I FIRST SAW ST. PETER'S...
I first say St. Peter's Basilica on a scorching, late September day of my first week in Rome. I was nineteen and spending a year in Italy. An Italian cousin picked me up in the morning in a green–and-black Roman cab and we rode out to the beach at Ostia, where, in my one-piece American bathing suit, I appeared ludicrously overdressed.
I was living at CIVIS, an international house for students, and I had to be back by three o’clock at the latest. My group had a papal audience at four. I couldn’t miss it, not only because no one stands up the pope, but also because he and my father had been friends for years. They had met when my father was studying medicine at the University of Rome and Paul VI, then the young Monsignor Giovanni Battista Montini, was chaplain of an anti-Fascist student group. In his pre-pontiff days, he would visit us whenever church business brought him to the States. Somewhere I still have the photograph of his cat taken on the balcony of his Vatican apartment that he sent to me when I was nine or 10. He had to give the cat away when he was elected Pope, and I had written to say how sad it was that the Pope could not keep a pet.
On that September day, the sun and the wine at lunch and the salty Mediterranean air made time irrelevant. When I finally tore into CIVIS sunburned and sticky, it was well after three, and the group had left without me. CIVIS is on the Vatican side of the Tiber River, a couple of miles north near Ponte Milvio, the bridge where Constantine, leading his army into the imperial city in A.D. 312, saw a cross in the sky and the words: In hoc signo vinces—“By this sign you will conquer.”
Constantine was a young general advancing on Rome to challenge Maxentius, the foremost contender to succeed the Emperor Diocletian. With Christ so obviously on his side, Constantine defeated his rival easily and was crowned emperor. He mended his pagan ways and soon after built the first Basilica of St. Peter.
Nothing happens quickly in Rome, but over the course of more than 1,600 years, a village grew around Ponte Milvio. By the time I arrived, the old bridge still spanned the Tiber, but the road linking the village to the city proper had become a wide avenue with a bowling alley, a soccer stadium, and a half-mile stretch where prostitutes were allowed to solicit openly. (Only the bridge and the soccer stadium were mentioned in my guidebook.)
At 3:45, I was standing at the bus stop just beyond the ancient bridge, in black dress, black heels and black lace mantilla, prescribed attire for a papal audience but notably conspicuous for an average afternoon. The only vehicle in sight was a vintage pick-up truck, one of those uniquely Italian three-wheeled contraptions. It appeared as ancient as the city as it hiccupped toward me. I stepped off the curb and waved. An immense workman with a very shiny, very black mustache sprouting beneath wide nostrils filled the cab. My father had warned me about Italian men. Being one himself, he knew the subject. But I was going to see the Holy Father—what could happen? —and the truck was going my way. Before the driver could protest, I edged in beside him. “Il Papa,” I said in my rudimentary Italian, “Vaticano! Subito, per favore!”
St. Peter’s should be hard to miss, but as we putted along, I strained in vain for a glimpse of the Basilica. As I was trying to orient myself, the truck lurched to a stop. “Ecco!” The driver pointed. Directly ahead of us, a line of stone columns stretched horizontally in both directions as far as the eye could see. Too flustered to recognize what they were, I began again. “Il Papa….” By then, it was about two minutes to four, and I must have sounded frantic, because the driver, gesticulating broadly, shouted, “Si, San Pietro in Vaticano. Eccolo!”
“Ma, scusi,” I said tentatively. “Eccolo,” he shouted louder, flailing his arms. “Pazza Americana!” His words chased me from the cab and trailed after me —“St. Peter’s—Right there! Crazy American!” And so I entered the line of stone columns—Bernini’s illusory colonnade. It is the first of the many illusions that comprise St. Peter’s.
Most visitors approach from Via della Conciliazione, the ostentatious avenue built by Mussolini to appease the papacy and trumpet the grandeur of the Church of Rome. Because I approached from the side, the colonnade concealed the Basilica until the precise moment when I stepped through the Doric columns into the sublime surprise of St. Peter’s Square. No photograph, film, or book of art treasures had prepared me for the physical experience of that first encounte. Twin fountains sprayed into the vastness of the piazza. Between them, the obelisk brought by the Emperor Caligula from Heliopolis ascended into heaven like a pagan convert. Ahead, spreading horizontally across the piazza and rising to the crescendo of the sublime dome, appeared the first church of Christendom.
Ever since that first glimpse, I have wanted to write BASILICA 
