So, Sunday morning on the northern edge of Rome’s Trastevere district. What is the handiest tourist/cultural site available at, say, 9:30 a.m.?

That would be the Vatican, where we blundered into a fairly significant day in Roman Catholic history — the day a saint-making record was celebrated in Saint Peter’s Square.

Later, we had the notion of joining Romans in another mass event, this one the Lazio soccer match against Sampdoria, but that one did not turn out. At all.

A recap:

We are quite close to the Vatican. About a 15-minute walk.

I am not a Roman Catholic, but I was interested in seeing what went on in the Vatican on a Sunday morning in May, and after checking the times of masses, we settled on the 9:30 service. In my mind, we would sneak into the back of Saint Peter’s Basilica and sit there and watch the church at work.

What we found was the square, approximately 250 yards across, segmented by ropes and organized by dozens of police and Swiss Guards, and a huge number of people (tens of thousands, was the estimate; see photo above) sitting and standing in the square. A mass was going on, but it was being staged from the steps of the church.

Fairly soon, we realized among the several hundred people up on the steps was the new pope, Francis I. Or Francesco, as he is known here in Italy. We could see him speaking from either of the two gigantic TV screens mounted to the left and right of the steps.

The new pope has a bit of a bookish feel to him (which I consider a good thing), and as he was doing readings, I could see the fairly severe black glasses on his face, and I thought to myself, “Pretty sure that’s the pope from Argentina.” And it was. The first pope from the New World, too.

The service went on and on. We had speakers in Spanish and Italian, and the choir seemed extra busy.

Since clearly we were not going to get inside the church, I decided to wait to see how they managed communion with all those people. I anticipated scores of priests going into the crowd, and that is what happened, finally, more than an hour into the service.

At that point, we were ready to go. We had been on the edge of things, where more than a few people (mostly world tourists, but some of them locals who should have known better) were paying no real attention to the events, and making more than a bit of noise.

(We witnessed a particularly embarrassing exchange among local folk; a guy and his girlfriend stood up just in front of a whole batch of older people who were sitting on the shallow steps on the east side of the square, and they asked the guy to move — and he refused. An argument broke out, and he would not budge, appearing to say if he moved left or right he would just block someone else. Brilliant.

He would have been dead on the spot had looks been able to kill. He was quite an ass about it; if he wanted to stand,  he could have moved where we were — and five feet behind the old folks who were sitting.

So, after working out how they would handle the logistics of communion, we left. Only later, as a helicopter hovered for more than a half hour, did we realize that other events went on. It was more than just a big, out-of-doors mass.

It also marked the occasion of the church making saints out of women from Colombia and Mexico, but also 813 martyrs from the 1480 Turkish capture of the Italian city of Otranto. They were men who refused to convert to Islam and were ordered beheaded.

Those guys have been fairly prominent, apparently, in the Catholic church since then, but only now have they been recognized as saints. Roman Catholics have no shortage of saints — the 800-plus in on day makes for more than 10,000 saints. And I thought the Catholics had decided, a few years ago, to try to reduce the number.

Also, when it was over, Pope Francis did a lap of Saint Peter’s Square in the modified popemobile — this one does not enclose the pontiff, as it did John Paul II after the assassination attempt by a Turk in 1981.

So, a pope in an open-air vehicle, no doubt makes the security guys very nervous, and that accounted for the helicopter.

We wished we had stayed behind for the lap of the square. Not every day that happens.

We will go back later this week to look at some of the things not available because Sunday was a working day for the Vatican. Have not seen the Sistine Chapel in more than 20 years.

After some ridiculously nice pizza at a place named “Core” in Trastevere, we rested a bit, and then figured out how we were going to see Lazio play.

We plotted how to get there, via bus, and had been assured that tickets were, in fact, sold day-of-game at/near the stadium.

So, the one-hour bus ride, in a bus packed with tourists and, especially, Lazio fans. We got into the northern part of the city, which is much tidier and newer than the central and southern parts of the city.

We were disgorged across the street from the Foro Italico, which counts among its venues the Stadio Olimpico, centerpiece of the 1960 Olympics and also the 1990 World Cup.

I was inside the stadium three times in 1990 — to see the opening match, Italy versus Austria; to see Italy and the U.S. play (a 1-0 Italy victory) and the final, the dreadfully dull 1-0 West Germany victory over Diego Maradona’s Argentina.

I had been there every day for a week in 1987 for the World Athletics Championships, the one at which Ben Johnson ran the steroids-aided 9.83-secod 100-meter dash, beating Carl Lewis, who already was complaining that Johnson was cheating — which he would be caught at doing, at Seoul 1988.

So. We couldn’t find a ticket booth (in theory, one was on the east side of the stadium), and it was about 20 minutes before kickoff. We circled the east side of the stadium, four an empty ticket booth, asked help … and a kid working in the parking lot sent us over to the Lazio “store” on the other side of the Tiber.

Searched that out, and briefly joined several hundred increasingly agitated Lazio fans, who could hear the roar of the crowd, even from across the river, and knew the game had begun. They were sitting and standing in front of a smallish office building, where they waited for their numbers to be called so that could hand over 70 or 90 euros (about 90 or 125 dollars) for a seat.

Note: Lazio averages 32,000 fans for home matches in a stadium that holds more than 70,000. Yet they could not figure out a method to take the money of hundreds of people who were dying to get in.

The sales were moving very slowly, and we realized we would not get in before halftime, if then, and we gave up, astonished by how ridiculous the situation was. The bus back was much nicer; no hip-to-hip crowding with fans wearing sky blue and white.

In the evening, we went to the Via Allegro wine bar in the Piazza Giuditta, in Trastevere, and had a very innocuous white Falanghina while snacking from the buffet, then ordered a far better Feudi di San Gregorio Greco di Tufo with a sumptuous cheese and meat plate … and sat al fresco and watched people carousing through the neighborhood and wondering how hard it would be to live in the middle of a tourist haven.

So, what will be remembered from this … is the big and solemn yet happy event of the 800-plus new saints … the wild-goose chase into the northern suburbs and our failure to give the Lazio club abouit $200 to watch them play … and the wine bar at the end. Yes.