Tourist or Pilgrim? Art Historian Elizabeth Lev on How to Visit the Vatican
The Rome-based art historian explains what most visitors miss, how to experience the Vatican beyond the checklist, and why St. Peter still gives the city its meaning.
Elizabeth Lev has spent decades helping visitors understand the Vatican, the churches of Rome, and the art that has shaped the Christian imagination for centuries.
In this conversation, we discuss:
What most people really mean when they say they want to “visit the Vatican”
How to approach Rome and the Vatican as a pilgrim rather than merely a tourist
What makes a good guide — and how to avoid superficial, scandal-driven tours
The essential places to see in Rome beyond the standard checklist
Why art still has the power to move people in an age saturated with images
How the tomb of St. Peter and the tradition of pilgrimage shaped the city of Rome itself
More than a guide to sightseeing, this is a conversation about wonder, beauty, and the deeper meaning of visiting the heart of the Catholic world.
Transcript
Intro: Elizabeth Lev is an American art historian who has spent decades helping visitors unlock the riches of the Vatican collections and the artistic heritage of Rome. A graduate of the University of Chicago and the University of Bologna, she's known for bringing the history, symbolism, and spiritual meaning of Rome's art vividly to life. She has even consulted with Hollywood productions filming in Rome, helping actors and filmmakers understand the city they're trying to portray on the big screen. She has witnessed Rome during some of its most intense moments, the deaths of three popes, papal conclaves, the massive waves of visitors during Jubilee years, which means she has seen the best and the worst of how Rome and the Vatican are explained to the millions who come searching for something here. In this conversation with Catholic News Service, she shares how the Vatican is a place she shares her passion for art, the essential things to see on a once-in-a-lifetime trip, and why preparing to visit Rome as a pilgrim rather than merely a tourist may be the key to discovering the deeper power of this ancient city.
Robert Duncan: Liz Lev, thank you for sitting down with Catholic News Service. You were one of the first people that I met when I moved to Rome 15 years ago, and it seems like everybody knows you. Tell us a little bit about what you do and why is it that you are such a monument in the city of monuments?
Elizabeth Lev: It’s funny, I was just looking at you and remembering when I met you all those years ago, and look at you now, this amazing figure. You even cut a fine figure. So I’d say, wow, what a remarkable journey we’ve made. Everything I do is connected to art. At the end of the day, the thing that keeps my economic boat afloat is I do tours. I’ve been doing tours since I passed the licensing exam in 2000 or 2001, whatever it was. And I teach art history, fortunately. It’s very nice to be able to have students to pass this on to between the University of Mary, which has a Rome program, and of course the Angelicum, which is always great to be among Dominicans is something I think we would agree. And I do a lot of writing about art. So it’s very fortunate to be able to not be an art historian as an amateur, but as a professional, which means that every minute of every day is concentrated on thinking about art.
Robert Duncan: How did you fall in love with art and where did you go to school? What courses of study did you take?
Elizabeth Lev: Well, I think it’s a kind of a funny origin. I think when I think back when I was a kid, what I really liked was mythology. I just read books and books and books and books. If it had a story about Zeus or Hera, I was always caught up in what they were doing. And I also liked biographies. I liked stories about people, things that people did. And in high school, when I was already sort of leaning towards becoming probably an English major, which was probably where I was going, some kind of lit major, I had a wonderful, wonderful high school teacher, these kind of many, many stories like this, who said, I’m doing an experimental art history class during Jan term, why don’t you take it? And she was one of those teachers. If she said, I’m going to teach you how to pick garbage, I probably would have said, sure. And we took this class. I got my copy of Gombrich, the story of art. And I remember coming home with that book under my arm and thinking, this is who I am. So I went to the University of Chicago for art history. And then for my graduate program, I went to the University of Bologna, mostly because Dante went there, but really because it was a method of looking at art that was very different from what the University of Chicago did. The University of Chicago was a very kind of clinical connoisseurship, looking at how works of art relate to other works of art in a kind of enclosed circle, which seemed to me to be a little sterile. The University of Bologna was very interested in context and really what one would say in the wine world, the terroir of a work of art. And so what are these factors in the soil, in the sun, in the wind, in the winemaker, in the grape itself, as it were, that produce these works that are unique to these places? You can’t have a Sistine Chapel in Venice. There will never be a charter in Sicily. It’s just the way that this art grows is very much connected to many different factors. And that’s where the art and the history come together. And ever since then, I’ve been hooked.
Robert Duncan: So how do you go from there in your studies to ending up in Rome and doing this in arguably the city — one of the cities that you’d want to live in and do it professionally?
Elizabeth Lev: My thesis was on, it was a fluke. I didn’t like Rome when I first came here. I remember going back after my first trip, thinking, oh my gosh, I can’t wait to get back to Bologna, which is a normal city. But eventually, as we got to the point where I was going to have to write a thesis, you don’t get to choose your thesis. They choose it for you. And so I was given a very small church here in Rome and I had to come back and forth to the archives. And gradually, this kind of coming back and forth to Rome, a few stints where I stayed here for a bit, I also remember the moment I was on the train going back to Bologna and thinking, I don’t want to leave this place. And then from there, it was only a matter of time till the will found a way. And I’ve been here, I think, since it’s right before Jubilee year 2000. So I must have arrived in 97 or 98.
Robert Duncan: How have you seen Rome change over those years?
