Fall Break - Vatican City

Wednesday

Wednesday was Vatican day! We went to the Colosseum very early in the morning to be at the front of line, but that doesn’t tend to work as well with the Vatican—it can take hours to get in. The easier way to deal with the lines is to wait until lunchtime, but that doesn’t leave you with anywhere near enough time to see even just the highlights. We’d been trying to find a good day to do the Vatican while dealing with this problem—and then I read in a guidebook that there’s a papal service at Saint Peter’s Basilica on Wednesday mornings. Score! We reasoned that the service would keep most people in the Basilica rather than the Vatican museums, so we hopped on the bus to the Vatican—and found practically no line at all! Actually, the museums were more empty than I or Dad have ever seen before—we got astoundingly lucky. 

We roamed through the museums for hours—the place is huge, and you would have to run through everything at full speed to actually see everything in one shot, but then you wouldn’t really see anything. I enjoyed having the chance to visit everything I wanted to see—I’d been to the Vatican twice before, and caught sight of a long hallway filled with classical sculpture, but never had a chance to go down it. Accordingly, I informed Mom and Dad that no matter what else we saw, we would go down that hallway, and they were happy to oblige me.

Artemis is probably my favorite goddess. Naturally, I had to get a picture of myself with a statue of her, and I really liked this one. Mom was kind enough to pose with me. There were lots of wonderful statues, and I probably ended up taking a picture of at least every other one.

Not in the hallway, but off to the side of a lovely little courtyard nearby was the Apollo Belvedere, probably the most famous statue of Apollo in the world. It’s beautiful—and you’ll see it in its full glory later :) You can see part of it in the background, hidden by the ubiquitous tour groups. I’m sitting facing the other way because while Mom and Dad browsed through the rest of the courtyard, I sat on the bench admiring the statue (and then went across the way to admire the Laocoon statue for a while...you’ll see that one later too).

When I’d gotten my fill of classical statuary, we continued meandering through the museum, taking the “long path” to the Sistine Chapel. Mom particularly enjoyed the Raphael rooms—it was my first time seeing them as well, and while they’re not generally my interest, they were quite spectacular. The museums are arranged in vaguely chronological order, and if you take the long path, right before the Chapel you’ll see some rooms of modern art—and this time I actually mean “within the last 20 or so years” rather than “anything past 410 CE” as I usually do. Modern art isn’t one of my favorites, but there were a few interesting exhibits.

I have no idea what this is supposed to be (although I assume the people at the bottom are saints), but it was a neat exhibit—it’s made of some beaten out metal, probably bronze, and it shimmered nicely in the low-light room. It’s also huge, as you can see by Mom and me standing in front of it. Just an example of some of the interesting modern works you see before you get to the main attraction.

The Sistine Chapel itself....there really are no words. You can’t take pictures inside (although I suspect most people have a secret picture of the ceiling, and I must admit to being one of them), but you could see all of the pictures of it in the world, and nothing compares to the real thing. The chapel itself is really rather small, but the sheer amount of painting on the ceiling and walls makes it appear far larger than it actually is. It was restored relatively recently—this was Dad’s first time seeing it since the restoration—and the colors are bold and bright. Dad had a guided tour of the chapel on his iPod, so he wandered through the chapel listening to that—Mom and I found a seat along the walls and just stared upward until our necks hurt and we started getting too hungry to ignore. We slipped into the back of a tour group to go out the group exit, which leads straight to Saint Peter’s Basilica, letting us bypass the lines to get in there (the mass had finished by this time). The Basilica is beautiful, naturally. The nice thing about the Basilica—that you can use flash inside it—is due to one of the most impressive things about it—there is nothing painted inside the Basilica. Every “painting” is a mosaic, every glittering accent is gold leaf, and everything but the baldacchino (which is wood and bronze) is built of gorgeous polychromatic marble or white stone. And of course, the Pietà is there, and is beautiful. It’s probably my favorite Michaelangelo work, and I’m sorry that it’s far behind glass now.

Anyway, I’ll stop teasing you with descriptions and no pictures—I’ll gush more, with photo accompaniment, later. Hunger eventually drove us out of the Basilica, into the square, where we stopped to look around briefly before discussing our lunch options.

Dad snapped this picture of Mom and me sitting by one of the fountains in the square. He’s a sneaky one with that camera.

The Vatican has the same problem as the Colosseum with regards to food—there are more restaurants than roach-coaches, but they’re all expensive with bad food. Unfortunately, we were too hungry to really get far enough away to avoid them—not one of our better meals in Italy. After we’d eaten, we wandered down along the Tiber for a while, eventually ending up at Hadrian’s Mausoleum, which is better known today as the Castel Sant’Angelo. The original mausoleum was turned into a fortress, and is today a museum—I was curious, but the admission was too expensive and from what I’d heard it wasn’t very interesting, so we passed on that.

 While we didn’t go into the Mausoleum, we did admire the view from the long street that ends at Saint Peter’s, and I made Mom and Dad pose for pictures with the Basilica in the background.

We eventually headed back home and hung out at the Centro again, before going out to dinner. Having been burned by lunch, and not interested in wandering far from home, we went back to Carpe Diem. Our hostess from the last time recognized us, and we had another wonderful meal. As we were finishing up, my friend Caitlin came in with her family, which was fun—the restaurant is close to the Centro, so it really shouldn’t have surprised me!

And here's Mom, who I suspect appreciates the post-classical art in the Vatican museums more than I ever will:

One of the sites on our to-do list I'd been dreading was the Vatican....only because I'd anticipated dealing with lots of crowds. We decided to do the Vatican on Wednesday, because the Pope does a morning address. Sure enough, most of the crowds were lined up for the service and there wasn't much of a line for the museums at all. We got lucky! It's hard to describe the Vatican museums in words. The historical significance of all of it is mind-boggling! There was beautiful artwork and sculptures. Every time I entered another long ornate hallway, I thought I had gotten to the Sistine Chapel, but wasn't there yet. There was a hallway with a collection of tapestries, another hallway of Egyptian antiquities, another hallway of wall maps of various regions in Italy. Then there was the Rafael Rooms. After all that you finally come to the Sistine Chapel! Even if you could take pictures, nothing could translate the awe-inspiring sight. If it wasn't so crowded, I could have laid on the ground and stared at it all day. Absolutely gorgeous! Katie and I found a place to sit down so we could just absorb everything around us for as long as possible. My senses were definitely on overload! Then we headed over to St. Peter's Basilica (we cheated and took the shortcut that was reserved for tour groups). While the Pieta was beautiful, it was much smaller than I thought it would be. We grabbed a bite to eat for lunch (made the mistake of eating near the Vatican....not great and expensive, but we were starving!). Headed back to Katie's place before going to dinner. We were drawing a blank on where we wanted to go, so were happy to revisit Carpe Diem. Katie ran into one of her classmates, Caitlin, there with her parents. Guess it's the place to bring your parents.