Rome: Day One

Adam and I spent the last week in Italy for our Winter Break! We used our handy Eurail passes {such a good investment} to take the train from Marseille to Rome last Saturday. It's not as easy to get between those two Mediterranean cities as you might think. We left Aix at 6:00 am, took five different trains, and arrived in Rome at 11:00 pm. The highlight of that very long day was finding a gigantic jar of nutella when we were buying dinner in a little train station on the France/Italy border.

Luckily, our hostel was only a five minute walk from the main train station in Rome, so we got to sleep around midnight. We spent all of Sunday in Saint Peter's Basilica. The first thing {after marveling at how huge and beautiful the basilica was} we did was go to confession in English, since that's kind of difficult in Aix.

Then we rushed back outside to see the pope give his twice-weekly address to the crowd. At noon every Sunday and Wednesday, he appears in a window in Saint Peter's Square and blesses those gathered below. The most amazing part was hearing him greet everyone in seven different languages! He spoke Latin, Italian, French, English, German, Spanish, and Portuguese, all with a pretty good accent.

We left the Vatican for a typical Italian lunch of pizza and gelato {the same lunch we had for the rest of the trip} and then went up to the cupola, or the top of Saint Peter's dome. We took an elevator up part of the way, stopping to view the church and the top of the dome from the inside.

We took stairs the rest of the way. Here's a picture of us at the cupola. Can you spot the difference between our outfits here and in every other picture on this blog? That's right - I changed up my scarf for our Italy trip.

The view of Saint Peter's square from the dome of the basilica. You could see the whole city from up there!

After seeing the top of Saint Peter's, it was only fitting that we see the bottom. So we headed down to the grottoes, or basement, to see some of the Pope's tombs. It was especially moving to see the grave of the previous pope, John Paul II.

We ended the day by going to Mass. By going to Saint Peter's, I'd only ever seen one Cardinal in my life {Cardinal di Nardo of Houston}. Now I've seen at least a dozen! After Mass, we had a typical Italian dinner of spaghetti and tiramisu, which we proceeded to have a variation of each night for the rest of the trip.