The Vatican

Another morning bus trip, this time to The Vatican. The Vatican City is an independent state wholly located within Rome.  It's not very big - only a few square kilometres.  Once we have crossed over the River Tiber it's only a few minutes before the imposing structure of St Peter's Basilica is in view. 

The area in front of St Peter's is enormous and would easily hold several hundred thousand people.  There are a lot of visitors and tourists around, and the square looks empty.  As we get off the bus there are many people trying to sell tickets to "Beat the Line". There's a longish queue to get into the Basilica and we queued for about 20 minutes before we got to the security point and then another 10 minutes before we got into the building.

The Basilica is huge too, about the size of 2 football fields, although it doesn't seem that big when we look at it.  This is due mainly to the optical illusion created by the size of the statues, surrounding it.  When we look at it in comparison to the size of people in the area it's true size becomes apparent.

Once inside the Basilica we are struck by the painted ceiling, cupola and walls.  There are many small chapels, each with marble statues and paintings.  The floor and altars are inlaid with many different colours of marble.  Although there are a lot of people inside this magnificent church there's also a sense of reverence. It's cool and it's not too noisy. People are busy looking at the many artworks and ornate decorations.

From the Basilica we moved on to the Vatican Treasury Museum. Here we saw many of the treasures collected over the history of the Roman Catholic Church. Many of the items have been gifts to the Church.  The Basilica is built over the Tomb of St Peter and we saw the key to the Tomb.  This museum is a collection of religious items - crosses, vestments, books dating to the 11th century, and other items used for worship.  There were plenty of gold, silver and jewels in evidence.

We spent about 2 1/2 hours at St Peter's.  We walked around to the entrance to the Vatican Museum and the Sistene Chapel, but the queue was too long and it was very hot so we decided to come back tomorrow.

Tuesday morning and it's our last few hours in Rome so we've caught the bus back to the Vatican to see the Sistene Chapel and the Vatican Museum.  This time we queue for about half an hour before we get to buy our tickets for 15 euros each.  We could "Beat the Line" and do a tour for 30 euros each but we're happy to queue, especially since it's in the shade.  There are plenty of touts selling hats, umbrellas and scarves along the queue.

The Vatican Museum is a museum and art gallery with a huge array of exhibits.  There's everything from Roman statues to mosaics to tapestries finely stitched with gold, silver and copper and silk threads. The rooms are arranged in themes so there's a room of animalia (animal statues), another room with huge maps painted on the walls and long rooms lined with painted cupboards. 


All of the rooms have ornately painted walls and ceilings. We saw rooms painted by Raphael and another room full of statues by Raphaello.  As well as Renaiassance artworks, there's also a series of galleries devoted to contemporary, 20th century art with works by Matisse.

There is a special exhibit dedicated to Oceania and the  indigenous Australians.

The centerpiece of this part of the Vatican is the Sistene Chapel and all corridors seem to lead there eventually. The walls and ceiling are  breathtakingly beautiful and we just sat and drank in Michelangelo's magnificent paintings.  The guards were kept busy keeping the noise to a quiet background hum.

As well as the indoor galleries, the are also a number of pleasant courtyards with colonades and cloisters, lush lawns and sculptures.  As we walked along some of the corridors we saw fantastic views of Rome.

This was a morning well spent. We probably spent about 5 hours in total at The Vatican and we did it at our own pace.