Wednesday...Rome

Janel and the gang came over to our flat around 11:00 am. I took a picture of Mom on the balcony of our 7th floor apartment. You can make out the wall of Vatican City in the background.

First, we stopped at an espresso bar for a cappuccino. Mom had her first Italian breakfast - a cappuccino and a cannoli. Cannoli are not usually breakfast food, but what she doesn't know won't hurt her. Actually, I told her it should be a differnt type of pastry for breakfast, but she wanted to try the cannoli.

Our first stop today was the Vatican Museum. The Rick Steves guides are invaluable. He has self guided tours for all the big museums and attractions. First stop was the Pinacoteca, which is a large renaissance art gallery. Very cool paintings including my favorite of Adam & Eve in the Garden of Eden - it was the last painting before we left the gallery.

Stopped for lunch at the self service cafeteria and spent way too much money. We should have packed a lunch...lesson learned. We're on vacation - just have to get into the mindset of we're tourists and we're going to pay more than we should for stuff.

This is Heather and Flat Lauren in front of a map of Sicily in the map room of the museum. The room is several hundred feet long and has maps of all the regions of Italy, new and old. This one is backwards...the left side of the map is east and the right side is west..not sure why.

The museum is full of loads of cool stuff - the Egyptian and ancient Greek stuff was cool to see as was the huge hall upstairs through the palace. The halls are lined with statues, paintings and tapestries.

At the end, you enter the Capella Sistina - Sistine Chapel. There were dozens of school kids on a field trip so it was pretty loud. The docents were trying to get everyone to be quite, but it didn't work.

We took a short cut, instead of finishing the whole museum tour, and went to the Basilica. St. Peter's tomb is in the middle near the front of the church under a huge altar. The cathedral is very grand. Words do not do it justice. The place is just huge, awesome, powerful...see I can't even try to begin to describe it. Snapped a photo of Flat Lauren and then headed out to the square.

St. Peter's square is even bigger than I imagined. Again, I can't even think of trying to describe the grandeur of this place. Everything is more impressive than the last. We wandered around the square for a bit and wanted to do some drawing, but we had to catch a bus to the Colosseum before it closed.

Express Bus 40 takes you right to the Colosseum from the Vatican in about 15 minutes. In the early evening its not too crowded. The inside of the Colosseum is even more impressive. Not quite as grand as I had imagined, but very much worth seeing. I can imagine it was a big, fat, hairy deal in A.D. 80! Even more impressive is that it's still standing and we can go walk around inside this ginormous sports arena built almost 2 thousand years ago.

We took a bunch of pictures inside - wacky poses and Lego Stormtroopers. Scooped up a dirt sample from the arena floor for our collection. Arena is the Latin word for sand, which is what the ground of the Colosseum was covered with after the wooden floor was in place.

Headed back to the metro and got off at Berberini and started towards the Trevi Fountain. Got hungry so we stopped at a pizzeria. Very good margherita pizza! Watched Rome play Manchester United on TV at the ristorante. There was about 5 or 6 TV's tuned to the game all over the restaurant.

After dinner, we finally found Fontana di Trevi...chucked a few coins...snapped a few photos and then had to take a taxi home because the metro shuts down at 9:00 pm! Oh well...

'Sera,

Bud