Page 127 – LIFE

LIFE at the Vatican: Unearthing History Beneath St. Peter’s

January 17, 2020March 1, 2013 by

The walled, pint-sized city-state known as the Vatican physically takes up around 100 acres in the center of Rome, but occupies a measureless space in the lives of more than a billion practicing Catholics around the globe. Here, LIFE.com looks back to a time when the church was actively unearthing its own secrets . . . literally.

In 1950, LIFE reported on a years-long effort undertaken beneath the staggeringly ornate public realms of the Vatican, as teams of workers meticulously excavated the myriad tombs and other long-sealed, centuries-old chambers far underground. Nat Farbman’s color and black and white images in this gallery most of which never ran in LIFE, were touted on the cover of the March 27, 1950, issue of the magazine as “exclusive pictures” for the story titled “The Search for the Bones of St. Peter.”

Deep in the earth below the great basilica of St. Peter’s in Rome [LIFE wrote] the clink of pickaxes and the scrape of shovels in the hands of workmen have been echoing dimly for 10 years. In the utmost secrecy, they have penetrated into a pagan cemetery buried for 16 centuries. Architects feared they might disturb the foundations on which rests the world’s largest church. But the workmen, with careful hands, pushed forward finally to the area where, according to a basic tenet of the Catholic Church, the bones of St. Peter were buried about A.D. 66.

The Church has always held that Peter was buried in a pagan cemetery on Vatican Hill. Now, for the first time, there is archaeological evidence to support this: the newly discovered tombs, which LIFE shows [in these exclusive pictures].

The greatest secret of all—whether the relics of the Chief Apostle himself were actually found —s one which the Vatican reserves for itself, although there have been rumors that the discovery of the relics will be announced at an appropriate time during the Holy Year.

In the end, LIFE’s editors expressed their appreciation for “the privilege of guiding LIFE’s readers through these chambers where in the dust of antiquity can be traced the humble yet transcendent beginnings of the Christian faith.”

[MORE: Buy the LIFE book, Pope Francis: The Vicar of Christ, From Saint Peter to Today.]

NOTE: In December 1950 Pope Pius XII announced that bones discovered during the excavation could not conclusively be said to be Peter’s. Two decades later, in 1968, Pope Paul VI announced that other bones unearthed beneath the basilica—discovered in a marble-lined repository, covered with a gold and purple cloth and belonging to a man around 5′ 6″ tall who had likely died between the ages of 65 and 70—were, in the judgment of “the talented and prudent people” in charge of the dig, indeed St. Peter’s.

To this day, that claim has as many doubters as adherents.

Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter at @LizabethRonk.

In a clutter of bones and artifacts the foreman of a team of Vatican workmen examined an ancient archway, St. Peter’s, Rome, 1950.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The interior of St. Peter’s basilica, with markers indicating the location of the excavation beneath the floor, 1950.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The tomb of the Caetennii (17 x 18 feet) was one of the richest and most lavishly decorated of all those excavated beneath St. Peter’s.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Tomb of the Egizio featured elaborate sarcophagi sculpted with scenes of Bacchic rites. While most of the findings here were purely pagan, there were also Christian designs—for example, of a palm leaf and a dove.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Scene during the excavation beneath St. Peter’s in Rome, 1950.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The hunt of the Amazons was portrayed on a polychrome mosaic decorating the facade of the tomb of the Marci.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Scene during the excavation beneath St. Peter’s in Rome, 1950.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A workman cleaned an inscription during the excavation beneath St. Peter’s in Rome, 1950.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Pope Pius XI, whose desire to be buried below St. Peter’s nave led to the historic excavations, lay in his stone sarcophagus in renovated upper grottoes.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The oldest burial chamber found during the excavation beneath St. Peter’s in Rome, 1950.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Scene during the excavation beneath St. Peter’s in Rome, 1950.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Workmen examined underneath the floor of the Basilico.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Workers gauged damage from water seepage during the excavation beneath St. Peter’s in Rome, 1950.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Workmen gauged damage from water seepage during the excavation beneath St. Peter’s in Rome, 1950.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The oldest burial chamber found during the excavation beneath St. Peter’s in Rome, 1950.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A double row of burial chambers beneath St. Peter’s, 1950.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

