Vatican City

Today we visited Vatican City. We wisely took the advice of others and made a reservation to get in. The wait time when we arrived around 10am had to have been at least 3 hours, and the line continued to grow all the while. Conveniently, we were able to more or less walk right in (there was still madness to get through before actually entering, but we just stuck to the buddy system and made it through intact and together). If you have already figured it out, I will say it very clearly - the Vatican makes Disneyland look like a ghost town. I have never seen so much humanity crammed into such a small area. So if you don't like crowds and are not dying to see the Sistine Chapel or St. Peter's Basilica, this is something you may want to skip.

So once we accepted that we would be in a continuous crush the entire day, we set out to enjoy ourselves. There are basically three major things to do in the Vatican: the Vatican museums, the Sistine Chapel, and St. Peter's Basilica. We started out by first just viewing the architecture of the Vatican itself, aka the Apostolic Palace, where the pope both lives and conducts business. The palace is created in a very classical nature, with tall clean columns and statues overlooking the square below. These are actually statues of various saints (I had to explain to Ryan that no, not all the saints are up there - there's just not enough room for that!).

After getting our bearings, we checked out the Vatican museums. There is some very beautiful artwork here - some famous Rafael's, Giotto's, Caravaggio's, etc. There was also Da Vinci's St. Jerome, a piece that always stands out to me as it looks almost impressionistic compared to the vividly realistic paintings from the Renaissance. This is simply because it was unfinished, but whatever. Da Vinci was a visionary...maybe he left it unfinished to make it look more impressionistic...but probably not.

After finishing with the museums, we took a couple of deep breaths and joined the throng of people surging to the Sistine Chapel. If my earlier warning was not enough for you, I'm going to try it again - when you get in line to see the Sistine Chapel, you are not simply waiting to go directly into the Chapel. No no, you must first get herded through a long maze of rooms that unfortunately get completely ignored because the line is continuously surging forward towards the light at the end of the tunnel. You can try to step out of line to admire some of the pieces, but you are completely surrounded by the masses, and quite frankly you get to the point where you are feeling so claustrophobic, you just want to get through it and get out! Not an ideal way to view some truly wonderful art, but there you have it. The modern art rooms closer to the Sistine Chapel were more open, so you could easily step out of line to admire these pieces, so we did. There were some Dali's, a Diego Rivera, and a few other really wonderful modern pieces (all of a religious nature) that were a breath of fresh air after a plethora of Renaissance art.

After at least 30 minutes of being shepherded through dark, cramped, crowded rooms, we finally arrived at...The Sistine Chapel. I will not say it is underwhelming. It is pretty incredible what Michelangelo accomplished. I will say it would have been much easier to admire and appreciate if we weren't by this point sick to death of feeling like cattle. We admired the ceiling for a few minutes, and then happily exited.

Our last stop at the Vatican was St. Peter's Basilica. This was definitely the highlight of our Vatican outing. The church is massive - it has the largest interior of any Catholic church in the world, and to prove this point, there are plaques on the floor indicating where various other Catholic churches would fit in comparison. The altar itself is also massive, and apparently only the pope himself is allowed to perform mass from the main altar. It is said that the altar stands directly over the crypt where Peter's remains are buried. We were able to go down into the crypts below to see the memorial site for Peter, as well as the sarcophagi of a number of popes buried there (some as old as 1200AD and possibly older). Words just don't cut it when it comes to describing the basilica, so you will need to look at Ryan's photos to really get a sense of its grandeur.

After a hard few hours of sightseeing, we hit a little cafe on the way back to our hotel - jackpot! I ordered the minestrone soup while Ryan ordered the carbonara. Both were phenomenal. I am really amazed by our good fortune with food on this trip!

We returned to the hotel to observe the siesta hour, then wandered over to the Spanish Steps to watch the sunset in style. At this point we were ready for dinner but not really in the mood for more heavy Italian food, so we found a trendy little Japanese restaurant that looked legit (Japanese sushi chefs). We ordered tempura and tonkatsu and were very happy with both - I kind of wish we had this restaurant closer to home. They are called Hamasei, and their original location is in Tokyo, then they decided to open one in Rome...so maybe we will get one in Huntington Beach yet!

Saturday will be our last day in Italy and second to last day on our trip, so we are going to do what