Bring Up the Bodies
1 April, 2014
Life On A High Beam: Nadia Comaneci
1 April, 2014Discovery Channel Magazine, April 2014
Something like a Persian rug is flapping beneath a top-floor window of the Vatican’s Papal Apartments, to the unbridled delight of at least 5,000 people in St Peter’s Square below. There are people with flags, with banners, hoisted upon one another’s shoulders; it’s like a football cup final. Among the faithful are a clutch of black-clad priests, cannily stationed in the best viewing spot in the shade.
And then he appears: Papa Francesco, as they call the Pope locally, is at the window, waving gracefully. He speaks for a while in Italian, first about the bible, then Syria, and then he is gone and the crowd disperse. This is his home – and that of every pope, by and large, since 1377. It is the spiritual capital of the entire Catholic faith.
The world’s smallest state is fall of surprises. I had not known he would be speaking, and had come only to see the sights of the world’s smallest sovereign state, nestled into a northwest pocket of Rome: the glorious interior of St Peter’s Basilica, designed by Michelangelo among others, with every square inch of its vast interior ornate; the trek to the mosaic-clad balcony and, through claustrophobic and tilting stuffy stairs, to the packed cupola at the very top of the dome; the treasures of the Vatican museum, most famously the Sistine Chapel and its The Last Judgment; and St Peter’s Square itself, with its marble-columned arms thrown out in a gesture of acceptance to the poor. Seeing the Pope was quite a bonus, and it seems a great omen for my trip.
That’s because the Vatican is just the first stop on what I’m calling the Obscure Principality Roadtrip. Western Europe boasts a cluster of these tiny places, of curious origin and still odder persistence as sovereign states, smaller than most big cities yet sustained independently for centuries. The Vatican City, the smallest of them all at just 44 hectares, is barely a corner of a map of central Rome and has a smaller population than many Singapore high schools. San Marino, Liechtenstein and Monaco are barely bigger, swallowed by Italy, Switzerland and France respectively. And while Andorra is of a mighty size compared to the other four, it still only has two roads in and out of the entire country.
And they are all, being European, relatively close to one another. And hence the roadtrip. My mission is to visit them all in four days.
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