An inscription revealed during the excavation beneath St. Peter’s in Rome, 1950.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

An early Christian mosaic, possibly the earliest known, decorated the ceiling and walls of a mausoleum close to area where St. Peter is supposed to have been buried, Rome, 1950.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Rich polychrome stucco work in the southwest corner of the Tomb of the Caetennii showed how resplendently it was decorated.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Classic sculpture adorned the Marci sarcophagus of Q. Marcius Hermes and his wife.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Scene during the excavation beneath St. Peter’s in Rome, 1950.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The foreman of work crew posed during the excavation beneath St. Peter’s in Rome, 1950.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The tomb of Pope Boniface VIII, beneath the Vatican, photographed in 1950.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Scene during the excavation beneath St. Peter’s in Rome, 1950.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Old-Time Baseball: Dodgertown, 1948

July 24, 2020February 28, 2013 by

Few baseball franchises are as storied as the Dodgers—especially the incarnation that played at old Ebbets Field in Brooklyn until the club’s abrupt (and, for countless Brooklynites, unforgivable) move to L.A. in 1958.

Those Brooklyn teams from the 1940s and ’50s—with players such as Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese, Roy Campanella and Duke Snider—hold a special place not only in the memories of millions of fans of a certain age, but also in the annals of the game itself. Dem Bums won eight pennants and a World Series during those years, and might have won a few more championships if they didn’t have to keep facing the powerhouse Yankees.

In these photos, most of the stars are notable by their absence. Instead the frame is occupied by the crowds of long-forgotten young hopefuls at spring training in 1948, the very first year the team trained at the “Dodgertown” complex in Vero Beach, Florida. (The Los Angeles Dodgers left Dodgertown in 2008, one of many to trade in Florida’s Grapefruit League for Arizona’s Cactus League for spring training.) But what the pictures lack in star power, they make up in charm. To be sure, the players and coaches pictured here are all very, very white. Jackie Robinson had only debuted the previous year, and at the start of 1948 there were only three (that’s not a typo) black players in the National and American leagues. But the jarring racial uniformity aside, the gallery also capsules the aura of spring training, as athletes shook off their winter rust and concentrated on practicing the game’s fundamentals. In several photos general manager Branch Rickey studies the action with his grandson, and the game’s generational appeal is palpable.

Here is a brief excerpt from. the April 5, 1948, cover story LIFE, followed by a few photos that appeared in the issues, and some other memorable diamonds as well:

Branch Rickey himself did not succeed as a major-league field manager (with the St. Louis Cardinals from 1919 to 1925), but that was because he had too many scientific theories about how baseball should be played and too few good players to make the theories work. Dodgertown proved to be the ideal place to test all of Rickey’s ideas. At the outset he laid down the law to his 35 instructors on how he wanted Dodgertown run i.e., with metronomic precision. Everybody had to bounce out of bed at 6:45 a.m. After breakfast there was a classroom session on the intricacies of “inside baseball,” followed by mass calisthenics. Rickey wandered all over the camp, shaking hands briskly with the kid pitchers, not just to be friendly but to test their grip as well.

Fresco Thompson, a former National League infielder, spoke to Dodger coaches and prospects at Dodgertown, Vero Beach, Fla., 1948.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Prospects at Dodgertown, Vero Beach, Fla., 1948.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Batting practice in the cage, Dodgertown, Fla., 1948.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Top row, left to right: Pitchers Carl Erskine, Carroll Beringer, Edward Yasinski; bottom row, infielder Russ Rose, outfielder Bill Wolfe, outfielder Bernie Zender.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Brooklyn Dodger rookies and prospects did calisthenics as part of their daily training routine at Dodgertown, Vero Beach, Fla., 1948.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

These prospects bought their own baseball mitts.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Dodgers players and coaches attended an instructional talk.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Dodgers rookies and prospects listened to a hitting instructor at Dodgertown, Vero Beach, Fla., 1948.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Dodgers general manager Branch Rickey and his grandson watched a pitcher go through his wind-up.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Players were timed for speed.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

