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Entry: Coming Home Link: http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/coming_home#16969 Post contents: As a lover of Rome, I thank Mr. Z for this fine article! And I'm delighted that his sensibilities are mine. Santa Susanna is best seen from the outside, its wonderful facade from a.D. 1610. (In Rome, one needs to put a.D. and BC before dates.) And the American Paulists are terrible iconoclasts, as are the American Jesuits in Rome. Don't go to Rome to see "Americanized" churches. The English chapel at the Venerable English College, worth seeing for the English Catholics buried and memorialized there, has also been "wreckovated". I hold the Baroque to be an aesthetic achievement rivaled only by the Gothic, and the best examples are mostly in Rome. My favorites: The Boromini Churches of San Ivo, San Carlo on the Quirinal, and Saint Agnes in Agony in piazza Navona. Also his Oratory and Propaganda buildings. Then Bernini's Saint Andrew on the Quirinal. Add the masterpieces of others: Santi Luca and Martina, Saint Andrew in Valle, the Gesu, and my own favorite: Santa Maria in Campitelli, where the architect dissolves the idea that a room is supposed to have four walls, a floor, and a ceiling. Throw in churches with Bernini sculpture and Caravaggio painting, and you can make a trip to Rome out of just seeing the Baroque. St. Peter's is certainly sublime, despite T.S. Eliot's dislike of it. The dome is perfection itself - and it's a pity that the dome can't be admired from the piazza. So overwhelming is San Pietro in Vaticano that folks forget that it isn't even the Cathedral of Rome or Christendom's first church or First Church. That honor belongs to Saint John Lateran, the church Christians have continually worshiped the longest, since a.D. 311. St. Peter's emphasis in the Papacy. But for The Church symbolically realized, built upon the Apostles, St. John Lateran is spiritually the place. Also, Santa Croce in Gerusalemme has its own spiritually, however wanting it may be aesthetically. Sent at: 2008 07 05