Xoxo, Paige: Il Vaticano 7-31-11

I'm home for the weekend after mom needed me to last minute pick up some material from a vendor in St. Louis and bring it home on Friday. I stayed home for the rest of the weekend to work for her. While I was on facebook on my computer for once in my life (rather than on my phone, like always) I started talking to one of my Italian friends on facebook chat. As I reminisced with him about Rome, I shared some more pictures/stories with my mom while talking to him and watching the cards game on TV. (GO CARDS!) Mom told me that she was going through my study abroad pictures on facebook recently and she thought that I needed to elaborate on locations/stories of pictures before I forget things. (Lord knows I have a terrible memory) Sooo, I figure I'd better finish posting some of my pictures. :]

The last Sunday of the month is a hectic one in the Vatican city. The museums are absolutely FREE for everyone. After spending molti dollari during my euro-trip (and along with the fact that college students don't pass up anything free) this obviously sounded appealing to me and my friends. A group of us decided to get up ungodly early the last Sunday morning in July to attend mass at the Vatican. Here we are:

My friend Matt is a Seminary from Philadelphia and actually served in mass every Sunday while he was in Rome. I only made it to this one service, but it was truly amazing to see one of my friends serve at St. Peter's. I may or may not have teared up a little watching him.

Anywhooo, like I said, it was early. I want to say we left our apartments around 6. (I wish I would have written this before and I would have remembered times and details) But it's Rome and regardless of how early it was, it was already hot and toasty walking what was probably close to a 2 mile trek to the Vatican City. (We lived fairly close to it) I'm not complaining about how early it was, or about the 2 mile trek, because I definitely walked a minimum of 2 miles every day while I was in Rome. I'm just complaining about the amount of clothing we had to wear while doing so. Holy hot hell, I don't know how the nuns do it every day.

So we got to the Vatican and upon entrance is a grand piazza, Piazza de San Pietro, or as it translates, "St. Peter's Square." Here are some images of us in the city long before most of the regulars even got there... You can see the sun coming up over the walls. :]

I believe we got to the city well before 8 because we had time to walk around the piazza and be tourists/take pictures and whatnot. We were first in line to climb the cupola (the dome of St. Peter's) before attending mass at 9 AM!

After a couple hundred stairs, you arrive in a part of the dome where you can overlook inside the cathedral... Here are some images:

And after climbing another few hundred stairs... We reached the top of the dome. And boy, was it worth the 7 euro. Check out the view:

The image above is an aerial view of a few important things from the top of the cupola. The largest roof closest to the bottom of the image is the roof of the Sistine Chapel. The attached roofs/buildings are the rest of what is included in the Vatican museums. Towards the back of the picture is where the Pope lives... I couldn't tell you which roof. :p

Here are a few of us at the top of the cupola:

Climbing down the dome was interesting... Sketchy flights of stairs with no hand railings (and obviously a good, supportive set of shoes) was a little intimidating. In the following pictures you'll see how the walls slant because of the dome, but the halls never get wider...

It was kind of an unintentional fun house. :p

When we were back on the main level, we made our way into the Basilica to attend mass. Although it was all in Italian, I was able to pick up on some of the message. I was also able to snap some pictures of the absolutely INCREDIBLE altar... Although pictures aren't technically allowed. Shh! ;) It's kind of hard to see and the picture absolutely doesn't do it justice, but you can see that the doctors of the church are holding the chair of St. Peter.

After mass, we headed to the museum (free on the last Sunday of the month) which wasn't a smart life choice... We waited... and waited... and waited... in line wrapped around the gates of the Vatican. Did I mention I was wearing jeans and a top with a JACKET?! in JULY!? So as we waited and died, we saw a man in front of us with some interesting shoes:

And here is a hint at part of the length of the line and amount of people we dealt with in the museums. This is the entrance to the museum:

Our main goal inside the museum was to obviously see the Sistine Chapel... Which is conveniently located at the very end of the museum, so you have to walk through everything else first. In my opinion, there was a lot of useless art (a modern art section which was absolutely disgusting and almost disgraceful to have amongst Renaissance art) But despite the amount of people we had to push through in our 5 layers of clothing, it was kind of cool to be forced to walk through it all. Pictures: