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Lying on the Floor of the Sistine Chapel Maria Elser “No, no, no, no! You did it all wrong,” my nonno explained in his slight Italian accent. At thirteen years old, I saw an image of Michelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam” in an art history textbook and my love for the Sistine Chapel was born. The intricacy of the angels, the cracking, weathered paint, the emotional chord that is struck when one imagines God reaching out to the first created man with a gentle paternal love. From the moment I studied this painting, my dream destination became the Sistine Chapel in Rome, and I daydreamed about little else. I would concoct vivid scenes of me entering the doors as the subtle smell of incense reached my nose. In complete solitude, I would only hear the sound of my shoes echoing softly off the chapel walls. Just then, I would walk to the middle of that beautiful chapel and raise my eyes to the painting that brought me there: “The Creation of Adam.” This past summer, in my twentieth year of life, I finally saw the Sistine Chapel. And it was nothing like I had imagined. I went in the afternoon on a late July day with a sweltering temperature of 98 degrees. I funneled through the chapel doors shoulder to shoulder with
hundreds of other tourists. The smell of the Sistine Chapel? Any incense that had been burned or was being burned was imperceptible. With so many people bustling in and out, it smelled like nothing in particular. The sound of the Sistine Chapel? I could only hear the hundreds of people failing to whisper. The occasional security guard would scold someone for speaking too loudly. Every so often, a guard barked into a megaphone, “Attenzione. Silenzio. No fotos.” I finally plowed through the crowd like a linebacker to reach the room’s center and gaze upon the painting that had brought me some 4,450 miles. That painting which I had stared at in books and on computer screens for the last seven years was finally there above me, stretched across that stunning ceiling. It was much smaller than I anticipated, but no less breathtaking. God was reaching out to the first created man above my very head. But still, the madness pressed in all around me. When I got back to the States, I told my nonno of the outcome of this longawaited experience at the Sistine Chapel. A native of Italy, he had walked through that chapel dozens of times when he still lived there in his youth. I told him of it all: the disappointing smell of nothing, the overwhelming bustling bodies, and
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