General manager Branch Rickey and a catcher.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Players practiced base-running and pick-off attempts.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Brooklyn coaches posed for a group portrait.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Brooklyn Dodger rookies and prospects played a spring training scrimmage at Dodgertown, Vero Beach, Fla., 1948.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Branch Rickey watched practice with his grandson at Dodgertown, Vero Beach, Fla., 1948.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Brooklyn rookies and prospects practiced hook slides.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Strings marked the strike zone as this pitcher delivered at Dodgertown, Vero Beach, Fla., 1948.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Batting practice.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Two coaches (including Pepper Martin, right) held rope at a level designed to force players into proper slide technique.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Top row, left to right: Outfielder Vic Marasco, catcher Dick Ballestrini, outfielder (and future Hall of Fame manager) Dick Williams; bottom, first baseman Dee Fondy, infielder Jim Baxes, catcher Mervin Dornburg.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Players drank fresh orange juice at Dodgertown, Vero Beach, Fla., 1948.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Players relaxing during spring training.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Players competed in horseshoes during spring training at Dodgertown, Vero Beach, Fla., 1948.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Brooklyn Dodgers and young women relaxed on the beach during spring training.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Slow Ride: LIFE Visits a British Snail-Watching Society

August 12, 2021February 28, 2013 by

Consider the snail. Humble, deliberate, primeval, the wee gastropod that comes to mind when we hear or see that one, simple word snail is seemingly the very last creature about which anyone would or could grow not merely protective, but passionate. After all, seen in a certain light (for that matter, seen in any light) the common snail is an irrelevancy or, if one is a gardener, a pest to be dispatched posthaste.

Then again, perhaps we’re not giving the snail its due. Perhaps there’s more to this mucus-y, slithering, boneless lazybones than meets the eye. Perhaps, if we engage in a subtle recalibration of our assumptions about our fellow creatures, we might find that the snail is not only worthy of our attention, but even of something like devotion. Perhaps the mild snail, dilly-dallying its way through life, can teach us something about the . . .

Oh, never mind! The fact is, most of us pass our days blissfully unconcerned with what snails — near and far, large and small — might be up to. Most of us, quite frankly, just don’t care.

But there was once a time, in a land called England, when dozens nay, scores! of snail fanciers did care, and struggled to rehabilitate the image of the oft-maligned critters. LIFE magazine photographer Hans Wild visited the intrepid souls of the British Snail-Watching Society in 1946. This gallery highlights some of the pictures he made. For the story of the society itself, however, it’s probably best to simply quote from the December 2, 1946, issue of LIFE, which really did manage to hit just the right tone when discussing this slippery issue:

The British Snail-Watching Society is an organization dedicated to the theory that man, harassed by the mounting tempo of modern life, has something to learn from contemplating the snail. The society’s whimsical propaganda has fascinated England and even resulted in editorials in the [London] Times. A recent meeting of the society, at which the pictures on these pages were taken, featured a snail race which, to snail lovers, is the equivalent of the Kentucky Derby.

The Snail-Watching Society was founded last year as an elaborate family joke by Peter Henniker Heaton, an ex-employee of the Admiralty, after he had extravagantly admired a roadside bank silvered by snails after a rain. The snail, Henniker Heaton declared, can teach man a thing or two because it has solved many of man’s own dilemmas: 1) it carries its house on its back, 2) it makes its own roads by glandular secretion, 3) it takes its time.

Already the society has 70 members, a book full of press clippings and correspondence from far parts of the world. Its members write indignant letters to the press protesting such barbaric customs as eating snails, of which there are 40,000 varieties. Best known are the small garden snails of the order stylommatophora, but in Australia there is a variety, megalatractus proboscidiferus Lamarck, whose shell measures two feet. Of the society’s favorite sport, Henniker Heaton says, “When you are used to snail-racing, horse races are over too quickly.”

