Behind the Pages: How Our Vatican Morning Found Its Way Into Beneath Mediterranean Skies
One of the things I love most about writing the Uncharted Horizons series is that so little of it is invented from thin air. The ports, the guides, the small mishaps and the unexpected moments of grace that end up in these books almost always started as something my wife and I actually lived through. Rome, and specifically our morning at the Vatican, is one of the clearest examples of that.
Before Sunrise, Before the Crowds
We'd booked a 7:00 a.m. tour, the kind that gets you inside before the gates officially open to the public. There were maybe ten of us in the group, plus our guide, standing in St. Peter's Square while the light was still soft and the square itself was nearly empty. If you've only ever seen St. Peter's Square at midday, packed shoulder to shoulder with tour groups and selfie sticks, you have no idea what it feels like to stand there almost alone, with the obelisk throwing a long shadow and the colonnade curving away into quiet.
That contrast, between the Square as a churning sea of tourists and the Square as a place of genuine stillness, is exactly the kind of detail that's hard to invent and easy to steal from real life. Watching the visitor lines start to build while we already had priority access in was its own small, satisfying drama. It's the sort of texture I want in a scene: not just "they visited the Vatican," but the specific feeling of being early, of having the place to yourselves for a few unrepeatable minutes.
The Square itself is full of the kind of small, discoverable details that never make the postcards. There are wind-rose medallions set right into the paving stones, marking out the eight winds with old Italian names like Tramontana and Levante. There's a spot in the colonnade where, if you stand in exactly the right place, all four rows of columns line up into a single row, an optical illusion Bernini built into the design centuries ago. Above the basilica facade, a clock tower and bell keep watch over the whole scene, and the square's twin fountains send up their spray as the crowds start to gather. Little discoveries like that are half the fun of walking a place slowly instead of rushing through it.
From there, our tour carried us through the Vatican Museums with priority access. We walked the Gallery of Maps, a long, ornately frescoed corridor lined with painted geographic maps of Italy, the ceiling above it almost as busy and gilded as the maps themselves. In the Raphael Rooms, the walls and ceilings are vividly frescoed floor to ceiling, and just before the Sistine Chapel itself, we passed through a hallway hung with enormous tapestries, woven scenes rich with color and detail that somehow manage to hold their own against everything else around them. Along the way we also passed the Bramante spiral staircase, that famous double-helix ramp near the museum's exit, the Cortile della Pigna with its giant bronze pinecone flanked by bronze peacocks, a pair of black granite
Egyptian sphinxes, and the Sala Rotonda, where an ancient Roman mosaic floor surrounds a massive porphyry basin. We also stood in front of the Laocoön statue group and walked galleries lined with rows of Roman busts and togate statues against deep red walls. From there we reached the Sistine Chapel, and finally St. Peter's Basilica itself. Along the way we crossed paths with the Swiss Guard in their striped, plumed uniforms, standing at attention the way they've done for centuries. We also caught a glimpse of the balcony used for papal appearances, the one the world watches on television during major announcements, from ground level looking up.
No photos are allowed inside the Sistine Chapel, and honestly, I think that's exactly right. It forces you to put the phone away and just stand there with your neck craned back, taking in Michelangelo's ceiling and the Last Judgment with your own eyes instead of through a screen. That chapel isn't meant to be a box you check off a list. It's meant to be experienced, fully present, in the moment. That's a lesson worth carrying into the writing itself: some things matter more when you're not trying to capture them, just live them.
What Actually Makes It Into a Chapter
I don't transplant a travel day into a book wholesale. What I'm usually after is the sensory truth of a place: how the light hit the square before the crowds arrived, the particular hush inside those museum halls, the moment a guide points out something you'd have walked right past. Those are the details that let Olivia and Lance's world feel lived-in rather than researched. When a reader can practically feel the cool of the morning air or hear their own footsteps on the cobblestones, that's the payoff of mornings like this one.
Rome sits on the Mediterranean itinerary in Beneath Mediterranean Skies, and a city with this much history, this much beauty, and this much genuine emotional weight gives a writer an enormous amount to draw from, even in scenes that aren't explicitly "about" the Vatican itself. It shapes tone. It shapes pacing. It reminds me that awe is a physical sensation before it's anything else, and that's the thing I'm always trying to get onto the page.
Castel Sant'Angelo and the Passetto di Borgo
That same day we also made our way to Castel Sant'Angelo, the massive circular fortress that started as Emperor Hadrian's mausoleum and later became a papal refuge. Standing at its base, looking up at the bronze angel on top with its sword raised, you get a sense of just how many centuries of history are stacked into that one structure. Inside, there were scale models showing the fortress's fortifications and the elevated corridor called the Passetto di Borgo, the secret escape route popes used to flee the Vatican for the safety of the castle in times of danger. We also passed a marble bust of Hadrian himself, and a sword and dagger displayed under glass.
Down in the fortress's underground passages, a papal crypt corridor runs on for what feels like forever, its walls lined with carved coats of arms and inscriptions marking centuries of popes, one referencing the Borgias among them. A stretch of ancient mosaic floor is laid out along that same passage, preserved right there in the stone underfoot.
From the ramparts, the views stretched out over the Tiber, the Ponte Sant'Angelo lined with its sculpted angels, and the rooftops of Rome in every direction. At one point we watched a two-man rowing team slice down the Tiber far below, oars cutting a clean wake through the green water while the city just went on around them, unhurried. It's the kind of vantage point that makes a city's geography suddenly click into place, something a writer can only really get right after standing there and seeing it for themselves.
The Long Game of Research
None of this is dropped into the manuscript in a single afternoon. It gets folded in slowly, the way our real trips always do: a sensory detail here, a piece of local texture there, sometimes just a feeling I'm chasing rather than a fact I need to get right. But mornings like the one we spent at the Vatican are exactly why I keep saying the port and destination scenes in this series come from real travel. Fiction can invent a plot. It can't invent the particular gold of early light on St. Peter's dome, or the strange privilege of having an entire square nearly to yourself before the rest of the world wakes up.
That's the morning behind the page. More behind-the-scenes posts to come as Beneath Mediterranean Skies gets closer to its October 1 release.
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