By Bob Van Leer

  (ROME, ITALY, Sept. 22, 1994) - On our last day in Italy and on this tour, we spent much of the morning at the Vatican and a brief trip to the coliseum.

  The Vatican is country within a country. Completely independent since 1929, the Vatican cover 108 acres and has 700 inhabitants. The Pope is both the spiritual and temporal leader.

  The prime attractions at the Vatican are St. Peter's Basilica, the Sistine Chapel and the Vatican museum. St. Peter's is the largest church in Christendom and its dimensions are staggering. It would be a monumental feat to build today and an incredible one in the 1500s.

   As with many of these buildings, it was not all built at once as we see it today, but started in 1506 and basically completed by 1614. The first structure was built as a shrine for the mortal remains of Peter. The present building is in the form of a huge cross and Peter's grave is under the crossing point.

  It's dimensions are huge. The length is about 680 feet, longer than two football fields. The height of the dome (designed by Michelangelo) is about 440 feet. It has a crowd capacity of 50,000 people. Works of art grace the church at every turn.

  Perhaps the most famous is Michelangelo's first Pieta. It now has to be viewed behind glass. About 20 years ago a crazed man attacked the marble statue with a hammer. The statue has been repaired and our guide said the attacker is still in a mental institution.

  The facade of the church uses stone from the Roman coliseum. Inside the church are bronze structures made of metal removed from the Pantheon. Connected to the church is the Sistine Chapel, the private chapel of the pope, with Michelangelo's famous ceiling painted from 1508 to 1512. Cleaning of the frescoes (and all of St. Peter's) has just been completed with a grant of $23 million from Nippon Television Network, Tokyo. Photos of the old compared to the cleaned paintings shows a striking difference.

  The Sistine Chapel is where the College of Cardinals meets to elect a new pope. By tradition, when a vote is taken and no pope is elected, black smoke comes out of a chimney in the chapel. If one is elected, white smoke comes out. There is no stove and chimney in the chapel so a temporary one is set up when the college meets.

  The Vatican Museum Gallery was opened to the public in 1721. Traffic through the gallery, chapel and church is intense. The peak day so far was over 19,000 people. The gallery must be a couple of miles long and houses thousands of pieces of art in the form of sculptures, paintings and tapestries.

ROMAN COLISEUM

  The Coliseum (actually the Flavin Amphitheater) was begun in 72 A.D. and finished eight years later. It is elliptical in shape and, on the long axis, just over 600 feet long. It was built as four-story structure and could seat 50,000 and it could be covered. It was used for six centuries. Only about a third of the structure remains. In the Middle Ages it was used as a quarry for materials for other projects. Under the arena floor was a complex system to hold wild animals being used for fighting and dressing rooms for gladiators. Gladiators often fought to the death and it is estimated 2000 were killed before the practice was outlawed in 404 A.D. Men also fought animals and animals fought other animals. Other entertainment was presented in the coliseum also.

  In the evening we went for a final "farewell dinner" at a nearby restaurant. But this one was shorter. It was now time for most of us to go back home and most of us have early flights. One couple is going onto Hungary and one is staying over in Rome for a few days. Betty and I and Scott and Sherry have to leave the hotel at 5:45 a.m. to catch an 8:40 a.m. flight. For international flights, airlines want you there two hours early.

  We fly to Dulles airport outside Washington, D. C., then to Chicago and finally to Portland where we are scheduled to arrive at 9:53 p.m. Since we will be regaining the nine hours we lost coming over, this will be the equivalent of arriving at 7:00 a.m. Saturday. Betty and I will spend the night with Sherry and Scott and drive home Saturday. We will be tired but it has been a grand trip.