Italy Day 11

Italy Day 10


I did not mention this but the women I met at dinner on day 9 had already reserved a tour through the Vatican but instead had managed to see the Vatican on Sunday through another tour. That meant they had a pass to get into the Vatican at 11am today. In talking to me the daughter asked me if I wanted to take the voucher from her because it was only going to go to waste. I bought it off her for less than the ticket price so as to give her something back for her generosity based on the fact she really had no idea who I was and had offered it to me anyway. I got up at 7 and had a roll and some yogurt for breakfast before heading down towards the Vatican. It took about an hour to walk there and that meant I was well early of the 11am start time for my reservation. I tried to get in anyway but the guy said come back at 10 instead of it being before 9am. I wandered a short loop around then came back to the entrance and waited until just after 10am and he let me in instead of making me wait. It probably helped that I was solo so he could sneak me in.

The voucher basically saved me about 2 hours of waiting in line, that was obvious. The line runs all the way around the Vatican for people who are waiting to buy a ticket. If you reserve online you can get in basically immediately at the time you reserved for. A bit of begging and being polite helped me get in earlier than had been reserved as well. So, once in the voucher pays for your ticket as well. You just give them the voucher and they give you your tickets. I got two because that is what she reserved but I obviously only needed the one for me. I would probably have tried to reserve my tickets for Saturday if this had not been handed to me so easily so I hopefully wouldn’t have had to wait in line for hours anyway but it was definitely helpful. I am betting the line without reservations would have been near 2 hours long. Many people join “tours” that allow you to skip the lines to get in faster. I am not sure how much they cost but then you have to move around the place at their pace and that would annoy me.

Having got in I can only say that as a Recovered Catholic that I am mystified that the Catholic Church can ever claim that it needs money from anyone. There are artifacts of wealth from all eras of time. They have Egyptian, Byzantine, Roman, Greek, you name it artifacts in their museum collections. There is not doubt that there is so much wealth there that it is unlikely the church could not find money by selling off all this stuff. Especially the stuff that is not of Christian origin. I am not the biggest artwork fan in the world. I do not generally have a visual mind but there is no doubt that tons of time, effort and money went into everything that makes up what the Vatican museum holds. The fact that is all aimed towards one guy who may have existed and died 2000 years ago is sort of nuts to me. Don’t get me wrong the basic idea behind the Christian concept, the idea that is skipped by everyone who believes devoutly in their various sects is not really all that wrong. If you took the teachings of the man they call Jesus Christ at the most simplest level it was basically, “Be nice to others and they should be nice to you.” It is common sense. Humans aren’t capable of it. Instead they bent it all into the various messes that are what make up the Catholic and Christian religions. It is why I don’t really want to subscribe to a church. I shouldn’t need a god to tell me to be nice to others and nor should anyone else. Sadly that is not the human way.

Enough philosophy I guess. The Vatican Museum includes a visit to the Sistine Chapel of course and you get to see the paintings of Michelangelo all over the chapel. It is amazing stuff even to someone who is not an art connoisseur at all. In speaking with the people from the night before I found out that some Japanese paid to have the chapel restored and now own rights to all the postcards and whatever else involves the artwork. They said that the restored version is much better than it had been some 20 years ago (I suspect more recently than that but she was there 20 years ago and said it was vastly superior now. I can attest to the fact the paintings are vibrant and incredibly detailed. You are not allowed to take pictures in the chapel and they wish people to be quiet and respectful though of course the latter part does not happen at all. Being a stickler for those sort of rules I didn’t take any photos and instead bought a book with some detailed photos. Of course it is not the same but it is a sacrifice that has to be made.

In all it took me about 4 hours to make it through all of the Vatican Museum sections. I am very much sure that I didn’t miss anything as I ended up doubling back and seeing some areas more than once (including the Sistine Chapel) and I even managed to have lunch inside at a pizza joint. Once you leave on your ticket you are not allowed to return so they know they have a captive audience. I had a slice of pizza and a beer but at least it was still only 8 Euros or so. That carried me through lunchtime well enough. I can say for certain at some point you do get an overload on taking pictures of things. For the most part they don’t prevent pictures but if you took a picture of everything there was to see it would take days to get through it all. As it is I think 4 hours is a long time for a museum visit no matter how large the museum is. I was very happy with the visit even if it does make me cough to think about all this wealth gone awry in the world.

After the Vatican it was only natural to visit Saint Peter’s Cathedral. It is right around the corner and attached to the Vatican City but is not considered part of the Vatican tour. There is inevitably a line to the basilica as well but it is a security line where they screen for weapons and the like. It looked long but it really wasn’t more than 15 minutes before I was actually inside the grounds. The main basilica does not have an entrance fee. It is a gigantic cathedral that I am not sure I have seen the equal to anywhere. It of course is even more of a symbol of the waste a religion can spend on itself than the Vatican museum. At least the museum had materials that were from times other than Christian times. That means it is a collection of stuff and not necessarily only stuff that was made for the religion. The cathedral is all about the Catholic god and it is huge and ostentatious and unimaginably expensive I am sure. There are three parts to visiting the basilica. The main cathedral, the dome and the papal tombs. The tombs were closed for some reasons so I did not get to see them. The basilica was everything you would expect it to be.

The dome is the interesting part in many respects. You can buy a climb by foot for 5 Euros or a lift ride for 7 Euros. The climb is pretty much what you would expect and is what I bought. A ton of stairs. The lift only gets you part way up and then it is a ton of stairs after that. The lift gets you to the lower roof of the cathedral. From there you can climb to the internal catwalk inside the dome of the basilica. It is a tad disappointing because of the 10 foot tall safety grating that pretty much prevents you from taking any good pictures of the inside of the cathedral from on high. After you get through that it is what seems like thousands more stairs until you get to the top of the outside of the dome. This sounded like it would be a great thing except it was so painfully crowded that almost as soon as I got up there I was ready to get down. I took a few pictures but you couldn’t really get around the entirety of the accessible area because there must have been hundreds of people up there. It didn’t help that the climb was so hot an humid and sweaty then to get up there and find that the vast quantities of people up there were sort of blocking off the breeze that might have been available was basically unpleasant and it wasn’t long before I was headed back on my way down. Fortunately the climb down was a bit less strenuous. By the time I had finished with the basilica and the dome it was basically 4pm and I was ready to start heading in. It had been a full day. I didn’t exactly run in but it was a bit after 5pm when I got back into the vicinity of the hotel.

I decided to try to eat at the Aquila Nera which is across the street from the hotel before I even went back inside. Technically it is early to eat at 5pm in Italy but I am not one to care that much about their timing issues. I had a garlic and olive oil bruschetta and a turkey entrée that had artichokes and mushrooms. I coupled that with a couple beers. I do think the Mensa di Bacco is better for taste overall but it wasn’t bad food. While eating I met a Canadian couple from Toronto and talked to them for a while. They were very nice if unfortunately Maple Leafs fans. They have been traveling in Europe for a bit and had just come into Rome from Paris and were then going to head to Poland then England after this. Their stay in Rome was only a couple days. I gave them some advice on saving time I hope by going to the Palantine before going to the Coliseum and also to pre-order their visit to the Vatican to save th time for waiting in line.

I will say this. After a week in Palermo, Rome looks like a very clean city. I remember that my initial thought on Rome was that it was dirty but somehow a week in Palermo made it look like Stockholm. I know it is not really that clean here still but in comparison it is pristine. Stockholm is of course much more insanely clean than Rome could ever dream of being but it is all a matter of perspective.

All allusions to Catholic waste aside I would definitely say that it was a very good day filled from top to bottom.