Elizabeth Lev: Tremendously. As a matter of fact, when I first moved here, it was, it had to have been a little earlier than the Jubilee year because everything was so dingy and horrible. If you’re, oh, you haven’t been here long enough, but there was the place where they now have the five-star Exedra hotel near the baths of Diocletian was actually a porn cinema. And it was this beautiful construction they’d made at the turn of the century with that sort of wonderful fountain. But everything was just encrusted over, you avoided it like the plague. The buildings were all covered with dirt. The museums kind of had things hidden off in corners. In fact, one of my, with a painting of my thesis was like, no one knew where it was. I mean, we were like wandering around in back corners of the Barberini gallery, trying to, it wasn’t in the Barberini gallery, it was in the officers club next door, I mean, of all things. So, I mean, it was a really, it was very, it was kind of a tawdry city. And then suddenly this incredible energy started to be poured into the city, energy and money. And as I’d already decided to throw my lot into this little dreadful, dirty, almost third world corner. And then suddenly they started cleaning it up. And so first of all, the Jubilee year 2000, we saw this unveiling of this new face of Rome. And with a couple of moments of setbacks, it’s been a pretty steady upward journey. I mean, like every other Roman, I complain about the cantiere, but I really feel that our present mayor, politics aside, loves our city and wants the best for our city. So, I look at these really annoying things for traffic, but I keep remembering that when they come down, we get these really lovely piazzas. Few of them probably could have been thought out a little better, but still, I think we are on a very good upward trajectory.
Robert Duncan: I mean, even St. Peter’s Basilica for people, I mean, now it seems like it was a long time ago, but you remember before the Jubilee, if I have this right, the Basilica itself, the icon of Catholic Rome, was black.
Elizabeth Lev: First of all, it was black. And then it was covered in scaffolding. And then it was covered in scaffolding. I remember in ‘99 going around with people saying, yep, and underneath is St. Peter’s Basilica, oh, underneath that is the Trevi Fountain. I think somewhere in there is the Bernini’s Four River Fountain. It was just, but St. Peter’s Basilica, we just looked at that plywood and scaffolding and thought, hmm, I wonder if we’ll ever see that again, but now look at it.
Robert Duncan: So you mentioned earlier that you are a licensed tour guide. And that means also in the museums?
Elizabeth Lev: Yes, yes.
Robert Duncan: For people who don’t know, I mean, there’s this —
Elizabeth Lev: Italy governs the profession of tour guide. And to be a tour guide, one has to have a license, which is a more or less complicated examination process, depending on the government and power at the time. When I took it, the exam was regional, so you would become a tour guide of Lazio, and then there was the tour guides of Tuscany, and then there was, and so on and so forth. Actually, I was just talking to the head of the tour guide union yesterday, and she was regaling me with some very funny stories about how this works. But once upon a time, you received your license for a region. All the exams for Rome had been blocked for over 10 years by the tour guides who didn’t want new tour guides because they didn’t want the competition. So for 10 years, there was no exam until 2000, I think it was 2000. And from what I understand, 5,000 people showed up to take that exam. It was the first time in 10 years. Somehow, miraculously, I passed that exam and became a licensed tour guide. Now, in case people are curious, there’s been a new law passed, I think in the last year, year and a half, which created a national tour guide. So now, when one takes the guiding license, one will become a licensed guide for all of Italy. This is the weeds of Italian craziness, European craziness. But already, there had been a law passed in about 2015 or so, where if you have a guiding license, you can guide anywhere in Europe. So just apparently, you need, and now, everybody wants you to have a QR code because, of course, QR codes are the thing. But yes, it does require a license to guide. The Vatican Museums will honor an Italian license and then they have their own licenses that they distribute.
Robert Duncan: And, you know, to steel man, the argument for having to have a license, I mean, I’m sure you know lots of stories of people who have no licenses, people who solicit tours on the street. And, I mean, I remember hearing stories that people would point out a totally bogus information standing in St. Peter’s Square to unsuspecting tourists who would just say, oh, okay, that’s where the Pope’s swimming pool is, for example.
Elizabeth Lev: Yeah, of course, you have to kind of wonder about the people who sort of show up and let some random person tell them stuff.
Robert Duncan: It can be hard to know what to do.
Elizabeth Lev: Some responsibility of what you’re gonna learn might be in order. But yes, so the reason for the licensing, I mean, the reason for the licensing is that Italy likes to control everything. You’ve lived here long enough, you know everything has to be controlled. So, and then ostensibly, it is to assure the quality of the guiding. But I did spend five years on the examination board. I mean, I was one of the examiners. And I would have difficulty telling you that everybody who passed the exam was that much different than the characters that you’re pointing out. So I think when the exam used to require a high school education, so you needed a high school education to become a guide, then they passed another law that would make, if you had a degree in archeology, history, art history, you could take this exam upon which I was one of the commissioners on that exam to be able to turn that into a guiding license and the stuff I heard.
Robert Duncan: Can you, some examples of the wildest ones?
Elizabeth Lev: Let’s see, I think the one that really floored me, I could usually keep a pretty straight face during these things. But the one that really floored me was that we were coming up to June, we’re doing the exams and I’m like, okay, well, you have, it’s good news that we have this week, this Tuesday off because it’s June 29th. Like, yes, June 29th, it’s a holiday. And so what happened on June 29th? Well, no, it’s a holiday. I’m like, it’s a holiday that only Rome has, right? Nobody else has this holiday in Rome. Why, why? And the guide, this aspiring guide did not know that June 29th is a holiday in only Rome because it’s the feast of our patrons, St. Peter and St. Paul, who were traditionally martyred on that day. I mean, I tried saying, well, did you notice the big church? This guide was planning on becoming a guide where she would be doing tours of the Vatican without knowing, like, why we have this Peter and Paul. They tried to get around, like, how about the two guys who came to Rome? It was just an, that was, and I remember being so surprised. And she, oh my gosh, she was, she was unhappy. She showed up, I think, a few weeks later with a very large boyfriend trying to, like, catch me in a corner to tell me what was what, but that did not work out.
Robert Duncan: So I want to talk more about the tours that you do, but you also have this trained art historian background. So how did you, how have you mixed over the course of your career, your specialization in art history? Have you worked on papers or — I think you’ve written a book?
