors wandered among the crowds clutching towering bunches of helium balloons in the shape of Father Christmas, Pokemon characters or Mickey Mouse - whose grinning faces, released by bored children, you could sometimes spot trapped high among the angels of the churches' painted ceilings.
Elsewhere the presence of Christmas was discreet - a moderately-decorated spruce here, a string of lights there. Instead Rome wove its ageless spell upon us - a spell which is most obvious in the tricks it plays on your sense of scale. It is not just the city's antiquity, the "abundance of its fetched-forth and laboriously upheld pasts" moaned about by Rilke, but a vertiginous feeling that accumulates over the days in a humbling and very pleasurable way.
Thus, looking down over the old heart of Rome from the Capitoline hill, it is dizzying to realise that the ancient world was ruled from a district smaller than a cricket pitch. In the vast basilica of San Giovanni in Laterano - "the Mother and head church of Rome and the World" - the priests bustled like beetles around the baldacchino as they presided over Midnight Mass. On the northern side of the Piazza di Populi was the exhibition of 100 Presepi - a hundred tiny worlds liberally representing the birth of Jesus. A mechanical, Neapolitan version featured flowing streams, smoking fires, washing flapping in the breeze and pizzas being loaded into the oven (somewhere amidst it all was the Holy Family). Others were carved from single pieces of wood, cast in metal or made from pasta or cheese; one was constructed entirely from kitchen utensils, with the Magi as dessert spoons and the Holy Child as a teaspoon. Another featured a smouldering Manhattan divided from the tank-strewn desert of Afghanistan by a narrow strip of water. Above it all lay a pacific, outsize Baby Jesus and the title: From Year Zero to Ground Zero.
Christmas Day itself was crisp and clear. A deep blue sky stretched above the west front of St Peter's. Below it, in their harlequin uniforms and their halberds stood the Swiss Guard. Behind them the great plain of the Piazza San Pietro, in which had been erected a church-size presepi, was packed. We stood next to a grinning Mexican. Only two days earlier he and the group of short, black-suited and fresh-faced men around him had been ordained; now they stood staring expectantly at the balcony high above our heads, waiting with the crowd of nuns and priests, pilgrims and tourists for the arrival of the Holy Father.
When he appeared, a swelling cheer rose from the crowd. The seminarians clapped. Hunched and doddery, a miracle of will over disability, the Pope began his Christmas greetings - in 60 languages. Malay, Ukrainian and Welsh produced squawks of recognition from various corners, Mongolian nothing. Spanish received the biggest collective shout, followed by the chant: "Me-hico! Me-hico!" - at which our newly-ordained friend could not help grinning. But, as the Pope conducted his mumbling world tour, giving equal time (and a distinctive Polish lilt) to various linguistic dots on the globe, it struck me that the gathering had much less of a sense of Christmas hope than the up-beat, all-inclusiveness of the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games.
And, as he spoke, a helium balloon - Mickey Mouse again - drifted against the clear blue sky. He soared over the square towards the Tiber, trailing his short tether, grinning on the thousands below and on the single stooping figure who held their attention with languages that no-one appeared to understand.