Admire the stage instead: "All eyes are on one man's achievements as the world's television cameras dwell on the great spectacle being enacted in the Vatican. I'm talking, of course, about Michelangelo Buonarroti. It may officially be Pope John Paul II's week, but as a flatterer once told the sculptor, painter, architect and poet who conceived the dome of St Peter's, the world has many rulers, but only one Michelangelo...
There's not a stone in the Vatican that is not shaped, directly or indirectly, by Michelangelo. Even its fortifications, which you queue alongside to get into the papal museums, were built under his guidance. It is no exaggeration to say that everything we see in the TV images from Rome is the creation of one 16th-century mind.".
This book has been on my night stand since February. Now the ending is spoiled.