Elizabeth Lev: So I, the way I try to incorporate are the way that these things all mesh together, and they do, they mesh together very well. It’s, it never really fails to amaze me how it feels very providential when I’m working on something that happens to dovetail with something else and it works out great, that it just makes a tour that maybe I’ve been doing for years and I’m beginning to feel like, ugh, again, and then suddenly it’s all exciting again. So I find that a very, a truly providential aspect of my work. I, for example, my thesis, which was, it’s about counter-reformation art. It’s like it hit your head against the wall, kind of, you know, and I said, then the Council of Trent, and then they wrote this treatise. But, you know, the things I learned, which were kind of heavy and dry, when it got to be 2017, and, you know, we’re talking about the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation, it became very apparent to me that some of those arguments that we had made, that I, you know, that people were making at the time of the counter-reformation were very similar to what we were living with today. And so all of that work I did in the thesis, which I had been sort of incorporating in my teaching since I was teaching a Baroque art class, suddenly found a way to, it just, it made sense to turn it into a book where you could actually see, and I really do see it this way, that in the course of the late 16th century to the early 18th, late 16th century to the late 17th century, there are a series of questions that are confronted in art that are very close to the heart of the Catholic Church, so sacraments and intercession. And that, the works of art, these famous works of art that people love so much, respond to these questions in a very public way. And so that’s how the book, how Catholic Art Saved the Faith came into being. And so I think it’s been very, very fortunate. And to the touring, there is an aspect of what I do, where you kind of, you’re an art historian, you want to have graduate students and you want to just like, you know, sit in a little room with the people who are writing down every word from your lips and you hear my ideas and I’m gonna pass my ideas into the future and I’m going to be, but you know, I, as I tell an old friend of mine, I’m a grunt, I’m a grunt. My dad was a Marine. I feel like I’m a, I’ve got, that’s, I prefer to be in the trenches. So I don’t teach graduate students. I teach students who are really approaching art history for the very first time. And that’s good, because there is a sort of divorce between art and the public and it’s nice to be able to try to create bridges, but also to remind people that art’s not just like whatever you feel or I’m gonna look at this and see this, if you’re going to use art as a means, particularly to communicate the faith, you better have some sort of methodology behind it. So that’s, I’m very excited that I get to do that. I’m very happy that I get to write and sometimes I even get to write things that are academic, but the bread and butter of my life, those tours is hugely important because it is a different circumstance from teaching. The students, I’m holding the grade book. I’m just not gonna get that much pushback. In the other hand, in a tour, the client is holding the pocket book and they want their questions answered. And so they will hold my feet to the fire. Some will hold my feet to the fire and say, I don’t understand this. Why is this? Well, this doesn’t really make sense. How does this work? And so you learn, you have to learn to not just speak in ways that sound great to you and make you feel like you sound super smart, but you have to learn to speak in a way that speaks to many different people. I may have an engineer in front of me. I may have someone who didn’t make it out of fifth grade and each one of these people deserves an explanation and a way of talking about art that is accessible to them. And without those people, then I would just be stuck in my little classroom mode or my little island of writing in front of my computer and how I sound so great in my own head. So I’m very grateful that I have all of these outlets that allow me to try to make the communication about art as universal as possible.
Robert Duncan: The Church now and for the last several decades has been looking for, really since the Second Vatican Council, a new way to reach and talk to people, especially those outside the Church or who’ve been alienated from the Church. And because you’re not a priest, you’re not a religious, you get these questions in your tours. And so, I mean, it seems to me like you have privileged access to what maybe people are thinking and what the challenges are, especially when you consider that a lot of the time when people come to the museums, I’m sure you get this also some, well, why doesn’t the Church just sell all of this and give it to the poor? So what have you learned about how to reach people? You talk about art specifically, but what lessons might be more universal?
Elizabeth Lev: When I was studying at University of Bologna, I had a professor named Anna Maria Matteucci, who I think was about four feet tall. She was a world-famous, she worked in architecture. She was a world-famous art historian among the very elite world of art history. And we were a little cohort of art history grad students in her class, and we’re so cool that we’re studying art history. I think we might’ve all worn black. And she asked a question, we were studying Renaissance art. She asked a question about a 19th century poet, no, a 20th century poet. And I remember all of us kind of looking at each other like, we’re not doing 20th century poetry. This isn’t our thing. And little forefoot Anna Maria Matteucci smacked her foot on the floor and said, you are art historians. You have chosen the hardest part. You have to know everything. And that’s really the approach that I take to this job. That if there’s something I don’t know, it is my obligation to know it. If I don’t know how to explain, if I’m sitting here talking about a painting that elicits questions, I’m talking about the Pieta that elicits questions about Mary. It elicits questions about how the Christians think about life and afterlife. It is my job to go and to be able to answer those questions to the best of my ability. I mean, to the best of my ability, I’m not gonna be a theologian or a philosopher anytime soon, but with enough thought and enough asking people who do know and reading on my own, I can come up with a plausible answer for people. And if I can’t, I can always say, I don’t really know how to answer that question. But I have made it the point over the past almost 30 years that I’ve been doing this job. I don’t like not being able to answer a question. So if I didn’t know, I would go home and study until I did know, which is very much in keeping with all the Renaissance artists I admire, all the people that I look to in my studies who were the sort of people that Brunelleschi, how am I gonna put the cupola up? I don’t know, but I’ll figure it out. I mean, he left Florence after he lost a competition, said, I’m not coming back until I can do something better than the rest of the Florentines. Michelangelo says, I’m gonna paint a ceiling for you. Like, but Michelangelo, no one’s ever painted stories on the ceiling and you don’t paint. Yeah, I’ll figure it out. So there is something about this wonderful
Robert Duncan: Is that true?
Elizabeth Lev: He painted very little. He had frescoed, he had studied fresco under Ghirlandaio from about 13 to 15, according to him. As I like to point out to my students, he basically slept through fresco class because he planned on becoming a sculptor. We know he did a panel painting and we know he was set up to compete with Michelangelo. So clearly they knew that he could do it, but he just didn’t have the practical experience. And plus what he was planning on doing on the ceiling, which is to do a series of narratives. That’s not been done before. People do narratives on walls, but not on ceilings. So really he did plan something that was beyond what could be done and then he did it. And so there’s something about these characters or even the first professional female painter, the woman who first said in 1580, I’m gonna set up a studio and let’s see what happens. I mean, I’m surrounded by the most extraordinary examples who just tell me, work hard, right? It’s the same beauty of the American work ethic, which I find in these people, the sense of apply yourself, work hard, be bold and you can do it. And I love that gratification of finding myself in the company of these people who did that. So, you know, it can be done.
