Small Pleasures As Italy Reopens After Christmas Lockdowns

ROME (AP) — Much of Italy gingerly reopened Monday from pre-Christmas coronavirus closures, with the Vatican Museums welcoming a trickle of visitors to the Sistine Chapel and locals ordering their cappuccinos at outdoor tables for the first time in weeks.

While many European countries remain in hard lockdowns amid surging COVID-19 infections and variants, five more Italian regions graduated to the coveted “yellow” category of risk starting Monday. That meant museums and the Colosseum could reopen, sit-down restaurant and bar service could resume during the day and many high schoolers could return to class part-time.

“Finally we can breathe again after this long period of staying at home,” waiter Elsafty Rashad said as he set up tables outside La Nonna Betta restaurant in Rome’s Ghetto neighborhood. “Without work, staying at home every day is too difficult for us young people who work, who have to pay rent and everything else.”

Italy is by no means out of the woods: The country is averaging around 12,000-15,000 new confirmed cases and 300-600 COVID-19 deaths each day. But it appears to have avoided the severe post-Christmas surges in Britain and elsewhere thanks to tightened restrictions over the holiday that kept ski slopes closed and prevented residents from traveling outside their regions for big family get-togethers.

Many travel restrictions remain in place, along with indoor and outdoor mask mandates, a 10 p.m. curfew, limits on public transport and other social-distancing norms aimed at preventing the health system from buckling under.

Tuscany, for example, was declared “yellow” last week and on Monday its famed Uffizi Gallery reported that around 7,300 visitors had already passed through its doors. Museum director Eike Schmidt said he hoped the government would allow the museum to reopen on weekends too even though for now, visitors are almost exclusively locals since interregional travel is still restricted.

In Rome, Monday’s “yellow” designation meant that the Vatican Museums welcomed visitors for the first time in 88 days — its longest closure ever. Museum director Barbara Jatta said staff took advantage of the weekslong closure to rearrange some exhibit halls and do maintenance work that would otherwise be difficult to complete with the nearly 7 million visitors who normally flock to see Michelangelo’s “Last Judgment” and Raphael masterpieces each year.

“I think it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see it so empty,” marveled Julia Lammer, a visitor from Austria who said she had been in Rome for several weeks before being able to snap up a ticket online to see the Sistine Chapel on the first day it reopened.

Italy, the first country in the West to be hit by COVID-19, shuttered its museums in early November during the peak of its autumn resurgence and divided the country up into a three-tier zone of risk, with regions assigned the most severe restrictions (red) to the least (yellow) based on their infection rates and the health care system’s ability to respond.

Hardest-hit Lombardy was declared a “red zone” as it once again succumbed to high numbers of infections and dead. But even Lombardy graduated to “orange” on Monday, allowing shops to reopen and takeout service at restaurants and bars. Not all stores took advantage, though, with many still shuttered on a typically slow Monday morning.

In Rome, where the “yellow” designation and reopenings coincided with a hint of a spring day, residents were out taking full advantage.

“We couldn’t wait,” said Giulia Marcelli as she soaked in the morning sun. “Look, the very first morning I am here with my papa getting a cappuccino, sitting at a table, outside.”
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By TRISHA THOMAS and ELISA COLELLA

Nicole Winfield contributed to this report.

Vatican, Rome's Jewish Museum, Team Up For First Joint Show

ROME (AP) — The museums of the Vatican and Rome's ancient Jewish community

 are hosting their first joint exhibit, building on decades of improved Catholic-Jewish

 relations following centuries of mistrust.

The focus of the exhibit opening in May will be the menorah, the seven-armed

 candelabrum described in the Jewish Torah and depicted in Jewish, Catholic

 and secular art over the centuries.

Through figurative art, the exhibit "recounts the multi-millennia, incredible and

 suffered history of the menorah," organizers said in a statement Monday announcing 

the initiative.

Part of the show will explore the legend of a solid-gold menorah that was kept in 

the first Temple of Jerusalem. The menorah was taken to Rome after the 70 A.D.

 destruction of the temple by troops of the Roman emperor Titus.

The historic trail of the menorah seems to have been lost during the 5th century,

 when it was possibly hauled off by the Vandals who sacked Rome in 455.

Arnold Nesselrath, a Vatican Museums official who is one of the show curators,

 called the exhibit about the menorah's history and symbolism a fruit of "intense

 dialogue" developing between the Holy See and the Jewish community in the

 last three decades.

Representations of the menorah throughout the centuries helped "Christians

 recall their Jewish roots" in faith, he said.

Nesselrath noted that an image of a menorah is frescoed on a wall of the Vatican's

 Borgia Apartment built for Pope Alessandro VI. His papacy began in 1492, the

 same year Jews in Spain were ordered expelled.

Since Rome's Jewish Museum is tiny, most of the 130 works on display will be

 hosted at the Vatican Museums' Carlo Magno exhibit space in St. Peter's Square.

One of the highlights is expected to be a recently discovered bas relief from a 1st

 century Galilee synagogue. Ancient Roman glass, sarcophagi and memorial stone

 tablets from Rome's Jewish catacombs also we be featured.

Marc Chagall and Nicolas Poussin are among artists to be represented in the exhibit.

The Jewish Museum flanks Rome's main synagogue. The late Pope John Paul II

 became the first pope to visit a synagogue when he went there in 1986. On that

 occasion, he referred to Jews as "our older brothers in faith."

Lending museums for the exhibit, which runs from May 15 to July 23, include

 the Louvre and London's National Gallery.

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This version has been corrected to show the exhibit's closing date is July 23, not July 27.