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.
