I left off with our second day in Italy, when we attempted to see the Pope. Friends had told us to go to Vatican City early and the Pope was supposed to be at St. Peter's Basilica on that day (Wednesday). However the hostel lady told us to go in the afternoon, so we woke up around 9:30 and got ready and took the train to a stop around Vatican City. We walked down the street and started talking to an Australian lady who set us up with a tour of the Vatican and Vatican museum. She told us that we'd missed the Pope by three hours! We got there at 1pm and the Pope was out at 10am. It was really disappointing. Kind of a once in a lifetime opportunity that we missed. Anyway, we bought tickets to the tour and got lunch at an amazing pizza place. Rome pizza is seriously the best. I had two pieces, one magherita and one potato. Yummy.
It was pretty cool going into Vatican City because it's walled in and since it's its own country we had to go through security to get in. Unfortunately we didn't get a stamp in our passports, which is what I really wanted. Our tour lady told us a lot of things, such as the Vatican museum is the biggest one in the world (7 miles long) and that the Pope only wears Prada (besides his holy robes and such). We saw the Pope's private gardens and tons of rooms in the museum. One of the coolest ones was the Italian room. The city was gold crested and there were aerial maps of all different parts of Italy that were drawn before there was any way to get an aerial view of the ground. We also learned that Greek sculptures are more perfect and beautiful than real life people (beautiful mind, beautiful body). Roman sculptures are more realistic; there are bigger noses and wrinkled foreheads, etc. The tour was interesting, but really long. The end of the tour was Raphael's rooms and the Sistine Chapel. Raphael's rooms were beautiful, but the Sistine Chapel was kind of disappointing. For some reason I didn't realize that the Sistine Chapel was painted twice. The first painting is what I thought it would be, the Creation of Adam painting with the background of blue sky and clouds. This version of the ceiling was much more complicated, the Creation of Adam painting was in the middle of the ceiling but there were loads of other small paintings all over the place. It was really overwhelming, especially since I'm more of a fan of simple things. I would've taken a picture but you weren't allowed cameras. They had guys walking around telling people to be quiet and yelling at anyone with a camera.
After the Sistine Chapel we walked to St. Peter's Basilica. We saw Swiss guards (weird) and all of St. Peter's Square. St. Peter's Basilica was absolutely huge, our guide said that the Statue of Liberty could fit inside. I believe it because it was gigantic. We saw the Pietra also. The Pietra was surreal, I can't believe we actually saw it. Since 1997 it's been behind bullet proof glass because some guy took an ax or something to the statue and hacked off Mary's face.
We walked around, saw some monks from the Franciscan Order, a lot of nuns and the beginning of 4pm mass. After that we walked outside and took tons of pictures because it was beautiful lighting and I couldn't believe we were there.
There were a lot of bishops walking around and eventually we talked to one of them (mostly because Vijay thought it would be hilarious to get a picture with one of them). Supposedly the Pope was in the Czech Republic a year ago and all of the Czech bishops came to Vatican City for a conference or something and to thank the Pope for coming. The first bishop that we talked to spoke English, and we talked to another one who spoke basically every language but English. He was with his brother and his brother's wife, who both spoke English. I talked to them about hockey a little bit, they were Bruins fans.
After that we figured out our way home, it took a while. We stopped at Piazza Fornati on the way and I got the best lasagna ever. The food in Rome was ridiculously good. We wandered around some more and on our way home we stopped at a pub. After the pub we ended up at an American club where I saw someone that I knew from freshman year at Nova. I was so excited though because they had on ESPN at that club. Eventually we split and went back to the hostel to go to sleep.
I'm going to make a separate post for Venice.
M
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