Italy Day 3

Day 3

Wednesday August 3

Wednesday, we went to the Vatican and it’s extensive museum.

This place was amazing. They had everything from an Egyptian mummy to modern works of art. It was honestly mind blowing. It took us the better part of 4 hours to walk through with our handy audiotours. I took forever in the Sistine chapel. Even with a million people in it, it was amazing. It was super intresting to hear about how it was painted in stages by different people, not just Michael Angelo. The restoration process was interesting to hear about too. This was just a highlight of the tour, there was an amazing mosaics, statues, and painted rooms and motifs. These were all amazing to see and hear about how the Vatican acquired them over the centuries. The funniest thing I saw was a huge stone toe. That’s right, you read that correctly. A huge stone toe. It was random toe underneath a stone sarcophagus. I am very curious as to what statue this is from and why it is randomly placed there.

The amount of history that I saw that day within all those things really was defining. Between all the history in the ancient things we had seen in Rome the day before and now I was seeing their art. These people really started to exist in my mind as people. Not just as things of the past.

After our long long tour of the Vatican museums, we walked out of the Vatican walls and around to the front of St. Peter’s Basilica. We would have loved to go it, but it was the heat of the day and the line was super long, it was up one of the arms that stretched out from the basilica, doubling back a few times here and there all the way inside. We hung out around the fountains that were in the court yard and took in the entire experience while reading about the history of the building from my handy dandy corner kiosk guide to Rome. While sitting there, I could not imagine how many thousands of people that sit there and wait for the smoke that comes out of the chimneys of the Sistine Chapel when the bishops of the catholic church. So. Many. People.

I’m not sure that I even want to imagine it.

After this, I’m not sure you can guess what we did.

That’s right, we took a nap. My mono is starting to really annoy me at this point. Thankfully, we can use the heat of the day when we would otherwise be relative unproductive in our sightseeing adventures.

For dinner, we went to a resturant near the main bus terminal. We decided it was time for a nice dinner, not just food. To begin with, I had prujuito and fresh montzerella. AMAZING. Then I had a simple plate of spaghetti with meat sauce. Again, AMAZING. I ate until I was stuffed. And then finished it. Yum. Good memories.