Snail Appreciation, 1946

Hans Wild Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Life Goes to a Snail Watch in England 1946

Hans Wild Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Mourning FDR: In a Classic Photo, the Face of a Nation’s Loss

January 17, 2020February 26, 2013 by

Franklin Delano Roosevelt remains the only person elected four times to the nation’s highest office (although he would die within months of being sworn in to his final term), but his greatness can be measured, in one elemental sense, by the passions he still excites in both his supporters and detractors. To the former, he was a courageous and compassionate leader—a politician born into great privilege who nevertheless oversaw the creation of America’s government-run safety nets for the least powerful among us; a steady hand at the helm during the darkest, early days of World War II; and a man willing to spend most of his political capital pushing for policies and programs that were controversial and even revolutionary in their time, but today form the bedrock of America’s social contract.

To his naysayers, of course, Roosevelt’s New Deal was an egregious example of governmental overreach, while his political philosophy smacked of class betrayal and an un-American belief that the feds can solve every problem we’ll ever face.

His wife Eleanor, meanwhile, was even more progressive (and polarizing) than her husband. While her humanitarian work all over the globe in her later years would win her near-universal praise, as a First Lady she was something of a radical, giving her own press conferences (the first woman in her position ever to do so), arguing for expanded workers’ rights and sometimes publicly disagreeing with her husband on national issues.

One national issue on which the Roosevelts agreed to an extent was that of civil rights. Eleanor was the more vocal and adamant of the two, but it was FDR who signed Executive Order 8802 in June 1941. Geared toward defense workers, 8802 was the first federal action designed to prohibit employment discrimination in the United States. It was, arguably, the most significant action in the realm of civil rights by a 20th-century American president until LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

(Roosevelt’s record on civil rights as a whole is somewhat more checkered, especially in light of the internment of Japanese-Americans during the Second World War.)

Ed Clark’s photograph, meanwhile, of an openly weeping Chief Petty Officer (USN) Graham W. Jackson playing “Goin’ Home” on his accordion as FDR’s flag-draped casket passes by in April 1945 has, through the years, come to symbolize not merely a nation’s grief, but black America’s acknowledgement of Roosevelt’s efforts on behalf of civil rights.

It’s tricky, even dangerous to presume that one person’s emotions represent those of millions of others, merely because those people are of the same race. After all, Jackson had played music for FDR, and for countless other people at and around the so-called “Little White House” in Warm Springs, Ga., many times in the past. The two men had a history. The tears coursing down Jackson’s cheeks were, assuredly, the outward sign of an inward, personal grief.

That said, the anguish on Chief Petty Officer Jackson’s face was not his alone; in Ed Clark’s masterful, unforgettable portrait, we see, and feel, a nation’s loss.

LIFE in the Middle East: Power and Petroleum in the Gulf in 1945

August 11, 2021February 15, 2013 by

Oil. A simple word that for much of the 20th century, and well into the 21st, has meant unimaginable wealth for a very few; plentiful and (for a time, at least) cheap energy for consumers and industries around the globe; deadly conflicts and tensions, as international powers jockeyed to ensure access to wells, fields and pipelines; and, of course, myriad and well-founded worries about the poisoning of land, sea and sky and still, the world craves more, always more, of the precious stuff

In an online article titled “There Will Be Oil and That’s the Problem,” a companion piece to his recent TIME cover story, writer Bryan Walsh argues that oil supplies aren’t going to vanish any time soon, but that fact shouldn’t leave us any less concerned about our dependence on petroleum:

“[Discoveries of new oil reserves] are occurring around the world,” Walsh points out, “from the deepwater finds off Brazil to the North Dakota tight oil that has led to a resurgence of American crude production. There are oil sands in Canada and new resources in the melting waters of the Arctic. There will be oil and that may be the problem. That’s because the new supplies are for the most part more expensive than traditional oil from places like the Middle East sometimes significantly so. They are often dirtier, with a greater risk of more devastating spills and accidents.”

Walsh goes on to discuss far more complex and enduring issues around the production and consumption of oil, but a central, unsettling question looms: in a world with an unslakable thirst for petroleum, will human beings pay a higher and higher price in blood, in treasure, in environmental degradation rather than rethink their addiction to oil?

