The Vatican

Surprise parade we stumbled upon

After our tour of the Colosseum and Palatine Hill, we booked another tour for two days later of the Vatican with the same guide.  It was a good decision, too, because even though we arrived early in the morning, the line was already around several blocks outside of the Vatican.  With our tour, we got to jump that mess and avoid all of the peddlers who harass the people standing in line, too.  It was also nice to get more information that the plaques or Pat could tell me about the works of art in the museum.

Our tour took us through the vast art collection in the Vatican museum, which includes the Sistine Chapel.  To be honest, the Sistine Chapel was too crowded with too many people shouting "NO PICTURES" for me to really enjoy it.  Even so, it's clearly an amazing piece of work.  Pat also had plenty to share about the sculptures we passed along the way.  Some of the more disconcerting statues had realistic eyes.  I guess many roman statues were originally painted to be lifelike, which is hard for me to wrap my mind around since I can only ever envision them as white marble.

After going through the museum twice - once with the tour and once by ourselves to spend more time looking at specific works of art - we took a break to eat horrible pizza in the museum restaurant and write some postcards to send from the Vatican.  Then we found the entrance to St. Peter's, which is not attached to the museum, and explored there.  A student of mine had told me that the views from the top of St. Peter's were stunning, so part of our tour of St. Peter's was the very narrow staircase to the top, followed by gorgeous views.

That night, to wrap up our tour of Rome, we had dinner near the Spanish Steps.  Dinner was a fabulous mix of pastas (naturally), and dessert was gelato on the Spanish Steps.  The cherry on top, though, was our favorite pastime: watching the hoards of guys attempting to sell stuff illegally.  The guys would swarm the square for about five minutes, until the police (one of whom was wearing heels) would walk through.  Then the guys would run as quickly as possible around a corner until the cops were out of sight, when they would return to do it all over again.  We determined that they must have some kind of signal.  There was a guy doing laser pointer patterns on a building that we're certain was sending messages to his gang, and we also decided that the lone man who shot some kind of blinky-twirly thing up into the air was a watchdog of some sort.  As exciting as watching these games was, we got a little frustrated with how many times they asked us to buy things.  Pat actually got upset at one particularly aggressive rose seller, and told him to get out of my face. 

All in all, I'd say it was a very successful trip.  From the Vatican to delicious food, from the Colosseum to Horny Moses, I'd say we covered a lot of ground in very little time.  We left Rome feeling like we'd conquered the city, and headed to Florence via a rainy train ride, to experience beautiful Tuscan countryside, the leather markets, and Brunelleschi's gorgeous dome.

The ugliest statue of the Pope in the entire world

Giant bronze Roman statue.  It was buried upside down when it was found

Very sneaky photo in the Sistene Chapel

Illegal photo

More illegal photos

Scary eyes

Illegal Pat photo

More scary eyes

I pretended to blend in with the statues.  It didn't work so well.

We went back twice to see this

They look exactly alike, don't you think?

The double helix

The top of St. Peter's

Me at the top of St. Peter's

Lookin a little sweaty there, Pat

Pat got on the ground to try and take some cool pictures, but then my camera was malfunctioning so I tried to fix it by taking pictures of him...against his will.

The tiny way up/down in St. Peters. 

Spanish Steps

On our way to Florence