I thought Quakers were peace loving (lol)!

Thin, just equate my Scavi tour with, oh... Barry White showing up to sing at your birthday bash... or being asked to appear on the catwalk during Fashion Week, with a Proenza Schouler PS1 bag on your arm- and you get to keep what you model... :-D

"is mass at St. Peter's really special"

No.

There are lots of masses at St Peter's at different times of the day: most are pretty humdrum affairs - different only from mass anywhere else in that they're in a location designed to intimidate.

Some posters might have been impressed by the sung mass in the early evening: my impression of the choir singing the last time I attended it was that they were completely defeated by the basilica's acoustics, clearly untrained for singing in a big building and most wouldn't have passed the audition for the average English parish church.

The generally appalling quality of singing in Italian churches, and the extremely busy atmosphere - even while mass is on - in Rome's four main basilicas make worshipping in them a pretty hit and miss affair. Expect the worst and you might be pleasantly surprised - but at all of Catholicism's big pilgrimage centres, the continuous traffic of visitors (only some of whom are pilgrims) create an atmosphere some might find - well, not conducive to spiritual thoughts.

Two churches worth thinking about, though, both on the Aventine. Santa Sabina is simply glorious,little visited and sparse. Sant'Anselmo, half a mile or so away, is pretty functional, and shockingly new: but it houses the Pontifical academy of sacred music, and has rather better qc on its singing than is characteristic elsewhere in Rome.

Incidentally, a lot of people here seem to have been on a different Vatican excavations tour from me.

My guide - as is official Vatican policy - went out of her way to stress that we DON'T know for certain where Peter was executed and that we've no way of knowing any more about the bones than that they're consistent with being a man in late middle age who died about the time Peter did. And you can't see them anyway: you see, at a distance, a perspex box. That's all. You're actively discouraged (or at least we were) from treating the tour as anything other than an intellectual exercise. Emerging from its considerable rigour straight into the near-hysteria of some pilgrims around John Paul II's tomb is an extraordinary experience

The claim they're non-human and recent is just fatuous: the implied claim that the Vatican is making any claim about them at all even more fatuous. No Quaker I know is gullible enough to churn out absurd allegations on the basis of zero knowledge.

Throughout the tour, my guide went to extreme lengths to avoid saying anything more than, in effect "there's been a long tradition Peter's buried here, and there's now hard evidence of male human remains, dating from about AD50-100, buried under the main altar, that seem to have been an object of reverence from early times. The Vatican absolutely does not go any further than that, and we doubt it ever will"

Institutions don't survive 2,000 years without learning from past mistakes.

I agree with kybourbon and sarge. Great advice! Keep your scavi tickets and do the Vatican museums on your own.

Those that suggest you change the time of your Scavi tour may not realize that it is not a tour you book, but one you request and which may be confirmed - and at their appointed time.

While not as wowed as some of the posters here (and as a lapsed Catholic) I did find the Scavi very interesting and it was especially nice to be in a small group as opposed to the massive hoards of people in the Vatican Museums. For such a reasonable tour, it was nice to be in such an intimate group and to have questions answered by a knowledgeable docent.

I must have had a much different guide than Flanner.

Perhaps you will get 2 for 1 with your Scavi tour. While I was on the tour (you are several layers under the altar in St. Peter's) a mass/service started in St. Peter's. You could hear it while touring.

I must say that this has turned into a very interesting conversation -- more than I had hoped!

Since I believe that the Scavi tour is a relatively unique opportunity (I've heard of folks who tried for several years and never got a spot), and because, as kfusto notes, they're not easily (maybe not even possibly) rebooked, we'll keep the Scavi tickets and figure out some other arrangement for the Vatican Muesum/Sistine Chapel.

I'm not concerned about the "authenticity factor." I'm approaching it as both an intellectual exercise and as an opportunity for spiritual self-reflection, which to me is the essence of faith anyway.

And, it was way cool to get an email from the Vatican! ;-)