Pearls in Rome, Day Seven (Vatican Museums--Including the Sistine Chapel!)

For the entire time we'd been in Rome thus far, my hubby and I had seen nothing but sunshine and blue skies.  (If you haven't been here in a while and you want to read the first six posts about our recent Rome trip, here are links to Day One, Day Two, Day Three, Day Four, Day Five, and Day Six.)

Tuesday, March 26

On Day Seven, we had our first experience with gray and gloomy weather.  It was raining lightly but steadily as we walked over to the Vatican Museums in the morning and waited in a fairly long ticket line. Luckily, the coat I'd packed for this trip was a loose-fitting, water-repellent trench with a hood attached, so I was able to stay dry enough.  We didn't have umbrellas, and we probably should have bought one from one of the many vendors trying to sell them to us as we waited in line.  But my husband decided he could deal with the rain bare-headed, and fortunately it never really poured down hard.  Before we knew it, we were inside anyway.

We rented two sets of audio tour equipment, which consisted of headphones plugged into little battery-operated boxes that hung about our necks.  These devices gave audio narrations explaining all that we were seeing, room by room.  If you missed a bit of information about a particular piece, you could hit the replay arrow and listen again.  The rooms and many of the individual works of art in them were numbered, and we used the little audio tour boxes to select the numbers we saw as we made our way through the museums.  (Did that make sense?  I hope so.)

The Vatican Museums display a vast collection of priceless works of art which have been amassed by the popes throughout the centuries.  There are so many pieces of precious artwork housed in theses museums, including world-renowned ancient Roman sculptures, giant tapestries depicting the life of Christ, and some of the most acclaimed masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance painters.  There are rooms filled with  magnificent frescoes by Raphael.  And that's before you even get to the Sistine Chapel and Michelangelo's famous and indescribably beautiful paintings on its ceilings.

Friends, readers, bellas...I don't think I can describe what we saw.  As usual, when it comes to this Rome trip, I'm going to have to mostly let my pictures do the talking.  (And luckily, until we got to the Sistine Chapel, visitors were allowed to take as many photos as they pleased.  So what do you think this visitor did?  That's right, you guessed it: she took a whole slew of photos!)

The first rooms were filled with artifacts from ancient Egypt...including actual mummies!

Then there rooms filled with hundreds and hundreds of Roman sculptures, astoundingly life-like figures created by the hands of incredibly skilled artists.

The tapestries were breathtaking.

The opulent beauty of everything the eye beholds as you walk from one section into the next is indescribable.  If you are a lover of art, or architecture, or just plain beauty in general, a visit to the Vatican Museums is for you.  Actually, I can't imagine any human who could help but be moved by the majesty of it all. The term "awesome" is overused in our day and age, so that it has kind of lost the power it should have; but that is the perfect word to describe this amazing place.

My husband and I both felt unutterably moved by the almost otherworldly beauty of Raphael's paintings.  We spent a lot of time in the rooms adorned with his frescoes.

I remember thinking, "How can the Sistine Chapel be any better than this?!  How can Michelangelo's paintings be as good as Raphael's?"

I was about to find out...because when we finally got to the last stop on the tour, I was completely blown away.  My husband and I spent quite a lot of time in the Sistine Chapel, standing in the midst of throngs of noisy tourists, listening to our audio boxes and replaying some of the sections.  We just couldn't tear ourselves away from that magnificent chapel.  People were admonished to be quiet and remember that this was a holy place, a place of prayer, but it got loud at times.

When we first entered the Sistine Chapel, I didn't notice any signs saying that photography was against the rules (later, my husband would explain that the warning sign near the entrance had been hidden by the thick crowds), and I saw dozens of people pointing their cell phones and cameras at the walls and ceilings.  So thinking that it was okay to do so, I started to take photos with my iPhone, too, until I was told to stop.  (After that, numerous announcements were made over the loudspeaker reminding visitors that photography was not allowed, yet most people kept snapping away. I am a rule follower, though, so I stopped as soon as I was told to.)  I actually have a few beautiful pictures of the huge wall fresco known as "The Last Judgment" on my phone, taken when I didn't know photo-taking was a no-no; but I don't feel right publishing these "forbidden" images at the blog.  So here's one that I found on the Internet.

I was also thrilled to see (and get a photo of) this beautiful lady Michelangelo painted on the ceiling, an image that I'd tried to recreate with charcoal pencil as a very amateur teenaged artist (I once wrote a short post about this subject here).  Something about this face has always appealed to me.

My husband and I ended up buying two souvenir books at the Vatican Museums gift shop, one called Raphael's Rooms and the other titled The Sistine Chapel.  These picture books are filled with all the glorious paintings by those two unparalleled artists that we were lucky enough to see with our own eyes on our seventh day in the Eternal City.

We had purchased our tickets at about 11:00 a.m., and we didn't emerged from our long day of touring the museums until 5:45 p.m.!  Wow, that was some experience!  By then, the rain had stopped and the sun was shining again.  We couldn't have asked for more beautiful weather than we had during our time in Rome.  The temperatures were mild, and other than that not-too-heavy rainfall on the morning of the seventh and last day, it was simply glorious all week!

As we left the Vatican area, we passed by Old Bridge and this time there was no line, so we enjoyed some cones piled high with gelato. (Later, after dinner, we would each order another double scoop over at Giolitti's, just before we headed back to our apartment and called it a night--because we thought our last full day in Rome deserved an extra treat.)

They had an Oreo flavor--and it was molto delizioso!

Walking back across the Tiber River, as the sun began to set, the view from the bridge was incredible...I mean, just look at this stunning picture I got--with the dome of St. Peter's there in the distance.  (#nofilternecessary)

This was another night that we had a later dinner than usual, and it was the only time all week that we didn't dine al fresco.  Looking through a guide book one day in our apartment, we had stumbled upon a recommended restaurant called Fraterna Domus di Roma.  Located in the heart of ancient Rome (near the Piazza Navona, the Pantheon, the Spanish Steps, and the Vatican), Fraterna Domus is actually a convent where the sisters in residence serve a family-style meal each night of the week except for Thursdays.  We had made a reservation, and starting at 7:30, we were served a four-course, home-cooked dinner (soup and/or pasta, salad, pot roast with potatoes and green beans, fruit) by the most friendly and adorable Italian-speaking nuns.  We thought having dinner in this cozy and welcoming convent dining room was a fitting way to end our week-long sojourn in Rome.

Even the tiny chapel in this mid-city convent was inordinately beautiful.  I couldn't help snapping a quick picture as we passed by it on our way out of the building.

After dinner, we strolled to our Pantheon neighborhood.

We were kind of stuffed (the nuns did not take no for an answer when they came around with heaping platters, offering seconds!), but we had to have one last gelato at Giolitti's.

After that, we went back to the apartment to start the packing process, because we were going to have to catch a taxi at 7:00 the next morning, and then a train to the airport...

It was almost time to say a sad arrivederci to Roma...

More to come!