Robert Duncan: So your domain, which is as it pertains to the Vatican at least is the museums. And when people say they’re going to go visit the Vatican, they really mean the museums and the Basilica, I think, right?
Elizabeth Lev: Yes. And so- It really just means hill. It’s the name of the hill, but okay.
Robert Duncan: Right, right, right. So what can you tell us about what is actually available to be seen when people go visit the Vatican? I mean, when people say, I’d like to see the Vatican, maybe it doesn’t sound to them immediately like they’re talking about a museum and going to the Louvre or something like that. But what does it mean to visit the Vatican and how are the museums that access point for, really, the masses?
Elizabeth Lev: So I think it’s an interesting question. I think what people are really interested in is this teeny tiny state with this strange, mysterious history to it, this figure that the world stops while we wait to vote in our next, when the Pope dies, the whole world stops. And whether you like it or not, whatever religion you are, wherever you are, you got to sit and wait for this group of Catholics to go, this group of guys to go choose this next guy, and then you go back to the regularly scheduled programming. So clearly there’s something about this tiny little space that has a prestige and a mystery to it. So many parts, many elements, they really just want to penetrate into this mystery. Now it depends on whether you’re talking about a person who has no sort of Catholic or Christian experience whatsoever, or you’re talking about the religious pilgrim who for that person, the Vatican, is where St. Peter will be as Petrus. And so where is Peter and where is Peter’s successor? And everything else is gravy because a big part of seeing the Vatican is seeing Pope Leo, as we can see by the fact that you can see outside your window the people spilling out every single Wednesday for the audiences. So the Vatican is remarkably open for visits. I mean, if you think about it, it’s a quarter square mile. You can go, 55% is garden, 45% is building. You can go into the gardens. They have all kinds of tours of the gardens. You can go out and see this theater of the universe. As it were, you have these plants that come from all over the world. You have these little monuments and statues that talk about devotions in different places. You can visit the museums, which is three and a half miles in and of itself and covers a huge stretch. And then of course, the most important part that people visit is St. Peter’s Basilica. The entry point, the calling card into the world at large is generally the museums because of the Sistine Chapel, because of the collection of ancient sculpture, because in the kind of the world of culture, the Vatican museums is the calling card. But there is the aspect of St. Peter’s where first of all, it’s free. And secondly, it has this approach of these big kind of open arms. That is kind of the magnet. And so I think people want to, when they’re thinking about what is there to see, they’re usually thinking about there must be something in the museum. But when they’re thinking about what is drawing them, whether they realize it or not, it’s that Basilica, the presence of Peter and that magnet, which draws people from everywhere.
Robert Duncan: Do you think that the Vatican does a good job? You said that the Vatican is open to visitors, but does the Vatican, the various institutions, the Basilica, the museums, do they do a good job connecting people with the faith or does it feel like you’re visiting a museum?
Elizabeth Lev: Ah, that’s an interesting and somewhat tricky question. There’s a lot of tension in the history of art. So the history of art, as you can well imagine, it’s a modern discipline. It’s not something that’s been around basically, I’d say the 19th century, the field really. Johan Winkelmann invented it in the 18th century. The 19th century, it becomes a field. Art history was created in a very Protestant milieu. Protestant would be the lighter end, moving into the world that was really more or less secular. And as art history developed, it developed in an increasingly secularized environment. Ergo, when we talk about, in art history, it is considered unfashionable, anti-intellectual and flat-out off-putting to try to link faith to art. Fortunately, in the past couple decades, that has changed. There have been some really important, really excellent scholars, whether it’s Rona Goffin or Galvin Bailey, which we have some amazing, amazing, amazing people, Marshall Hall, people I really admire who have done a wonderful job of bringing magnificent scholarship, Pamela Jones and Roman altarpieces and their viewers, the magnificent sculpture as a scholarship without fear of following where the thread of faith might bring you. So instead of it being a hard no, we’re just gonna talk about this in this clinical form, these scholars have been willing to talk more and more about how the faith might inform the art. That, however, is very still, unfortunately, fringe. And most of the time, the religious element of a work of art is treated the same way. Bon temps, you don’t talk about politics and you don’t talk about religion. And so, unfortunately, when we look within the didactic services of the museums in the Basilica, I mean, there are many people who have gone on the Scobie tour, the tour that has the excavation where you go to see Peter’s bones, only to walk out of there asking, did I see Peter’s bones or not? And you have people going through the Vatican museums occasionally on sort of official tours where you’re hearing far more about the scandalous behavior of the popes than the sort of redemptive art that they attempted to produce in order to create the legacy that we have today. So I think it is not exactly hidden that I have some questions about the way the Basilica is run at this exact moment. I have great admiration for the Vatican museums and what they have to do. To accommodate in a very small space, 30, 35,000 visitors a day. I appreciate more than I can possibly say, and I will always stand in their corner, I will fight by their side, the desire to try to limit as little as possible. And I know that people look at this like they’re just, it’s just a cash cup, but that is not the reasoning that the director is using nor the Governato Rato. The concern that I would have about limiting, the only way you can limit these people, limit the number of people, yes, you’re right, limit the number of people who come into the museum, the only way you can limit them is by making the tickets, the only people proposed for limiting is by making the tickets more and more and more expensive. And that becomes a world of art which is limited to a very, very few. And I don’t, I mean, true, the art of the Vatican museums was originally limited to a very, very few, but over the course of 500 years, the Vatican museums has found ways to open that collection and let those works speak to everybody with the most amazing results. So I admire a great deal the way that the Vatican museums is constantly thinking. It’s a very dynamic institution that’s always coming up with things. And the things that people don’t like, like how come I can’t take my pictures in the Sistine Chapel, or even me, I don’t like- What is the reason? Because it makes people move. So I can’t explain in the Sistine Chapel, they don’t let guides explain in the Sistine Chapel, which breaks my heart. And you can’t take pictures in the Sistine Chapel, why? Because if you’re not explaining and people can’t sit there doing selfies, they’ll be out the door in half the time, in two thirds of the time, so it keeps people moving. It is a very intelligent way of using human nature to just allow the flood to go. They come up with all kinds of interesting ideas and I find it very, very, very, very interesting that they’re so proactive in trying to resolve this problem. The problem that I see in the problems of the Basilica are a little bit more complicated, but a problem I see in both cases is a lack of respect for the person of the guide. That’s not for me. Personally, I hear I’m treated very, very well, so obviously I would never lament how I’m treated because I really, for a person who’s a foreigner who came to this country, the way I’ve been welcomed and the way I’ve been treated, I have nothing but gratitude to Italy and the Vatican. But I do see that the figure of the guide, and again, my friend who is the head of the guide union of all of Italy, the government, and even many times the Vatican administrations of both the Basilica and the museums, treat guides as feudal workers. As feudal workers. I mean, the contracts they’re given are feudal. They are, you are tied to the land and you will do nothing else. But even the way that they were addressed in the course of the Jubilee year, the guides at the St. Peter’s Basilica were really made to feel persona non grata. It was a hard year where they were really openly scorned and kept aside. Their work was, they were embarrassed publicly on several occasions. So, I mean, you wonder.
