Rome

We left Florence pretty early, had breakfast and Em, Mike, and Tiffany sang me multiple versions of Happy Birthday. We arrived in Rome around 10:00 am and immediately bought a Roma Pass. It essentially gets you into two sites free (Coliseum and Roman Forum) and gives you free public transport for three days. Plus it lets you skip lines. We found our way to the Youth Station Hostel – one recommended by an STA travel agent. It was pretty ghetto – not as bad as the Clink 261 in London, but close. Luckily we didn’t spend too much time there while we were in Rome.
We first headed off toward Vatican City, but first stopped at the Pantheon. The Pantheon is one of the oldest buildings in Rome and it is a dome with an oculus in the center (a hole).

It was awesome. When we walked in, our eyes were directed to the large beam of light (pictured) that came down at an angle to the ground – it looked like something you would see in the movies.

We also listened to our Rick Steves audio tour of place to learn more about it.
After the Pantheon we had to move fast to make our 2:00 pm reservation for the Vatican. Our of all the sites that we planed to see on this trip, Vatican City was the one I had most wanted to see. When we walked into St. Peters Square, it was awesome.

All the hundreds of columns surrounded us with the over 140 sculptures of saints along the tops. In the center was an obelisk and behind that was St. Peters Basilica – the biggest and grandest of the Catholic churches.

We learned that if we stand in the middle and look towards the rows of columns on the perimeter, they all line up perfectly (cool use of geometry). We left the square and headed towards the Vatican museum, which houses the Sistine Chapel. The museum was actually pretty boring at first as it displayed lots of Egyptian artifacts and artwork (we are kind of artworked out – although I did find a secret to enduring lots of artwork – ipods. with really good music, any art is interesting.) The museum was pretty long and each room kept giving pointing arrows towards Sistine Chapel climax. After an hour or so we finally arrived at the Sistine Chapel and it was pretty neat. The best part was seeing ‘The Creation of Man’ – the picture of God touching Adam giving him the spark of life.


It was in the middle on the ceiling and a lot smaller than expected. Frankly, we actually had seen tons of rooms with painting on the ceiling but we learned that this one was done solely by Michelangelo – and it took 4 years.
Eventually we made our way towards St. Peters Basilica. When we stepped in, we had a similar ‘hold-your-breath’ moment that we had at St. Paul’s Cathedral (London), Centre Court at Wimbledon, the Duomo in Florence, etc. But I must say – this one topped them all. The place was absolutely incredible.

It was massive, with gigantic arches and columns. Its main hall led down towards St. Peter’s grave (supposedly where his actual body is buried) that was topped with a seven story four-pillared monument that was directly below the main dome. Above the monument were multiple pillars of light from open windows adding to the visual wonder of the place. We couldn’t believe that this was all built so many years ago without modern technology – pretty awe-inspiring. We stayed for a while and made our way around the place, ending up at the ‘Pieta’ – Michelangelo’s sculpture of Mary holding a dead Christ. I personally liked that sculpture better than the ‘David’ at the Academy. We paid the extra money to walk the 400 plus steps to the top of the dome for the best view in Rome.

We were so glad we did because we arrived in Rome by train then took the metro/bus to get around town and it was really hard to see how big Rome truly was. Atop the dome, Rome looked huge! It looked much bigger than London (maybe it is, not sure).
We left St. Peters feeling extremely satisfied at what we had been able to see. It ended up being the perfect birthday present to see such an amazing sight. We capped off the day with some dinner and Mike and Tiffany bought me some Gelato (the grapefruit was great).