Rome: More Sightseeing

I guess I’m writing more about Rome than I expected to. I still have more touristy stuff that I want to mention. I’ll try to limit it, though; because it’s not that much more exciting to write about than it is to read about.

After the Colosseum, the only other place that I knew I had to go to was Vatican City. The world’s smallest country has two specific places that I wanted to see. First, I wanted to visit the Vatican museums, which is a group of separate museums banded together under one roof, give or take, and St. Peter’s Basilica. I hopped on the metro and went to the closest stop to Vatican City and walked about ten minutes to get to the city gates.

I decided to go to the museums first. As I mentioned earlier, the Vatican museums are a series of several museums. The first that I saw, as an example, was an Egyptian museum. There were also art museums and museums of ancient Rome. A few of the most interesting include a map room, which holds a series of large maps of Italy and the surrounding area from the sixteenth century, and the Raphael rooms, which are fantastic rooms with mosaics painted by Raphael and his staff at the request of the Pope at the time – I forget which one.

Of course, if you’ve been to Vatican City, and even if you haven’t, you know that I’m leaving out the best part. If you follow the guide (again, I rented one of those electronic guide thingies), the tour of the Vatican museums ends at the Sistine Chapel. Many people enter the museums complex and head straight there, but I saved it for the end. If you’ve noticed in my past posts, I’m often impressed with the great icons that I visit in my travels, but also I am often left thinking – meh . . . it’s nice or it’s beautiful or it’s majestic, but is that it? Well, with the Sistine Chapel, the beauty is so much greater in person than in photos or television that I am unable to describe it adequately. Michelangelo’s rooftop work truly is amazing and the guide explained how it meshed all of the work that already had been done at the Sistine Chapel to tell the perfect story.

You can take pictures everywhere in the Vatican museums, usually without flash, except the Sistine Chapel. Somebody told me that the reason photos were not allowed there is that the Japanese company that financed the restoration work obtained exclusive rights to the use of photography and video with respect to the Chapel. I have no idea if that’s true or not. What I do know is that people didn’t take the restriction very seriously and the enforcement consisted of a few people walking around and occasionally shouting “No Photographs!” Seeing as I’m a follower and have absolute faith in the crowd, I took a photo of my own. I couldn’t help it. But at least I didn’t use a flash. That makes me a good person, right?

After eating, I went to St. Peter’s Basilica. At first, it was raining. This was unfortunate because the line stretched out for hundreds of feet and was outside. Rather than stand out in the rain (mama taught me not to), I sat under the roofed wings of the facility and watched people who had the foresight to bring umbrellas enter into the shrine. After an hour or so, the rain stopped, or at least slowed to a trickle, so I got in line. Evidently, entry into the Basilica is free because nobody tried to sell me a ticket and nobody asked to see one from me.

There were two areas that I went to see. First, I went to the tombs of the Popes. All the big ones were there. John Paul I, John Paul II, George Ringo III. Okay, I don’t really know my Popes, but that’s not the point. Beside every carsophagus was a placard giving a brief description of what happened during the reign of each Pope and what he was known for. It’s probably not that interesting to read about, but I found reading the inscriptions interesting. (Photographs were not allowed, so I’m going to throw on a photo from the Basilica beside this paragraph. Obviously, this is not a Pope tomb. Sorry if I confused you.)

The other area was the dome. Now, I believe you can go up to the top of the dome, or close to the top of the dome, or something like that for a fee. I understand that there is an elevator part of the way up and then 300 or so steps you can climb to get there. Since this was only a couple of days after my trip to the top of the Tower of Pisa, and I was very in touch with my acrophobia, I decided that it was probably a good idea that I not make this trip. Below the dome, however, in the Basilica is a fantastic collection of religious art. Here, I basically just walked around and tried to observe and soak in what I could. I’m not a religious person by any stretch of the imagination, but this place seemed to demand much more reverence than most.

For some reason, I’ve always thought about Jerusalem and the surrounding areas as the holiest Christian place, with the Church of the Nativity and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and the history and what not. The Vatican, however, is just a complete shrine to Christianity, or at least Catholicism. While Jesus may have been born and raised in the Middle East, he definitely vacations in Vatican City because I can’t believe there is another place on Earth where he is treated so well or with so much respect.

Okay, enough sacrilege for now. There will have to be more posts about Rome.