Robert Duncan: Do you think that that’s because maybe they’re, to accommodate the number of pilgrims, there were a lot of guides who maybe weren’t up to a certain standard and so they became, as a class.
Elizabeth Lev: Oh, it had nothing to do with standards. What people were saying or how, what kind of guides, no, it had nothing to do with that. It simply had to do with this plan to control the flow of tourists. They planned to create the fast pass line. There were a number of things that were being put into place for the Jubilee year that needed organization and they found that the guides were just, sort of a necessary evil to bring the paying, the people who are paying for the headsets, the people who are paying for the passes. The only function they have is just to bring these people through. And it really was a difficult year. However, I’ve just been taking the online course for the Basilica to become an official Basilica guide, which I must say is a truly beautiful piece of work. The technology, I wish they’d talked to you, but it’s a beautiful piece of work. And to listen to Dr. Pietro Zander explaining to us aspirante guidee, that how we know the bones of Peter are there and the excitement he has. He’s been on that site for 40 years and he’s talking into a camera and he’s so excited that I, I’m like, I wanna go to St. Peter’s, I wanna go to St. Peter’s right now. So the way they transmit, they had the parish priest of St. Peter’s, they have this, it’s a beautiful piece of work so that if a guide really wants to be well-informed and well-formed, they actually have a system with which that can be done. So that set. I do think there was a kind of an unfortunate divorce between the guides and in particular the Basilica, but it’s not just the Basilica, it’s really the state itself, which will inevitably side with these huge tour operators so that the tour operators have control to all the access to the sites and the tickets. And so a guide has to put him or herself, again, in a feudal position underneath an agency. These are people who, many of these guides, advanced degrees, these are people who love the city, these are the, this is the face that is the link between the city and the tourist.
Robert Duncan: So you are saying that they were mistreated by Rome, by the Italian state?
Elizabeth Lev: Oh, by both. I mean, I really, it’s a blanket situation where the figure of the guide, I don’t think is really respected enough and you can say, and I know, I know you and I have had these conversations a million times about the bad guides and the, but the bad guides are actually not the norm. I mean, there are plenty of people who get off the plane and they, you know, get a guidebook and if you’re gonna fall for that, you’re gonna fall for that. Again, I repeat, some of it is on the shoulders of the tourist, but there are so many guides here who I go to, I’m walking in the Vatican Museums and I see guides by themselves studying. I go to these shows, I know, I give lectures to guides and the room is full and they’re whole, they try to learn and they try to improve because they love their job and they love their country and most of them, most of them are these people. And so to have to be treated all the time, like you’re some charlatan or your job is to simply be the person who takes the group of people that are really going to be dropping money at the restaurant and the ticket booth and the gift shop, your job is just to lead them to the places where they can, like your job is to lead the sheep so that they can be shorn. Really, it undermines the dignity of the figure and so since these are the only people actually talking to the tourists, that’s an excellent way to burn them out, to make them tired, to make them not enthusiastic about what they’re talking about. So if I were to say one thing between A, the Vatican and B, the Italian state is, why don’t you put a little bit more trust and support into the figure of all of these guides we have?
Robert Duncan: It’s encouraging to hear you say that there are a lot of very good guides, especially for people who may be planning a trip to Rome. I have a couple of different directions I’d like to go but maybe now would be a good time to ask: I mean, first of all, what advice would you have for someone who is maybe planning, as many people do who do come to Rome, it’s a once in a lifetime trip and they get on Google or maybe now they ask ChatGPT, what advice would you give to someone planning a trip to Rome in order to make sure that they get a good guide, besides going to your website, of course, and make the best of that possibly once in a lifetime trip?
Elizabeth Lev: Well, again, like everything, if you’re serious about something, you put a little time and effort into it. So first things first, I would say, leave yourself time. Now, if you, for whatever reason, travel expense, you don’t have a lot of time in Rome, I’m not a big fan of more bang for your buck. So you have to run and go see, you’ve got a checklist of 10 things you have to see in the course of the day and it really just involves walking in, looking at it and walking out. I don’t, why don’t you just put it on the TV and just look at the picture. It’s not, I would say that to leave enough time to actually experience the site. So make a decision about what you’re going to do and leave yourself time. And leave yourself time so that you’re not exhausted. And people live one kind of rhythm and then they come here and they think they’re gonna see 25 things in one day and they can’t understand when they’re tired. They’re not used to walking and then suddenly we have to walk for hours. They’re not used for standing and then suddenly you have to stand. So I think, try to, you don’t wanna have dead time where you’re just sitting there doing nothing but sucking down Aperol spritzes. But I think a certain sense.
