The year 2000 was Holy Year in Rome. It was a special one celebrating the end of the second millennium according to the Gregorian calendar.
I was in Rome in March and again in May, bookending a stay of several weeks in the south of Italy and in that most Catholic of countries, Malta. I travelled not as a pilgrim to the Holy City in pursuit of indulgences, but to three cities in the indulgent pursuit of some of the most powerful painted images of the counter reformation—the paintings of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio.
In March, new leaves were starting to appear on the plane trees but there was still a wintry feel in the air and a fairly insignificant number of visitors, measured by the relative ease of being able to squeeze in the door of the Vatican buses heading down via Nazionale.
The city was gloriously clean, its classical columns and pediments and its baroque scrolls and volutes now clearly delineated by the shadows cast by an oblique sun on their pale surfaces.
St Peter’s, no longer overbearingly dull and grey, looked manageable, visually contained and quite beautiful. Rows of plastic chairs filled Bernini’s grand piazza and dozens of young volunteer red-capped guides led hundreds of red-capped pilgrims around the basilicas.
Among the red caps in Saint Peter’s I saw my mother. At least I thought I did. I had been thinking of her, so when I saw a short, sturdy, elderly woman with a guide book in her hand and an intensely happy expression on her face, a bit of morphing happened. She returned my smile and went on her way with her group.
My mother came to Rome for Holy Year in 1950, half a century earlier.
She was 44 years old, the mother of five children aged from three to 15, a Catholic whose faith combined a keen intelligence with a simple set of Irish superstitions. In our home, serious tomes from the Catholic library sat beside the little porcelain statue of Our Lady which she put outside under an umbrella the night before any event for which rain was absolutely proscribed. This was her first trip out of Australia and she threw up all the way to Aden and all the way back to Australia. The Suez Canal and the Mediterranean must have been kinder because they were never blamed for her indisposition.
She bombarded us with