Our tour of the Vatican was an early start, bit like being back on the bus trip. We had a 25 minute walk to where our tour started, which was about 500 yards from the Vatican itself. We waited there for a while until a bus showed up. For some reason, beknown only to the tour company, they put us on a bus for the last stretch, then unloaded us again....most odd...we could have met them there it wouldn't have been a problem.
There isn't a great deal to the Vatican, space wise, but of course there is a great deal of quality. Both Chez and I were very keen to see the Sistine chapel. We travelled through a museum containing statues and tapestries and early examples of cartography to get there.
Our guide said that we were lucky, there weren't many people in the chapel when we arrived. There was no talking and we had about 20 minutes to suit our selves. The roof was smaller than I expected, not having done my homework, I was expecting a dome of some sorts. Didn't matter, the depictions were outstanding. The front wall depicting judgement day was probably the most interesting part for me. What an incredible work it was. You have to say Michelangelo had a good eye for drama.
We ran into a couple of the young ladies from our Italian bus tour after we had finished in the Vatican. One of them had been to the Chapel when it was being cleaned some years before. At that time, so few people were going she said you could lie on the floor and look up at the ceiling and stay as long as you liked. Well our guide might have said there weren't many people in the chapel on this day but if you happened to lie on the floor you would have been trampled...before the "shhhh" police dragged you away.
Experience 47. St Peters Basillica. Vatican City. 25 June.
Well as expected St Peters Basillica was pretty amazing. Surprisingly we were allowed to take photos there too which was different to any of the other churches we had been to in Italy. The interior was decorated in mosaics some of which looked more like paintings. We wondered around with the rest of the crowds, passing a couple of glass coffins containing the preserved bodies of dead popes. That was a bit weird.
The owners seem to be a bit fixated on the size of the basillica, not only is the dome really big, but the floor marks the size of other significant cathedrals around the world, runner up being St Paul's in London....na na, my cathedral is bigger than your cathedral.
Experience 48. Siesta
I think I have already mentioned somewhere along the line that all the smart people in this country siesta in the mid afternoon. I can see why too at this time of year because it is so stiflingly hot. In one of the places we ate dinner, the waiter insisted the weather was unseasonably hot...more like usual July he said, even so, it stood to reason that the only sillies out and about in the hottest part of a Rome afternoon are the tourists and the locals making a buck out of them.
Now I have no love of the protestant work ethic personally and don't mind admitting to the occasional siesta myself on weekends (& sometimes at my desk....I am a public servant after all). So now that we are off the bus tour, siesta time has become a part of our daily practice, if only for our few remaining days in Rome.
What joy to get out of the heat, take a cool drink, maybe a quick shower...if you could be bothered...and an hour or so snoozing away the heat of the day. Once up and about, quite revived, one tends to notice all the bedraggled tourists who have been through the Roman ruins or steamed themselves in the Pantheon all afternoon....poor sods.
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