Il Vaticano
Trip Start
Oct 04, 2007
1
5
41
Trip End
Nov 11, 2007
Vatican City,
Italy
Monday, October 8, 2007
The vatican city is awesome. I would have to say the most impressive place I've been so far... ever? We took the tram to the nearest stop an walked past the line for the vatican museums, about 1km! Thought that was too long and we would come back later (internet booking would have been good!) so we went to line up for St Peter's Basilica, another 1km line. We walked right to the end with Neill whinging about lines the whole time an got approached by a dogy guy selling tour tickets which lt you skip the line. We ended up buying them an went straight to the end of the museum line which was a bit shoter by now. Our guide promised us about 45-60 minutes wait. An hour and 40 minutes later we finally got through vatican security and started our tour. The guide was excellent and really knew his stuff. There are so many amazing sculptures and works of art everywhere that you become complacent after a while (kinda like with the monuments in Rome). We had about a half hour history lesson on the sixtine chapel ceiling paintings which was really interesting and saw the museum highlights. Apparently if you spent 1 minute in every room of the vatican museums you would come out 15 years later. We decided not to do that tour.
La Basilica del San Pietro (St. Peter's Basilica) is the biggest cathedral in the world. 55 stories high and no buildings in Rome are allowed to be higher than it says the pope :) You can take photos inside but they turn out very dark because the place is too big for the flash to be of any use. We blessed ourselves with holy water but there were monks watching when I did it and I buggered it up. spectacles, testicles, watch and wallet right? :)
That's enough on vatican city fo now,
John
