Saturday, November 14, 2015

Weird Stuff I Saw in Italy, 1: The Pope's Cowboy Hat


As I mentioned yesterday, we're just back from a ten-day squint at Italy. We saw a lot of the normal stuff (which was very cool, and I'll be slapping some normal pics up here soon), but being a strange person, I was especially attracted to the strange things like this funky hat in the Vatican Museum. 

The description of this one, I believe, dated it sometime in the mid-1800's, meaning the Pope was sporting it around the same time such hats came into fashion in the Old West. Somewhere in the same hallway I spotted a painting of a Pope wearing one like it, but since he was not riding a bucking bronc or brandishing a six-gun, I failed to photograph it. A subsequent search of the book The Vatican: All the Paintings failed to turn it up, making me suspect the title is a lie. 

4 comments:

  1. Did you see Joe Lansdale while you were there? He's so popular in Italy that the pope would probably let him wear that hat.

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  2. I think they only wore it while riding a bucking altar boy.

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  3. I saw a guy who might have been Joe. I'll post his pic in a day or two.

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