13.25. The surging throng of visitors to the Vatican Museums is steadily beginning to thin out. I could still probably count a thousand or more within the pillared walls of St Peter’s Square, but the morning rush is almost over. From my outpost under the statue of St Philip, I can see most of the piazza, except for the part obscured by the Vatican Post Car parked a few feet away. The postman came to pick up the mail around 11.30, some two hours ago. Since then I’ve been watching the visitors, tuning into the various languages around me and observing the interactions of the many thousands who pass through the Vatican every day. You could call it snooping, I suppose. I prefer to think of it as people watching. As I leaf through the first chapter of Triffids – my solo traveler’s Bible – I try to capture everything I see around me.

Two very well-heeled girls have been taking photographs of each other in front of the pillars for at least half an hour now. One of them is kitted out in a striking tea green trouser suit; the other is more noticeable for her red hair. Let’s call them Green and Red. I imagine what they’re trying to do is one of those time-lapse images for this or that social media network, since Red keeps strutting backwards and forwards in a highly artificial manner, flickering her hair over her shoulder and looking back to Green’s phone. The Vatican City seems an odd place for a glamour shoot, but then, what do I know? It’s a changed world.

A toddler is having the time of his life chasing pigeons in front of me. He’s so caught up in the chase that he keeps falling flat on his stomach, but the brave little soldier hasn’t cried once. He just gets right back up and charges headlong into the flock, giggling wildly and scattering the panicked sky-rats in his wake while his parents watch and mum takes a film on her phone.

After the people and pigeons, the next most numerous living thing here in the Vatican is the city’s gull population. Apparently they’re only a recent arrival: until as recently as the 1970s, gulls were a rare sight this far inland. Now they’re everywhere, raiding bins, snatching bread from hopeful pigeons and circling St Peter’s basilica like dirty angels – or do I mean vultures?

Three locals have dropped by with a pizza box for a snack lunch in the square. It seems the obvious spot for a lunch break: the domed sky is immense – you have to really open up your eyes to take it all in – and there’s always something going on here. A few minutes ago a woman was screaming something on the other side of the square – I never did see her face nor did I catch what she was shouting about over the cascade of the fountain, but from her constant used of “ustedes” I’m going to guess she had that evangelical fire that you only find in Latin American Catholicism.

Did you know there were plans to turn the Colosseum into a church? Fortunately they were abandoned many years ago, sparing Italy the shame that Spain has to bear in the desecration of its greatest Islamic treasures of the Alhambra and the Great Mosque of Córdoba.

Well, perhaps not entirely. A casual walk around Rome reveals that many of its ancient churches are carved out of the bones of other Roman carcasses, perhaps most notably the basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri, housed in what was once an impressive frigidarium. Still, it’s worth remembering that this fate is probably what saved it from the twitching fingers of the stone-thieves that reduced many of Rome’s treasures, including the Colosseum itself, to the picked and dismembered skeletons we see today.

These days the Church has lost interest in “reclaiming” ancient wonders for Christ. Now it’s faithless corporations like Hard Rock and MacDonalds that play Columbus in the ancient places of the world, stamping their flags as close to the action as possible so as to draw in their customers like spiders. In that sense there’s not an awful lot of difference between them and the hawkers offering line cuts in St Peter’s Square at “special special” prices. They’re simply out to make a quick buck at the expense of the next band of pilgrims. It is a little disheartening that the first shop down from St Peter’s Square on the Via della Conciliazione sells branded British tee-shirts.

Speaking of which, the newest addition to the square is drawing a steady crowd. Timothy Schmalz’ Angels Unawares depicts a muddled group of refugees from every corner of the globe and drawn from across several ages in history: a Syrian mother and child, a Polish Jew, a family of African migrants, even a Native American nobleman. In a square full of righteous saints and martyrs, it’s a necessary homage to the real sufferers around the world: the everyday folk whose worlds are turned upside down because somebody somewhere thinks their world view has the right of it.

It’s 14.30. I’ve kept my vigil here for over four hours, and now I’m getting peckish. My feet, however, are immensely appreciative of the break from yesterday’s constant Roman around (ha ha). Time, I think, for a spot of lunch. BB x