Suffering for your art: St Peter's Basilica

Or how I understood Baroque.

It's been a week since we were in Rome and I'm still processing the experience. My main objective was to understand Baroque art, but you can't really do this as an intellectual exercise. Baroque is about emotion, so you need to see and experience it - or at least, this was what people thought in the Georgian period.

One of our key missions was to visit St Peter's Basilica. My husband visited it in his youth and was quite surprised to see the epic queuing involved today, which seems to be the a result of two factors: 1) global tourism and 2) airport-style security. In 1972, a Hungarian clambered over the altar rail in St Peter's and attacked Michelangelo's Pietà with a geologist's hammer, so don't go thinking you will just stroll in.

As with most places in Rome, there are plenty of people trying to sell you 'skip the line' tickets, but you can't actually skip the airport-style security and I was happy to queue. Well, in the abstract.

While we were dithering about how to approach this most British of problems, the gates opened and a crowd flooded in, taking us with them; I must admit that, as the crowd constricted and began squeezing us on all sides, I panicked a bit, but luckily, people started shouting at each other and soon the crowd widened again. I didn't look at my watch but we probably shuffled in that queue for maybe an hour, maybe an hour and a half.

If you want to really understand the Italians, or international relations, you could do worse than stand queuing for the Basilica - things were fine until we were in sight of the steps leading to security scanners. An Italian had her umbrella up, and an Italian behind was moaning about the stupidity of opening this 'ombrello' in such a small space, and then somebody else (American or Canadian) voiced his displeasure at the inefficiency and tried to skip the queue. We saw him, disappearing up ahead, where he was duly locked out by determined tourists.

That was all fine, but then things kicked off when a tour guide also tried to skip the queue, taking all her charges with her. We had been watching the progress of the Polish scouts, who had just reached the scanners, as a kind of marker of our own position in the queue, but were now obliged to push forwards onto the steps or lose out to a group streaming in from the side. Much arguing commenced, which the Italians in front helpfully conducted in English ("We're part of a group!" shouted the tour guide, "So are we!" they shouted back, gesturing at the hundreds of people behind).

I think the tour guide was also locked out as we finally surged forward and slammed our belongings onto the scanner.

Despite all this, St Peter's is definitely worth the wait. After only a few days I had developed a major obsession with Bernini, so it was great see his colonnades on each side of the Basilica, topped with classical statues, as well as the impressive facade by Donato Bramante (check out those Corinthian columns).

I was also looking forward to seeing Bernini’s celebrated Baldachin, but that was entirely covered with scaffolding. However, I did enjoy his monument to St Peter - a vast bronze sculpture topped by a window showing the dove of the holy spirit - along with his funerary monument to Pope Alexander VII.

The Pope Alexander VII monument (below) was designed by Bernini but sculped by assistants; it's so large that they had to remove a fresco and move a doorway forward to install it. According to my guidebook, Bernini incorporated the doorway into the design as a symbolic entrance to eternity. There is a billowing marble drape above it, with a skeleton emerging from underneath, holding up an hourglass.

For some reason, the thing that really stuck in my mind is that, while we were admiring this spectacle, a member of staff emerged through the doorway in the statue, sighed loudly and mimed doing up his flies.

Just a little joke for the tourists in this most theatrical of cities.