Today we got up pretty early to make it over to the Vatican before it got too crazy. Seems we forgot it's November which makes it seem that there are almost no tourists in Rome. There was no line outside the Vatican Museum, there was no line to get into St. Peter's Basilica, and most impressively, there was actually room to breathe in the Sistine Chapel.
We visited the museum first, and I won't really go into too much detail about it. I think I read somewhere that there are nearly 1,500 rooms in this museum and we saw most of the rooms that were open: the Egyptian rooms, the Greek/Etruscan rooms, the animal statues rooms, the tapestry rooms, the map rooms, Rafael's rooms, the courtyards, the painting gallery, the ethnographic rooms, the stamps/coins rooms, the modern art rooms, etc. Its mind-boggling how much art the Pope's have collected over the years! My only complaint is that my favorite room was closed...the micro-mosaic room. According to the guards, its almost always closed. I guess I just have to consider myself lucky that I saw it last time I was here. Nearly the last room we visited was the Sistine Chapel (we forgot to bring a mirror so we have some seriously cramped necks), and it was great to see, as always. Our guidebook provided a lot of good information that we read before we entered, and it really helped get more out of seeing all the amazing painting Michelangelo did in such a short time.
What we decided after we left the Sistine Chapel is that we sort of want to be museum guards when we grow up. When the sign says "No Pictures" it means NO PICTURES. At this point, giving people dirty looks has not worked in the least. Therefore, we've come up with some new strategies. For me, I'd like to tackle all the morons that can't seem to follow the rules (in nearly every museum we go to). Mike's preferred strategy is to let them sneak in all the pictures they can, and then grab their cameras before they leave and delete them all.
After four hours we were pretty exhausted so we wrapped it up, left the museum and refueled. Then we walked over to St. Peter's square and went inside to check out St. Peter's Basilica. While we both know that its the biggest Christian church (and they even mark on the floor where other big churches in the world would end if they were placed inside St. Peter's), it's hard to really believe it when you see it. Ok, yes, it's huge, but it seems that it was designed to seem smaller than it is. For example, the bronze canopy that is over the main alter (that weighs something like seven tons) is seven stories high! It doesn't seem that can be possible. Just about everything in the basilica is like that: there are no paintings - everything is a mosaic, the letters that wrap around the ceiling are seven-feet high, and the nave is two football fields long. We were pretty much exhausted by this point. We found a very generous gelateria (aka enormous portions) near the Vatican museum and walked home along Via Giulia, one of the oldest streets in Rome. We stopped by the grocery, walked home, cooked dinner, and then went out to grab a drink and some dessert before calling it a day.
Gelato Gusti per il Giorno:
Mike - Cassata e Creme Caramel and Biscotti e Amarana
Aviva - Fragole e Cioccolato,
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