St. Paul's Within the Walls Episcopal Church (17 June 2012)

This is a Wikipedia Commons photo of the church, since I didn't get one,
but I love the stripes on it and the little blue dots and rose windows.

When I was in Rome, my plan was to go to an Anglican church on the Sunday morning.  (Anglican Churches turned out to be my go-to churches while I was traveling because they always have services in English and because they seem to often be located near big tourist centers.)  

However, and I cannot emphasize this enough, the Italians take a more relaxed approach to schedules than do the Dutch.  This lackadaisical approach extended to train, bus, and metro schedules and was quite a shock to the system.  For comparison, the Dutch Minister of Transportation got fired after heavy snowfalls disrupted train schedules in the Netherlands for too long.  In Italy, you would probably get fired for sticking to the schedule to closely--or you would run your train into the back of the train in front of you.  

In any case, after the late start from Milan, we made up some time overnight and only arrived in Rome about an hour after schedule.  It meant that I was running a bit late for church.  When you add in some confusion about the streets and things, I ended up missing church altogether.

My plan had been to go to St. Paul's Within the Walls Anglican Church, which has been having services since 1859.  It got its name, apparently, because it was the first non-Catholic church allowed to be organized in Rome, which is pretty impressive, actually.  You can see the official website here.  But if you go here you can see the facebook page (which I think you can see even without a facebook account) and if you click on the photo link, you can see a lot of pictures of the very pretty interior.

I was looking for  pictures of the church and came across this website.  It is a photography and tourism website that deals specifically with Italian churches and cathedrals.  The entry on St. Paul's Within the Walls is toward the bottom of the page but you may enjoy looking through all of the entries.  There are interior and exterior photos, as well as information about the history of the church.

More entertaining, I found a website with "Mystery Worshiper" reviews of various churches.  If you click here you can see a pretty detailed account of what it would have been like to go to church at St. Paul's Within the Walls if the trains had been a bit more prompt.

Just as interesting, I looked through the archives and found reviews of the other Anglican churches I went to while I was in Europe.  

There were loads of reviews on St. Alban's Anglican Church in Copenhagen, Denmark, where Jael and I visited (I posted about that here).  There were reviews from February 1999, November 11, 2004, August 16, 2009, and December 25, 2009.  It seemed like there were some wide variations in the quality of snacks. 

This review of St. Clement's Anglican Church in Prague, Czech Republic is from January 1, 2006, so it was almost exactly six years before I went to the church (I posted about my visit here).  I noticed that the reviewer also noticed how cold it was, except for your feet.

One of the very oddest things I noticed was that the sermons only lasted from 5-10 minutes each, with the average being about 8 minutes.  I just have to wonder what those folks would say if they accidentally wandered into one of Pastor Bradley's sermons!