04-28 Audience with the Pope's House

Sometimes even our plans go awry: one half day at the Vatican and one half day at a new amusement park. It sounded feasible.

We took the #64 bus to St. Peter's Square and arrived at 8:30 AM. I had researched a tour with What a Life Tours and after a few pictures in the square I went and located the tour people outside the city and made arrangements for a 3 hour tour of the Sistine Chapel and Vatican Museum.

Our tour started in Italy about 100 feet from the country of the Vatican. For about 50 minutes we stood and listened (interestingly) to Matteo, our guide, tell stories about the history and people of the Vatican (follow the money!).

We then started a Bataan Death March to his office (into the City and then out of the City then around the block then down the street) to pay for the tour and to use the rest room. Tour guides get special side entrance access to the tour area so we were in in about 10 minutes after once again getting the Vatican walls. A visit to the Vatican Museum was first on the agenda. There were numerous works of art, statues, and frescoes on the ceilings (just the frescoes, not the statues!). Oddly, because of some Pope most of the statues of males (that they robbed from Greece) had their privates either snapped off or covered with a leaf. Here is a football field long hallway that was hard to believe.

This funny globe thingy was in a courtyard. I think it had something to do with world peace. There are a few of them around the world so the Vatican doesn't have the market on them.

This is supposed to be one of the most beautiful statues in the world.

There were no pictures allowed in the Sistine Chapel. It took Michelangelo four years to paint. It wasn't a labor of love either, because he was forced to do it by a Pope. Here is a list of Popes. Find one to blame.

When we finished here it was already 1:30 PM and it was going to take an hour to get Magicland and it closed at 6PM. We deemed it hopeless to try because we had yet to climb the steps of the dome nor had we seen St. Peter's Basilica, the largest church in the world. We were thinking that was going to take more than an hour.

Karen and I aren't wimps when it comes to stairs as you've seen in previous weeks on this trip but the weather was hot so we opted to take an elevator half the way to the top of the dome. We only had to do 320 stairs instead of 551. One of the Popes deemed that no buildings in Rome be higher than his church so the view from here is pretty good.

Exiting the elevator after the ride down put us almost into St. Peter's Basilica. No long line to stand in to get in. We entered close to the end of most people's walk-through so we just slowly did our looking and picture taking backwards.

To give you an idea how big this place is, every other church's footprint can fit inside this one. There were thousands of plastic chairs set up in here. Was this their pews? No, it turns out the Pope was ordaining some priests tomorrow. That would explain the chairs and video screens outside as well.

It is doubtful you'll ever see a more beautiful church, so if you're ever going to pick one to see choose this one. But give yourself all day to view the Vatican, you'll need it.