Take a personal tour through the Vatican City State through the panorama surrounding you in this updated edition with 128 pages and 63 color photographs. See St. Peter's Basilica and its famous Square, the Pontifical palaces with frescoes done by the great masters of Italian Renaissance, the Vatican Museums with the famous Raphael Rooms, the Nicolina Chapel, the marvelous Sistine Chapel with the restored Michelangelo frescoes and a view of the Vatican Gardens.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Library Journal
These modestly priced, adhesive-bound, made-for-tourist paperbacks are typically offered in a dozen different languages in the same shops that carry plastic pietas and Sistine Chapel slide sets at the Vatican. Papafava's Vatican incorporates a large-type text with scores of photographs, reproductions of art works, diagrams, and details, some with instructive captions. Photographs of the restored Sistine Chapel ceiling, including foldouts and several close-ups, are satisfactory. The work concludes with a single-page bibliography and a list of the popes mentioned in the guide. Roncalli, former director of Italo-Etruscan antiquities in the Vatican museums, covers the same 110 acres as the work above, this time in rambling, multipage paragraphs that highlight features and history. Nearly half of the volume deals with the Vatican museums, whose paintings and murals are unfortunately represented in washed-out or blurred photographs. Sculpture and the gardens fare marginally better. A single-page list of artists is included at the end. Overall, these translations are rife with misspellings, historical inaccuracies, choppy phrasings, and frequently unintelligible text. They make better souvenirs than library purchases. Libraries strengthening their foreign travel sections are better served by established travel industry guides such as those by Michelin and Fodor's; in this instance, consider the video Vatican, Fortress of Christianity (Films for the Humanities & Sciences, 1994).?Russell T. Clement, Univ. of Tennessee Lib., Knoxville
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The following paragraphs are taken from pages 3 and 4 of Vatican City.
In 313 A.D. an imperial rescript, commonly known as the Edict of Milan, acknowledged the Christians' right to religious freedom and restored to their cult places which had previously been confiscated. Between 320 and 350 A.D. there rose a great church on the grave of Peter the apostle; in order to erect this edifice, an entire burial ground, which had been expanding on the slopes of the Vatican Hill near Nero's and Caligula's Circus, was covered and leveled.
The pilgrim or tourist who today arrives in this square has difficulty imagining the period during which the small homes of the guards, shelters for pilgrims and those lodgings (dating from the 5th century) given to the Pope, resident of the Lateran, so that he might stay overnight for the liturgical celebrations, neighbored the then recently-erected basilica. All so very modest and precarious that the simple drippings of rain water from the roof of the basilica caused these buildings serious damage! It was not until the Jubilee of 1600 that the pilgrims saw, for the first time, the dome of the new church which was triumphantly enlarged, crowned by a bronze ball and a cross, blessed by Clement VIII in 1597.
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