Well apparently I wasn't the only one who couldn't resist...

Apparently I wasn't the only one who couldn't resist the draw of Il potere e la grazia, i patroni dell'Europa. This is the exhibit that I promise I will write more about...but now this breaking news from Catholic News Service:

Pope Sneaks Out to See Exhibit

VATICAN CITY -- Twenty-five years ago, it wasn't unusual for Pope John Paul II to sneak out of the Vatican in the winter to go skiing.

Pope Benedict XVI left the Vatican unannounced last evening to visit an art exhibit, according to reports today from Vatican Radio and L'Osservatore Romano.

Yesterday marked the end of the four-month run of the exhibit, "The Power and the Grace: The Patron Saints of Europe," at Rome's Palazzo Venezia Museum, and Pope Benedict was amoung the last of the more than 100,000 people to visit the show.

The Vatican newspaper said the pope arrived at the museum about 6:30 PM with his two private secretaries and four lay women who care for the private papal household. The women are members of the Communion and Liberation's Memores Domini Association.

While the public was held at bay for thirty-five minutes, the pope and his entourage were shown the more than one hundred works on disply by the curator of the exhibit, the Italian ambassador to Italy and an undersecretary of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's government.

For the last month of the exhibit, the Louvre in Paris loaned the museum Leonardo Da Vinci's painting of Saint John the Baptist. Other works on display included Jan van Eyck's painting of Saint Francis of Assisi with the stigmate, Caravaggio's Saint John the Baptist, and El Greco's painting of Saint Louis IX of France.