Friday, November 15, 2024
We had heard lots of horror stories about waiting to get into the Vatican Museum. Everything we read said take a tour take a tour take a tour. I wasn’t really interested in a tour, because I have been on a tour before. I didn’t need anyone to tell me about stuff – I just wanted to go to see the Sistine Chapel again. I would see things along the way, and they would be pretty and that is all I wanted. So, we bought tickets for first thing in the morning – 8am – thinking that if you are first in, you can’t be behind too many people.
We were right. We got up – ate a little in our lovely breakfast room – and walked over (the direct way – not all over the place. It seemed uphill this direction and wasn’t as fun as yesterday). The Lane 1 line for 8:00 was already pretty long, but it moved right along once it was actually 8am. We were in. We followed the signs to the Sistene chapel, looking at ceilings….
And floors….
Fancy things….
And places to shop (with windows that looked like mirrors at first, but were definitely just windows in front of more halls!)
Up and down at least eleven flights of stairs, inside and outside….(we were walking on a covered “bridge” between buildings)
Until we finally got to the Sistene Chapel! (No pictures allowed, which makes sense, but I wasn’t sure – so I snapped an illegal picture of the room, just to show how sparsely it was filled.
On our last trip here (my first trip outside North America or UK), this place just knocked my socks off. After the disappointing (plaster) Piete yesterday, I was ready to be underwhelmed. We zoomed in and got to sit on the plexiglass seats surrounding the room. I looked for God and Adam, and there they were. Mmmm. Nothing really popped. I sat and looked and looked. It is crazy impressive – just the sheer scope of it! – but it was a bit flat. I thought about the fact that this was where we went on the first day of our tour twelve years ago – and about how many (MANY) places and things I have seen since then. Am I jaded? Have I seen too much to be moved by the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel? OUCH! What a thought. There were some guys on the sides of the ceiling that I really liked, but…my socks were still on. We moved to the other side of the room and looked. Socks remained on. Keith started feeling unwell, so we sat a bit longer. I was fixated on the painting of curtains hanging around the room. They just looked so real, and I stood up and turned around to look at the ones behind me. I don’t even get how someone can paint the light and dark and make it look so real. I walked over to look at more curtains. I walked out to the middle of the room and looked up. BAM! There it was! AWESOME! It turns out those seats had lured us with comfort, but left us in a bad place to see. Suddenly everything was alive up there. People and masonry looked like it was dimensional, and weathered, and proportional, and real. Ooof. What a relief! What a beautiful sight. It is why pictures don’t do justice to anything. I don’t get a lot of things, but I really, really don’t get how Michaelangelo could paint and sculpt with the eye of the beholder in mind – painting and sculpting with the proportions so right that looking at it from far below made it look wonderful.
We continued on and saw some reallllly old stuff, and more gorgeous ceilings and floors. We got to the longest, longest hall with “lockers” lining the sides all the way down. I said it was the high school part, because the lockers were too tall for the littles. Keith inspected the area and reported that there were Roman numerals over each locker (obviously. How would you know which one was yours without a number?) He said he was looking at number 54 and he wondered if he opened it it would have stuff from Pope #54 – or perhaps actually have Pope #54 in it. There were also a lot of comfy looking chairs scattered about all the cases of old, religious stuff.
We were looking at some tapestry and embroidered work, when Keith called me over to look at some creepy faces. THE FACES…is something we say because of an old fruit roll ups commercial. We said it quite a few times here. Then again later…
We got to a point that the signs just said Exit this way. We followed. We veered off and went and hung out in a garden. Keith had seen a car like this on the road and was so excited we found one parked by the garden. He thinks you can barely tell which it’s facing if it’s not moving. It is very cute.
We went back in under a giant sign that said Exit with an arrow. It is weird to go in to exit. We were definitely exiting now. Up a very plain set of stairs, past some work area, and … not out. There was a giant area of more stuff. The first stuff was a model of Borobudur Temple in Indonesia. There was a big thing outside that at first we thought was a bell, but it turned out to be a piece of the temple. Keith had so much fun taking close up pictures of the model, trying to see if he could get the illusion that we had been there.
And then came the faces. Display after display of gifts the popes have received from other countries. So many faces. Here are some of the ones I really liked best.
Those ones really creep me out
We thought we were done after we walked through all the Pope stamps, but no. There was a double helix staircase that needed to be walked and photographed. What fun we had with that. How many pictures needed to be taken? Probably 40.
We were out in three hours. I was hungry and Keith was not. Upside-down world. Took a bit, but we finally decided where to go for lunch. They brought us a complimentary appetizer of tomatoes on toast. What madness was that? It was so good we were both just gobbling it. What was on it to make it so good? We don’t know. I wish I was eating it now. I ordered some pasta with red sauce and bacon. Keith ordered lasagna. Mine looked so good. Keith’s looked flat and an odd color. Mine was not good (to me — Keith thought it was good). Keith’s was amazing. We swapped halfway. We ordered a second lasagna for dessert. Reordering is the theme of the trip.
We set off walking toward a castle. It looked round and old in the pictures and was 23 minutes away. Instead, we found a grocery store in three minutes. We love a foreign grocery store. I bought myself an Advent calendar! We bought two Milka bars. We bought a bag of spicy chips called Vivace. We bought a coke twice the size of the one at lunch for one quarter of the price. We bought two kinds of cookies. We are ridiculous.
Cake comes in boxes! Who knew? We had to go home because now we had groceries. I found a face right outside our hotel.
I sat on the balcony and enjoyed my snacks, even though I wasn’t hungry at all. I was so tired, I really wanted a nap, but I knew we would go to bed early (it’s almost midnight as I am writing this, so, no) so we could nap. I came in and Keith said it was time for a nap. He set an alarm for half an hour. I slept for 90 minutes. So much for that round, old castle.
When we went back out, I had to take another picture of the pope shop because yesterday’s was obscured by the gate. I talked with Benjamin about this last night (birthday chat) and we are boggled by exactly what this is and who shops here. It is literally two blocks from the Vatican. Does the Pope look at his assistant and suggest a walk over to the shop for something spiffy for Sunday? Do cardinals and bishops pick up some “maybe someday” outfits? Do regular people pick up something to wear to the museum? (Imagine looking at the queues and every 50-100 people there is someone all dressed up. Is it not allowed, like at Disney World? You dress up in honor of a character, so to speak, but you can’t wear a costume.) Or do tourists buy an outfit just to wear at home, to remember the good times at the Vatican? I do not know. It is a mystery.
As we continued walking, Keith said, “OH LOOK!” I looked up and saw this – my first Christmas of the year.
I turned around and saw this! He is adorable!
We walked and shopped. We looked for food. We picked Vulio and had very interesting sammiches in a streetside plastic room. The food was realllllly different and really good. My sammich had dry tomatoes. I should have been able to figure out that meant sun dried tomatoes, but I didn’t.
We were so full we couldn’t eat another bite…until three blocks later when we stopped and bought lobster tails (the good, pastry kind).
I couldn’t go pack until I had one more look at the Basilica. It is right over there, afterall. It looked the same as yesterday.
