Vatican City

On our last full day in Rome we headed to Vatican City. Since we enjoyed our tour around the Coliseum and Roman Forum so much, we decided to book a tour for around the Vatican as well. We headed out on a beautiful morning but before we got there the rain clouds moved in. We were caught without our rain coats or umbrellas, so we had to duck into a Souvenir shop to grab a couple of more cheap little umbrellas.

After a bit of lunch, we met up with our tour group and headed into the Vatican. Our tour guide was an Irish guy named Russo, an archaeologist by training, who seemed to know everything there was to know about the Vatican and Rome.

The Vatican Museum is an absolutely enormous museum. There is no way you could see and appreciate all of the artwork there in a single day, so Russo walked us through the most famous parts of the Museum as well as some of his personal favorites. The piece with the most interesting story we saw was “Laocoon and his Sons”. This statue was lost for around 1500 years. It was then found 500 years ago, but it was missing an arm. The arm was then found only about 100 years ago!

Of course, we also saw Michaelango’s Sistine Chapel, which contains what has been my favorite piece of artwork that I have seen on the trip – “The Last Judgement”.

The last major stop of the tour was St. Peter’s basilica, which is the grandest building we have ever stepped in.

St. Peter’s is the largest church in the world by a considerable margin. The basilica is 550ft tall, making it the largest building in Rome. You could comfortably place the Statue of Liberty inside the basilica. It is hard to give a sense of the extreme size and opulence of this building. Legend has it that the main alter of the building is placed upon the exact spot where St. Peter himself is buried, deep underground. Oddly enough, this is one of the very few legends that is likely true, as determined by archaeological excavations that were done only about 60 years ago.

We finished the day with a dinner out at a fancier restaurant called Arco Antico. We both ordered the tasting menu which was an enormous amount of food.