Rome - Day 3 - The Vatican

Wednesday we had tickets for the Vatican at 9:30. We had bought them online before we left. We again needed to take the bus, so we again left a lot of time to get there. We got there at about 9am for our 9:30 tickets, so it was perfect. When we found the ticketholders' line, we were behind only one guy and one couple. Sweet! We decided to get in it and see if they'd let us in early. So, we waited. And waited. A few people showed up and got in line with the guy in front of us. Grr. But, still not bad. We listened to him talking to his group, and we learned that they normally open the gates at 9am to the ticketholders and 9:30 to the non-ticketholders, but there was a special event that day, so they weren't opening until later. It was a good thing we had gotten in line, because it grew and grew behind us. They finally opened the gates at about 9:45, and we rushed in. We had to change our vouchers for actual tickets, but that only took a moment. Then, we rushed to the Sistine Chapel. You enter on one end of the Vatican Museums, and the Sistine Chapel is way at the other end. But, you can't go straight there. You have to go through lots of galleries and up and down lots of sets of steps. Luckily, we had a map. It wasn't horribly detailed, but it was a map. We got there, and there was almost nobody there.

It's pretty spectacular. Everything is painted - the ceiling, the walls, everywhere. Again, this was a no picture area, so I took hip shots. I'm pretty proud of this one. Not bad for no looking, huh?

Since we had then seen the chapel, we wanted to see a few other things. Mom really wanted to see the Raphael rooms, and I wanted to see the Borgia apartments.

However, the Sistine Chapel is a one way affair, as we discovered as we tried to exit out the entrance. When we got out of the SC and asked somebody how to find the Raphael rooms and the Borgia apartments, he said we had to go all the way to the end and back around again. So, we did. We sauntered through the rest of the galleries and then started over. We went more leisurely through the rooms we had seen before and discovered some new ones. Max had wanted to see the Etruscan artifacts, so we found those. We found signs to the Raphael rooms and the apartments, so we followed those. Along the way, we saw lots of beautiful mosaics & sculptures. The Sistine Chapel was a crush of people by the time we got back to it. I'm so glad we got to see it by ourselves.

The Raphael rooms were pretty awesome. There are four of them, all painted walls and ceiling. I'm not positive whether the ceilings were his, too, or just the frescoes on the walls. Either way, very pretty.

Then we got to the Borgia apartments. I must say, I was quite disappointed. The ceilings were magnificently decorated, but I had hoped that they would be decorated they way they would have been when the Borgias lived there. They weren't. They were filled with modern paintings, and I don't care for modern paintings, in general. After that, we found our way back outside.

We wanted to see St. Peter's, as well, so we headed over that way. We got to the Piazza, and saw the line. OMG, the line. There was no way in hell we were standing in that line. There wasn't even a discussion. The whole discussion was, "OK, we'll come back Friday morning, first thing." We did walk around the piazza a bit, and we saw the place on the ground where you can stand and have all the columns around that half of the piazza line up. That was neat. It was so horribly hot, though, I didn't care as much as I might have another day.

We started walking to a bus stop, but decided that it was about half as far to the bus stop as it was to the apartment, so we just kept walking. We passed over the Ponte Sant'Angelo, where there are a bunch of Bernini angels that Mom really wanted to see. Her friend had said to see them at night, since they are all lit up, but we wanted to see them during the day, too, just in case.We got back to the apartment and had some down time, which we all needed.

At dinner time, we went to a pizza place near the apartment that came highly recommended by Mom's friend Pietro, who is from Rome. We got there pretty close to opening, and it's a good thing, because the line just increased behind us.
There's the line, on the left. We were amazed that people would stand in line like that for dinner, but then we figured it wasn't much different than waiting for a table at Outback, you just have to stand in a line instead of sit in a lobby.

On the napkins, there were little printed mustaches. Mom cut hers out and stuck it on her face, so we all followed suit. She hates having her picture shown, so I'll post mine instead. This is me trying to look like Mario.  I wasn't terribly hungery, so I didn't get a pizza of my own. I tried a couple of the other pizzas, though, and they were pretty good. We discovered that a four cheese pizza in Italy is nothing like a four cheese pizza in America, but much closer to that of France. It was covered in mozzerella, blue cheese, huge chunks of brie, and some unidentified 4th cheese. Sooooo much cheese. It was way too blue for me, but Em seemed to like it. I really liked the onion pizza best.

After dinner, we headed back to the Ponte Sant'Angelo to see the angels all lit up. They weren't. But, they were still pretty. Then it was bedtime! Never have I enjoyed bedtime as much as I did in Italy.

Emma says - The pizza had soooo much cheese, it was delicious!!!