With that question hanging in the air, LIFE.com looks back at one of the earliest and most comprehensive features any publication anywhere ever published on the fraught and lucrative Mideast petroleum industry: a massive photo essay in the June 11, 1945, issue of LIFE magazine titled, simply, “Middle East Oil,” that provided (in LIFE’s words) “the first complete look at this fabulous and troublesome part of the world.”

Photographer Dmitri Kessel spent eight weeks traveling and photographing in Iran, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Iraq. (“It was so hot,” LIFE informed its readers of the photographer’s time in the desert, “that for periods Kessel could not handle his camera without scorching his hands.”) The result is a remarkable chronicle of a world both familiar and impossibly remote, where preteen dynastic kings, transplanted Texas wildcatters and armies of anonymous workers play out their lives amid the forces shaping the region’s landscape and transforming ancient cultures: the towering oil wells and refineries so colossal they sometimes seem ready to dwarf the desert itself.

NOTE: A sharp reminder that the original “Middle East Oil” feature from 1945 was published in an era vastly different than our own can be found in the dated language and, even more so, in the blatant, invidious bias occasionally on display in the article. For example, one photo caption reads, in part: “Anglo-Iranian Oil Co. employs 40,000 Iranians, many trained in its own Institute of Petroleum Technology. It has built its own city beside the old town. Iranian workers are usually honest and as industrious as heat permits.”

It goes without saying that LIFE would not have made a similar assertion about, say, American workers at a refinery in Texas or Louisiana.

Middle East OIl, Iran 1945

Dmitri Kessel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

IRAN

Middle East Oil, Iran 1945

Dmitri Kessel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Iranian Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlev, 1945

Dmitri Kessel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Middle East Oil, Iran 1945

Dmitri Kessel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

IRAQ

Kirkuk, Iraq, 1945

Dmitri Kessel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Kirkuk oil field, Iraq, 1945

Dmitri Kessel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Middle East Oil, Iraq 1945

Dmitri Kessel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Kirkuk, Iraq, 1945

Dmitri Kessel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Kirkuk oil fields, Iraq, 1945

Dmitri Kessel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Camels graze near an oil refinery, Iraq, 1945

Dmitri Kessel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

King Faisal, Iraq 1945

Dmitri Kessel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

BAHRAIN

Bahrain oil refinery, 1945

Dmitri Kessel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Oil industry laborers, Bahrain, 1945

Dmitri Kessel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Middle East Oil, Bahrain 1945

Dmitri Kessel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Bahrain oil refinery, 1945

Dmitri Kessel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Bahrain 1945

Dmitri Kessel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

SAUDI ARABIA

Middle East Oil, Saudi Arabia 1945

Dmitri Kessel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Saudi Arabia 1945

Dmitri Kessel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Saudi Arabia oil refinery 1945

Dmitri Kessel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Saudi Arabia, 1945

Dmitri Kessel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Saudi Arabia 1945

Dmitri Kessel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Middle East Oil, Saudi Arabia 1945

Dmitri Kessel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Middle East Oil. Saudi Arabia 1945

Dmitri Kessel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Middle East Oil, Saudi Arabia 1945

Dmitri Kessel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The Heartache of Wartime Farewells, 1943

January 18, 2020February 13, 2013 by

The photos here, made by LIFE’s Alfred Eisenstaedt in April 1943 at the height of the Second World War, capture farewell kisses that are particularly fraught. These young men, bidding their sweethearts farewell, faced the possibility that they might never return from the war.

In its February 14, 1944 issue (Valentine’s Day), in which many of these pictures appeared, here’s how LIFE magazine described the scenes:

They stand in front of the gates leading to the trains, deep in each other’s arms, not caring who sees or what they think.

Each goodbye is a drama complete in itself, which Eisenstaedt’s pictures movingly tell. Sometimes the girl stands with arms around the boys’ waist, hands tightly clasped behind. Another fits her head into the curve of his cheek while tears fall onto his coat. Now and then the boy will take her face between his hands and speak reassuringly. Or if the wait is long they may just stand quietly, not saying anything. The common denominator of all these goodbyes is sadness and tenderness, and complete oblivion for the moment to anything but their own individual heartaches.