Robert Duncan: It’s a perfectly valid way to spend time, by the way.
Elizabeth Lev: Yes, you are of course right. I mean, it’s a question of, first of all, there’s a question of time management. Second, when you go to choose a guide, we have many, many excellent guides. We have guides who are extraordinarily accomplished in this city. We have the people, when you see those digs, some of the same people who are the archeologists who dig that stuff, they’re doing your doors. I mean, it’s really quite remarkable what we have out there. And so I would say there is a way, you don’t have to give your guide a test, but I would tell you a couple of things. If you are approaching a historical site and the only thing your guide is telling you or the only thing you’re getting are scandal stories, that’s the refuge of the lazy. That’s the refuge of someone who really doesn’t have a compelling story to tell and has no way of telling the story compellingly. And so the best you can do is to fall back on sex and scandal. You’ve got a bad tour right there. I mean, it’s fine. You drop it in, it’s funny. Alexander VI Borgia, always good for a laugh. Probably not in 1492, but fortunately we’re 500 years later. But the fact is that kind of touring is lazy and people who look for, accept that kind of tour, they are lazy. They feed the market. That’s your problem. If you don’t like your tours because they’re scandal, but they’re scandal-ridden, you think they’re superficial, it’s because you allow that to happen. So the other thing is I would really just read something, learn something, be more responsible about what they’re telling you. I’m not telling you you have to come here an expert on things, but it’s good for you to know that, oh, let’s start with The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci is not here. It’s in Milan. And so just, even when people read novels, it just, it gets you more excited. It gets you more prepared for what you’re gonna see and where you’re going to see it. So these are the things I would propose to bake. So be, manage your time well. So if you can have more time in Rome, that’s great. Leave time for you to not be sort of running around from thing to thing. You look for, when you contact a guide, talk about yourself. Tell who you are, what you’re interested in. I’m a first-time visitor. I’ve enjoyed seeing this. I’ve enjoyed seeing that. It’s like a sommelier. Sommelier, you had the giant, giant wine list. I don’t know what, people don’t know what kind of wine they want, but do you like, well, I like a dry, I like a little bit more fruity. I had this wine once. It was like this. It’s like that. I’ve traveled here. I’ve traveled there. I’ve really liked seeing the ancient sculptures in the Cairo Museum. It helps the guide to begin to get a sense, and the good guides will weave what you’ve, your experience into what they’re talking about. The more that you participate in your experience, the better the experience is going to be.
Robert Duncan: I hate to do this to you because it’s probably a mortal sin in your book, but most people want to see the Vatican, see the Roman Forum, Trevi Fountain, Colosseum, (that’s) probably a short list of what’s out in most people’s book. What are maybe three or five places or things to do that people don’t think to do that you would recommend them to do, even if it’s their first trip?
Elizabeth Lev: Well, the wonderful, there’s a wonderful Bernini-Borromini walk from, say, Santa Maria della Vittoria to Santa Andrea al Quirinale. So you can see the St. Teresa in ecstasy, and you can see this wonderful rivalry between Bernini and Borromini, between this all-white, sort of undulating church of Borromini and the theatrical Andrew going up to heaven in the St. Andrew of the Quirinale. And while you’re in the neighborhood, since it’s very close by, there’s St. Mary Major, which is really just an amazing, amazing church. And as a matter of fact, Mary Major is flanked by two other churches that have the most ancient, incredibly ancient mosaics. So Santa Pudenziana is the oldest Christian mosaic in Rome, and then Santa Braccede has this unique mosaic chapel. So you can see these different types of art forms. The Caravaggio crawl is always wonderful. Nice to start at Piazza del Popolo, which is the northern gate. That’s the way the visitors, if you had come to Rome in 1600, 1500, when Queen Christina came to Rome, that’s the way she came into the city. And so you have Caravaggio placed in the very first church that you encounter coming into the city and kind of thinking about why would you put a guy with an arrest record like that in the first church that you encounter in Rome, which gives us furiously to think. And then you can walk all the way down this wonderful road to Via della Ripetta and see four more of his paintings. And that’s a lovely, lovely thing to do. The San Clemente church with the three layers in one is another incredible site where you can just walk through Roman history. So you’ve got a Mithraic temple, you’ve got a fourth century church, you’ve got 12th century church. It’s really, it’s Roman history and kind of like a, it’s like an elevator speech for Roman history. And of course, the Galleria Borghese is my favorite museum of all. It’s the young Bernini producing his first sculptures, but really an example of art patronage, which is breathtaking. Scipione Borghese, he had some questionable ways of acquiring it, but I find it really hard to condemn him when I see that collection.
Robert Duncan: There are also all sorts of things that perhaps people don’t know about. And this, many Catholics might, but maybe not non-Catholic visitors to Rome. I mean, there’s the Scala Santa, the, I mean, the papal, the idea of a papal basilica and that there are multiple papal basilicas in Rome. Could you talk a bit more about that category of sort of pilgrimage sites or why they might be of interest also to non-Catholics?
Elizabeth Lev: Well, Christian Rome, I love it when people say, I’d like to do a Christian Rome tour. I’m like, well, let me see. We’ve got 360 churches here. I’m not quite sure where we’re gonna do, what we’re gonna do here. 360? Some people say 500, I think it’s 360 active ones.
Robert Duncan: Okay.
