When In Rome
Hello again my loves! I am a forgetful, spastic person and once again I forgot to update the blog. I don’t even have Spore as an excuse this time. I just forgot. But it’s all okay because here I am again! On with the show.
We left off in the train station after arriving in Rome. There, we collected our baggage from the baggage compartments and headed out into the city. After a rather amusing incident where we took the wrong road and ended up going in the opposite direction from our apartment, we found the place we were going to and dragged our luggage up five flights of stairs to collapse on the very squishy and comfortable couches.
After resting for a bit, we headed out to see the Colosseum, since it was nearby and we had no other pressing concerns at the time. We wandered down in that direction, observing the differences between Rome and Naples – Rome is very clean, and the streets are overall quite wide and straight. And the drivers are positive saints compared to the Neapolitan drivers. We came up the street to get our first view of the Colosseum – and was it ever magnificent. Seriously, that thing is huge, even with more than half of the outer wall knocked down. We headed down the stairs to ground level, passing numerous cheap tourist junk stands and a group of incredibly talented dancers performing on the street to do a circuit of the Colosseum and check out the Arch of Constantine. Upon finishing our circuit, we went to buy some groceries (pasta again) and returned to the apartment for dinner.
Here, I will pause for a moment to talk about our physical state at the time. After over a week of steady travelling and spending most of our days on our feet, we were quite tired already by this point. On top of that, mom was already somewhat ill, and I seemed to be picking up the edges of her sickness. Adding fuel to the fire, the beds in our Roman apartment, or at least the one I was sleeping on, were quite uncomfortable. It was also at this point that I really started missing Nami and various other people I’m in regular contact with. Altogether, it made for a rather exhausting few days, and for this reason, our adventures in Rome were not quite as energetic as they had been in Naples and Venice.
Once mom and dad had picked up our museum and transport passes, we spent most of the first full day in Rome simply exploring the city. We visited the Spanish Steps, climbing up all of what we think we remember as 176 steps to the church at the top of it. We wandered down to look at various historical buildings, then made our way slowly back towards the Pantheon, which we investigated with great enthusiasm. There, we found Jason, a very enthusiastic tour guide from Louisiana who has been living in Italy for the past nine years, giving tours. He was doing a free tour of the Pantheon, and took us around, explaining the significance of the cross-capped Egyptian obelisk out front (Christ’s triumph over “pagan influence”) and detailing some of the history of the structure. It was from him that we learned that Michelangelo had been so impressed with the Pantheon that, when he designed the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica, he deliberately made it half a metre shorter than the dome of the Pantheon, in honour of the “perfection” of the ancient structure – a building so stable that the earthquakes that knocked down the outside walls of the Colosseum had no discernible effect on it. Finished with the tour, we wandered back towards home, checking out the Trevi Fountain along the way, then buying groceries (more pasta) and turning in early in preparation for our visit to the Vatican the next day.
The next morning, we were out early (for us) around eleven to visit the Colosseum in the morning. Thanks to our pre-purchased museum cards, we got to skip the lines and go straight in, whereupon we climbed very steep stairs to check out the artifacts they had found (mostly sculptures, bones, and gambling paraphernalia), then went around the inside walls to get a good look at the arena floor, which had been destroyed and showed the underground rooms and corridors where they had kept the slaves and allowed entrance to the warriors and animals who rose up from the floor in the games. Then we caught the metro across the river, arriving promptly in St. Peter’s Square for our 1:30 tour of the Vatican with Jason.
And I must say, he’s both hilarious and a great tour guide. He told us about the history of the building, as well as the belief that St. Peter himself is buried under the basilica – a belief that may have been confirmed by some excavations in the last few decades, when a team discovered what they think are the bones of Peter. We headed around the outside of the square, checking out the wall that saved the Pope’s life when the Protestants sacked the city in the 1500s, as well as the area of housing that had set up to be a safe place for the pilgrims who came to visit the Vatican. Along the way to the museum, Jason told us about Michelangelo’s belief that sculpture was a superior art form to painting, and the sculpture project he was hired for that never got completed, because the architect of the Basilica talked the Pope into employing Michelangelo in the painting of the Sistine Chapel in order to keep “his” Basilica from being dominated by Michelangelo’s sculptures. However, his plan may have backfired, since Michelangelo’s paintings became some of the most famous works of the Renaissance, and his sculpture, Pieta, is still on display in the Basilica.
We headed through the museum relatively quickly, checking out various Renaissance-era and ancient sculptures of Greek Gods and Goddesses, including the rather famous sculpture of Laocoon and His Sons, beset by snakes when he tried to strike the Trojan Horse in suspicion. We also saw various ancient mosaics, a statue of the Artemis of Ephesus, tapestries, paintings, and an entire room of paintings by Raphael, including his famous School of Athens – absolutely incredible, and one of my favourite Renaissance paintings. Its colour is beautiful, the perspective is incredible, and the thing is huge – an entire wall of fresco. From there, we proceeded to the Sistine Chapel itself, where we witnessed the Last Judgement, the Creation of Adam, and all the other paintings on the ceiling and those on the walls.
No visit to the Vatican, however, would be complete without taking a look at St. Peter’s Basilica, so, after the tour finished, we headed inside to see the most magnificent, opulent church in the world. And it truly is incredible – even the “unimportant” sculptures and works of art tucked into corners and around pillars are amazing. And then, off to the side, we saw the Pieta. It was so incredible that I cried.
After that, it turns into a bit of a blur. Small moments stand out – hearing the choir sing as the evening mass started; the sculpture of St. Peter with the foot worn smooth from millions of worshippers over the course of history rubbing or kissing it for luck; the young woman who came in for the mass who crossed herself with tears of joy in her eyes. By the time we left, I had cried myself out. My last memory of the Vatican is looking up at the building where the Pope lives as we left and seeing that two of his lights were on.
The next day was much more relaxed. We wandered around more of the city, checking out a tiny museum of decorative art, a (somewhat out of place) stone pyramid, a monument to the victims of Italy’s fascist regime, and the old bathhouses, which we unfortunately arrived too late at to enter. Then we headed back to the apartment for dinner (pasta!) and one more night. The next day, we packed up for the last time and headed off to the train station, catching our train to the airport and getting on a plane back to Toulouse. We arrived home in the afternoon rain and collapsed in welcome rest, our holiday finally over.