Vatican City

Vatican City is tiny, but the volume of things to see is immense. We started at the Vatican Museum, which houses a staggering quantity of art and artifacts. The place is huge, with enormous galleries devoted to ancient Egyptian artifacts, Etruscan stuff, tapestries, maps, statuary (both whole and in ready-to-assemble kit form) and, of course, frescoes. Room after room of frescoes. Endless series of frescoes. Frescoes on all four walls and the ceiling, plus mosaics on the floor. We reached our saturation points early, but the way the museum is laid out you must travel through each and every room to find the exit. Fortunately, we reached the Sistine Chapel before complete overload set in. Although the room was severely overcrowded, we were able to spend some time with a guidebook examining the frescoes. The chapel truly is a renaissance art library all in one room.

After finally finding the uscita and leaving the museum, we set off for St. Peter's. We thought we were going by the shortest route and would have been there quickly were it not for two facts: 1) The Vatican is a walled city, and 2) we were outside the wall. We came pretty close to circumnavigating a whole country on foot, non-stop, before we found an entrance to the Piazza San Pietro. Our first look at St. Peter's Basilica was less than inspiring, as the whole facade was covered by a massive scaffolding. Once inside we were awestruck by the scale. I knew all along that the place was big, but I had no idea how imposing it would be. We walked all around the interior, identifying various statues with the help of our guidebook. We specifically sought out Michaelangelo's Pieta, which was not only protected behind glass, but we had to resort to binoculars to view it due to another enormous interior scaffolding.

As we were leaving, we spotted a line to go up to the cupola at the top of the dome. Of course we joined it, and an elevator ride later we began climbing steps, first to an interior viewing balcony overlooking the altar, then to the cupola itself and its panoramic views of the city. The weather was good and the sky clear, so we could see for miles.

After descending from the cupola, we visited the tombs below the church, then left the Vatican via the Piazza and headed back into Rome.