Elizabeth Lev: And you have them spread over the seven hills and there are incredible walks you can do to really experience the settling of Christianity into the city and then its growth and then its triumph. One of the places to start, however, if you’re gonna do that is with the catacombs, the Catacombs of Priscila, which have this amazing art. I mean, as an art historian, for me, the Catacombs of Priscila, which have the earliest Christian art in the world, that’s an unmissable thing. You have the First Madonna and Child. You have the Three Magi. St. John Lateran, which is where you’ll find the Scala Sancta, is actually the Cathedral of Rome. And it’s a church that, again, it’s sometimes hard to approach because it’s so piecemeal. It’s a strange looking church because it’s got statues from 1600 and a ceiling from 1500 and a Ciborium from 1300. And it kind of looks like someone’s eccentric aunt’s living room with a lot of brick and rack. But when you look at that museum, when you look at that church through the right eyes, what you’re looking at is 1700 years of Christian history. And it reminds you, in that one space, that this faith, since 313, has been working its way forth in the city. It was legalized in 313 by Constantine. It came up from the underground, the catacombs, the hidden churches, and it comes out onto the landscape. And it’s not easy. It’s a struggle for it to get into the heart of the city. And you can really trace that. You can go from St. John Lateran to the Church of Holy Cross, where we have these relics. When Helena goes to demonstrate, there was a cross that Jesus died on, and here it is. We have the Scala Sancta, which is the old chapel of the popes when they lived at St. John Lateran. Then you can go towards the San Clemente Church, which is remarkable. You can see the first, the St. Peter in Chains in 450, which is where Leo the Great built a church overlooking the Forum. So Christianity had been legalized now for 150 years, but the Christians still couldn’t get a church in the Forum because the resistance to Christianity, despite the fact that it’s the sole religion of the empire, they will not let them dang Christians into that Forum. And there is that Leo the Great builds this church of the Chains for the Chains of Peter, looking down. They’re now buildings, but you have to imagine once upon a time, it was looking down into the Forum, like the general before the next battle. And then you head down in the Forum, and in the Forum, there’s Cosmas and Damian, the first church the Christians managed to build in the Forum. So it’s really, it’s such an exciting tale to watch the Christians moving around in the city. The Caelian Hill with the site of the martyrdom of Saints John and Paul, and then this crazy round surround sound martyrdom church of Santo Stefano Rotondo. It’s everywhere you look, everything you walk into, there is some fragment memory of the Christian history, which just permeates the city.
Robert Duncan: I know you’ve also given a lot of tours because of how long you’ve been in Rome and your success in doing what you do. Certain VIPs, Hollywood types, I don’t know if you’re under any NDAs, but can you talk a little bit about some of the more famous people that you’ve shown around and what their reactions to the Christian story of Rome and the Vatican has been?
Elizabeth Lev: Well, my favorite was always taking Jim Caviezel. Every time they asked me to take Jim Caviezel around, I get excited because I get to take Jesus places. That’s always been my, I’m hoping one of these days, maybe I’ll get to take Jonathan Roumie, so I can have two Jesuses in my resume. But yes, so the way the tour business works is that usually the figures who are the Hollywood, the sets, the stuff like that, that’s usually set up. When a movie star, a famous person is in Rome, it’s usually through the concierge at a hotel, and that’s a different kind of work that I’m not interested in being tied to a concierge. That’s a different kind of call girl, but I’m not gonna be that kind of call girl either. But every now and then, because of some work I’ve done with production companies, they will call me up and they’ll say, we need you to take someone out. So this all began with the infamous Angels and Demons situation where the production company, which a friend of a friend worked for it, and wanted me as someone who knew something about Bernini to help with the Angels and Demons people. And so in the course of that, I met and I took Ron Howard and Tom Hanks and the rest of that gang around. One of my favorite memories is Ron Howard walking into St. Peter’s Basilica. He always wears his baseball cap. He walked into St. Peter’s, big coat baseball cap, and he swept the baseball cap from his head. And it was, no one had to tell him, it was just a, it was, you know when we talk about that gesture of respect of removing the hat? It was, you understood what that meant. And he just stood there, he turned into, I remember I was looking at him, he turned into like Opie, just this huge eyes looking at this place. And I really, I still see that in the movie, which, you know, leaving behind how I feel about Dan Brown. I see that love and that wonder of Rome in the movie, which I think it’s the redeeming quality for what is the most ridiculous story ever. And then I worked with the Conclave people, with the movie, that movie, who were charming. They were lovely. I find it hard to reconcile the, you know, completely uselessness of that, the complete uselessness of that book with the really delightful people who were on that tour. I mean, Ralph Fiennes was, I think he has a relative who is a theologian in the Anglican church. He had a lot of very interesting questions about why Peter. It was actually very, very fun. He kind of stood right in front of me and was like, so why is this Peter guy? And I was like, well, okay. And it was lovely. And he listened and he listened and he responded. And Stanley Tucci loves art. He loved l'Acquario. He loved the works of art, which is a beautiful thing. And I feel myself very, I consider myself again, very, very fortunate because the contact I have had with, you know, whatever these movie star people are, I usually get the thinking movie stars. So I get the people who actually think about things and want to know about things. Because first of all, to get to me, it’s complicated. Like someone’s gone to some trouble to put them in the room with me because that’s like, I’m just not the, I’m not the person that’s the guide for movie stars. So I usually get people who are thoughtful and people who are intelligent. I have taken around a few of the people who are completely self-absorbed and can’t see beyond them, something boring. So I never really wanted a career of taking around movie stars because I’d rather talk about Michelangelo than you.
Robert Duncan: I want to ask you also just about your passion and how, after all these years, you are someone who always is passionate about what you do. And although I know you have various issues as anyone does, you have not become cynical about any of this, as far as I can tell. And, you know, I just think that we’re in this scenario now where all these images, many of them at least, are online for people or we’re oversaturated with images. And it can be difficult to appreciate the way it would have been for someone from a different period in time, seeing a beautiful work of art, because that would have been such a unique experience. You know, we’ve got Hollywood and movies, Instagram, everything else. How have you retained your passion personally, but then also, how is it, as I think you would say it’s the case, that this place, the museums and the art that’s there, how does that still affect people despite what seems to be like the odds are against it?
