Rome, Day 4

Today was the "Vatican Day." Since our guidebook had led us wrong every other day and we heard from others in our hostel that the Sistine Chapel closes at about 2pm, we decided to get to the Vatican Museums right away in the morning. Then 7 more people from our hostel decided to join us. After 9 people got up, ready, had breakfast, bought tickets for the subway, got on the subway, and then got to the line, it was about 8:45 in the morning. Not quite as early as we had hoped, but such is life. At 10:20 am we finally got our tickets and were in the Vatican Museums. We didn't leave until about 2pm, and after we got back to the hostel, we realized that we had accidentally missed a whole chunk of it. Another lady from our hostel stayed in there until well past 3pm! By the time we were out of there, we were starving, and well ready to be done with museums for the day. The collection is wonderful though. The audio guide is not worth it through, and the map that goes with it sucks. If you go, buy a map from the gift shop or get one before hand online. That's how we missed a whole section, crappy map. But what we did see was AMAZING. There was one room full of mini-mosaics. They couldn't have been over the size of a 50 cent piece but all the little pieces crammed into that small space was incredible. And all the detail too!
No visit to the Vatican is complete without a stop to St Peter's Piazza and Basilica. We did see the funny looking guards, but they were disappointingly far off, and the guards at the car entrance don't have the crazy stripes, just blue. The guards at the metal detectors and baggage scanning machines are just normally dressed security guards. VERY disappointing. I wanted guards telling people to put on more clothes! They were a lot of people getting through that according to the "rules" shouldn't have... maybe the Church is rolling with the times. The church is absolutely amazing. The outside is beautiful and the inside is breathtaking. We took tons of pictures. One of the interesting points of the church, is that they mark how big it is compared to other churches. This one is MASSIVE. And the artwork in there is incredible. I cannot really describe it in words. I haven't uploaded these pictures yet, but even those do not do it justice.



After leaving the Vatican, we walked along the old Pilgrimage route for a bit. The street is very narrow (which does not stop cars) and beautiful. A lot of the corners in Rome had artwork of the Virgin Mary or other religious icons up on them. It was really interesting. This street of course had them.



We stopped at quite a few more churches during the day. The churches here are amazing, but, unfortunaley, with cramming so many of them into such a short period of time, they start blending together. At least we could label most of them when we got back! This one was really interesting given the turet. It swirls around at the top. We tried to get into it, but couldn't find any way of doing that.