Holy orders

‘No flash! No flash! Mama mia, four times I tell-a you, ma you do it again!’ The anger of the sacristan of the church of S. Agostino rolled past Caravaggio’s ‘Madonna dei Pellegrini’ and struck a Japanese with a beatific smile fixed under a digital camera who was clicking away in the direction of Bernini’s altar and the ‘Madonna of St Luke’, igniting explosions of light. At the back of the church, meanwhile, a thirty-something woman knelt silently before Sansovino’s ‘Madonna del Parto’, to whom the Romans pray for the safe delivery of a child.

Defending the holiness of Rome’s historic churches is — and probably always has been — a constant battle. I saw skirmishes in most of the 20 or so that I visited in the long weekend I spent there just after Christmas. I got caught in the crossfire myself, in the Chapel of the Holy Relics in Santa Croce in Gerusalemme.