Elizabeth Lev: Well, I think two thoughts come to mind. One, you don’t really get burned down on your spouse, your kids. I mean, you just, this is my, these works of art are my, I’ve known them longer than I’ve known my kids and my spouse. I mean, these have been what drew me to here, to this country to begin with. So art really never disappoints. I was up on the scaffolding in the last judgment this week and I was standing under Jonah. There was a lot going on. I was talking to somebody and then suddenly I turned around and I’m standing underneath Jonah and I felt something so powerful. It weakened my knees and I was like, I can’t believe, I think I might’ve said, now Lord, you may let your servant go in peace. I mean, it was just, to be there was something that I have seen and talked about, I don’t know how many hundreds of thousands of times, but I realized that it’s still there. It’s still, the spark is just as strong. Also, the other thing is cynicism. The only person you hurt with being cynical is you. The only thing you’re ruining is you. You’re not smart. I mean, I see cynical guides all over the place. I mean, it’s not intelligent, it’s not smart, it’s not energizing, it’s just draining and it’ll kill you. It’s a poison that will slowly kill you. I mean, a certain jaundiced view of the kookiness that goes over there and if my own head, I just treat it all like a giant sitcom. Like this is just, this is like a funny twilight zone. There’s some days where that’s, you’re just looking at it that way. I mean, in Rome, fortunately, I think you know this, Rome, we tend to laugh. I mean, we’ve been invaded a lot. We had Nazis and at a certain point, you just gotta be able to take a step back and go, I don’t know. So I think the humor is always a very good antidote for the cynicism, and a reminder constantly, I mean, we live in a city filled with saints, so there’s really no excuse to not be remembering this, but a reminder of the tremendous providence I’ve had to be here and what I do. I mean, complaining about my average day of work, I’m not gonna get a lot of traction with people. I have a very, very, very wonderful career and really to not, to descend into the, being unhappy about the various little things that don’t work the way I’d like them to, that would be a level of ingratitude, which would really be sinful. The fear of images, I’m not that concerned about images. I mean, one of the great steps forward, my frenemy in the history of art or my love-hate relationship is with Jacob Burckhardt, who wrote the history of Western civilization. And he is the man who gave us the thesis that Dan Brown is working on. He had studied theology and then realized he didn’t believe in God. Because of that, he really needed to create a thesis that these artists who are working for the church were not invested in the message of the church. And so it’s his work that every single morning I have to get up and deal with. But at the same time, he was the man who believed that art was forever. And so I think that’s a great example But at the same time, he was the man who believed that art was for everybody, that it was something that wasn’t supposed to be an elite thing where only the few who could travel or only the few who could get into these spaces. So he’s the one who pioneered the use of images in his lectures. But we’re talking about 1880, he’s getting photographs and he’s using these photographs. And what he was able to do was to get wet the appetite. And so the photographs are a lot better today, but all they’re ever really going to do is wet the appetite. Because when I was there in the Sistine Chapel this morning when the first group of people who had been waiting outside at eight o’clock, they came running into the Sistine Chapel when they opened the doors. And I was in that chapel when they walked in and happened to turn around long enough to see everybody going like this. Technology can do everything technology can do, but technology cannot take away the wonder of being in a space where 500 years ago, a little cranky guy wandered up on a scaffolding and just changed the way we see the story of salvation.
Robert Duncan: I want to bring the conversation to a close talking about one thing that many people who may not be Catholic, or even maybe if they are, may not know that you mentioned, you alluded to, but St. Peter. I think it’d be appropriate to conclude that the real motivation, or the real reason, or the original reason at least for Christians to come to this city was to see the tombs, the trophies of the apostles. So what would be your pitch for people who maybe never have been, to see their visit to Rome in that primary religious sense?
Elizabeth Lev: So this is a city that’s built on pilgrimage. It’s what it is. The ruins of ancient Rome, I’m leaving behind the ancient city, which is now in ruins. This is a city that is completely built on pilgrimage. The roads we have, the fountains we put in, the decoration, the reconstruction. It’s a city that has been welcoming pilgrims since Gaius wrote that letter which you were referring to to his friend in Asia Minor, come to Rome and I will show you the trophies of Peter and Paul. We have this movement of people here which has determined the way our streets are laid out, the obelisks you see, the way we recouped from the ancient Rome. It’s all about drawing pilgrims into this city, north, south, east, and west, leading them through this adventure of beauty and martyrdom and these many different figures that have walked through these streets and they culminates in the tomb of St. Peter who starts his career unable to catch fish in the Sea of Galilee, ends up, the head of the apostles, ends up in Antioch and then is crucified upside down here in the wake of Nero’s great fire, basically blamed for something, blamed for a fire over a real estate deal essentially. So he’s buried in this hole in the ground. To me, the most amazing thing about this city and again, something that never gets old, every single day talking about it. Peter was crucified upside down in the circus over by the Vatican Hill which was out of sight, out of mind. He was cut down off the cross, buried in the cheapest possible grave that they could come up with. It was a trench covered with some dirt, covered with some pieces of terracotta. That was the end of Peter except it wasn’t. So the Romans put Peter’s body in the ground. The Romans who had built those incredible structures, who took Rome a city of brick, changed it to a city of marble, they conquered everything. The Romans are people who do not make mistakes. They build roads from here to Russia and 40 mile aqueducts. They put his body in a hole in the ground and the Romans assumed they had taken out the trash. But what we see every single day, when you walk out the door, every single day you see it. What the Romans inadvertently did 2,000 years ago was plant a seed and in many ways, that seed which is the vertical of Peter’s body all the way up to the golden ball at the top of Michelangelo’s dome. That’s our beautiful symbol. Of all of these successors of St. Peter, these 267 successors to the present Pope Leo, this continuity in the vertical line and then spreading out like tendrils are these incredible works of art, whether it was the reconstruction of the Trevi Fountain to give pilgrims some fresh, clean water when they came to Rome, whether it’s the straight road that leads to St. Mary Major that allows you to get from Mary Major to the top of the Spanish Steps and see where you’re going. All of these things, they were built for pilgrimage. The entire city is meant to be seen under a Christian lens.
Robert Duncan: Elizabeth, thank you for sitting down with Catholic News Service.
Elizabeth Lev: Thank you very much. This was fun.