Day 8 In Rome: Vatican City

Vatican Day! I was very excited about this day. Unfortunately Tiff was not feeling well most of the morning. We really liked our tour guide from yesterday and she was giving a Vatican tour the next day so we did our third tour with our new Aussie friend Hannah.

We meet the group at noon and headed into the Vatican Museum. Basically when Rome began to fall and throughout the Dark and Middle Ages the popes continuously expanded their collections to where they now have one of if not the best collection of Greek and Roman sculptures and art.

These sculptures had dramatic influences on Michelangelo, Raphael and other great Renaissance artists because they were not allowed (by the church) to examine the human body by examining models and doing autopsies like their Greek and Roman counterparts could. Many of the bodies painted in the Sistine Chapel were copied from Greek sculptures in the Vatican collection.

Let me back up one second. The Vatican hill was chosen to build the "headquarters" of the church because that is where Nero killed Peter, by Crucifixion upside down because Peter did not want to die as Christ.

Nero's bathtub was cool. It was the biggest single piece of Egyptian porphyry ever produced. It is like 7' across.

Now the museums are cool but the Sistine Chapel puts it all to shame. It looks amazing. It was restored in the 90s because it had 500 yrs of soot on it but the church did not pay a dime a Japanese company did it all in exchange for the copyrights to all the images for 30 yrs so you can't take pictures inside.

The chapel was done by Michelangelo in fresco and was his FIRST fresco work. Fresco is when you apply a plaster to the wall the paint as it dries so that the paint is in the plaster and can not flake off which is why it still looks so good. However this is a very difficult technique because if you mess up you have to wait in it to dry a rip it all off and start over. Two other fresco painters turned down the project because they were working on other things. They suggested Michelangelo, a sculptor, because they were jealous of his fame but knew he could not turn down a request from the pope. They thought he would mess it up and they would have to come into to clean up after him. Little did they know it would be considered the best fresco ever in his first try at it. He was just such a perfectionist and would work 20 hrs a day 7 days a week for 8 yrs with no painting help from apprentices. Most of this time he spent on his back.

After the Sistine Chapel we went to the big show.. St Peters Basilica the largest Catholic Church in the world. It took 120 yrs to build which spanned through 9 popes. This place is amazing! You can flash photograph anything you want because there are NO PAINTINGS in there. Everything is mosaic. Once you know that your jaw drops. The statues are so big and amazing. Some of the statues in the second level up are 25' tall. Everything is big and everything is marble and a ton of it is the Egyptian porphyry.

We also went down into the crypt where most of the popes are entombed. Tons of people were crying and praying at Pope John Paul's grave. So what happens is after a pope dies they entomb him down there and then they open him up in 25 yrs if he has not decayed they consider it a miraculous sign and then encase the body in some material. They dip him in it and then put him in a sarcophagus up in the basilica. Some have been dipped in gold, silver, copper and I think the last one like 3 popes ago was dipped in wax (I think they cheaped out on that one).

We spent some time in St Peters square then went to eat. We ate the best food of the trip. The pasta was the most amazing Italian food either of us had ever eaten.

Long day. We hit the pillow hard. Very tired.

M&T