Rome: Day Three

When we woke in Rome on Tuesday morning, our last day in the Eternal City, it was still pouring down rain! We were so glad that we had planned an indoor activity for the morning. We headed over to the Vatican Museum to see all sorts of cool religious art. Of course, the highlight of our visit was seeing the Sistine Chapel. The detail is amazing! I illegally snapped some pictures of the altar and ceiling. 

Another highlight of the Vatican Museum was getting to mail postcards to our families from the world's smallest city! After lunch, we were sufficiently tired of art for one day, so we met up with Kristin again, our friend from the Newman Center at Pitt. We were sad to see that the rain hadn't let up at all, because we'd planned to spend the afternoon walking around the city center, with Kristin as our tour guide. We decided to make the best of it and headed to the Spanish Steps. 

I was really excited to see the Spanish Steps because they play a role in my favorite Audrey Hepburn movie, Roman Holiday. But they were actually the only thing in Rome that was smaller than I expected. Next, we headed to the Trevi Fountain. It was the biggest fountain we've ever seen!

Of course, we threw the obligatory coins into the fountain, in hopes that we'll return to Rome one day. Then, in celebration of Fat Tuesday, we had our second helping of gelato for the day. 

Rome: Day Two

On our second day in Rome, we went to the Colosseum.

It was pretty cool. Apparently, the Colosseum could seat between 50,000 and 75,000 people. I did not realize it was that large when we were there! That's probably because it is falling down, and the field is not very large compared to modern day sports fields. It was crazy to think about how many people died in the Colosseum, too. They would have gladiator fights to the death, hunts against giraffes, hippos, rhinos, and lions, and plays in which the actors would all be torn apart by such beasts at the conclusion of the play. I never really realized how cruel society must have been if such activities were considered entertainment. Interestingly enough, there is no written record of Christian martyrs in the Colosseum. However, there almost undoubtedly were Christian martyrs killed in the Colosseum, as all kinds of criminals were used for the above entertainments.

After the Colosseum, we went to the Palatine Hill, where nobles lived during the time of the Roman empire. There were some pretty impressively extensive ruins. I also thought it was interesting that these ruins are still active archaeological sites. I kinda figured that they would have finished with them by now, since they are not inaccessible (basically in a city park), and they have been known about since archaeology became a thing. But I guess it takes a while.

This is an ancient mansion on the Palatine hill. It's amazing how much of it is intact after almost two thousand years!

Above and below are the ruins of the Roman forum. They had an impressive display of columns. Woo! Everybody loves columns.

After the forum, we went to the Roman pantheon. It is the oldest intact structure in Rome. Sometime around the 7th century (give or take a hundred years), the Pope turned it into a Church, which it still is today. Raphael (the Renaissance artist, not the ninja turtle) has his tomb inside.

There's also a big hole in the roof! Apparently, it has to be there so the dome doesn't collapse. I don't exactly know why, but it was there in the original structure.

We met Kristin (friend from Pittsburgh) outside the Pantheon. It was pretty strange seeing someone from home in Rome. We had dinner with her, but by then it had started raining rather hard, so we called it a day after that.

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.