It’s Photo Friday! Faithful eCoolers will know that photographer Susan Sanders loves the writing on the wall. She spends lots of time on Rome’s streets looking for witty juxtapositions of word and image and that which she brings us today certainly doesn’t disappoint.
The sole-ful photograph above was shot near St. John Lateran, where a colossal bronze statue of St. Francis and his friars commemorates the visit of Assisi’s saint to Pope Urban III in Rome in 1209. The Pope, it seems, expected to meet a radical preacher, but instead found himself in admiration of St. Francis’s humility and faith and granted him permission to continue his work as the founder of a religious order.
The sculpture of Francis and his followers stands facing the church of St. John Lateran. Tourists and Romans alike pose for photos with the over-sized friars, but it’s when you walk around the back of the sculpture that things really get interesting, for the youth of Rome have applied their paint pens to the feet of one of the friars. We wouldn’t call it art, but the tags inscribed on the kneeling friar’s soles seem to suggest a new spelling for the word gra-feety.
