Day 19:  Firenze (Florence) to Roma (Rome) & Vatican City Italy September 27, 1998 (Sunday): St. Peter's Basilica, Vatican City, Cappucin Crypt
Day 20:  Roma (Rome) & Vatican City Italy September 28, 1998 (Monday): Vatican Museum, Coliseum, Forum, Pantheon

Day 19:  Firenze (Florence) to Roma (Rome) & Vatican City Italy September 27, 1998 (Sunday): St. Peter's Basilica, Vatican City, Cappucin Crypt

Caught the 8:37AM train for Rome. While on the train, I have planned our next two days in Rome. Today we will visit the Vatican City: the museum should be open (and free!) today. A lot of sights in Rome are closed or have short hours today (Sunday), for example only open until 1:00 PM.

We checked into the Hotel Fenecia, it cost 130,000 Lira, more than we would have liked. We took the metro to the Vatican City; the metro station is directly below the train station and is very packed, confusing, and disorienting. Outside the train station, a large crowd of men hang out alongside the building, drinking beer. Tons of men, it is very gross and sad.

On the train we saw a botched pick-pocketing. Until this point of the trip, Nicole thought I was quite paranoid about tourist-targeted crime.  One girl, about 18 years old, was holding a crying baby in her hands. A man offered her a seat, but she refused. At that point I thought something fishy was afoot, after all, why wouldn't she want to sit down? A few feet further down the train car was her friend with a front-loading baby carrying poncho. The girl with the poncho tried to get into the bag of a woman who had just come into town (she and her husband had their full set of luggage on the metro - perfect targets). I thought that I might have seen something funny, a hand in the bag, etcetera, but I wasn't sure. Fortunately, the man gave the girl a loud whack on the arm and gave her shit. Of course the girl acted innocent. The two girls got off the metro at the Ottaviano/Vatican stop with us and we saw them counting paper cash on the station platform.  I guess not everybody caught them in the act. In Canada, anybody using a baby like that would get thrown in jail with no questions asked.

We walked 4 blocks to the Vatican City, and went directly to the Vatican Museum. It was supposed to be free today; when we got to the front of the line we found out that the museum closed early today and that we could not get in. That screwed up my plans for today, since most other things in Rome are closed Sundays. We went into the Vatican courtyard, a huge open plaza, and then into St. Peters Basilica. The entire interior of St. Peter's is incredible. The floors are all made in geometric patterns from all different kinds and colors or marble. All of the art on the walls and ceiling are mosaics (made from small painted tiles), not paintings which they appear to be from a distance. While the mosaics are impressive, the most incredible part of the Basilica is the sculptures. The sculptures are mostly of past Popes and historic Christian people. There are curtains and robes on the sculptures that are actually sculpted from red marble; we had to go right up to the statues to see that it was not fabric. Every square inch of the Basilica is sculpted, covered in mosaic, or has some kind of artwork on it - this is not an exaggeration. The two of us were speechless at the beauty and extravagance of the church. The altar stands above St. Peter's crypt; St. Peter was crucified in a spot over which part of the church stands. We spent about 1^1/2 hours in the Basilica.

We then climbed the Basilica dome, built by Michelangelo, to the top. The hallways inside the dome were very narrow and the walls are on angles (because the dome is not super-high, and the incline is reasonably steep, you circle the dome and support yourself with your inside hand against the dome wall). There is a great view of Rome from the top, but you can't see the Coliseum.

We had some pizza for lunch, then went to see the Cappucin Crypt. Before we got to the crypt we were caught in a rainstorm and took shelter under a storefront awning for 20 minutes. I thought the crypt would be a catacombs with skeletons built into the wall (if you have seen the movie Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade, you may remember the scene where Indy goes underground and sees all the skeletons in the catacomb walls. I seriously thought that was what we were going to see).  The crypt was nothing like what I expected. It is actually a 6 room "museum" (or should I say art gallery?) with the exhumed bones of 4,000 people arranged in geometric and artistic patterns on the walls. The art was done by the Cappucin Friars in the 1700's for religious artistic reasons to illustrate "death as a part of going on to another beautiful life". The crypt resembles all of the patterns and art of other churches, but instead of paint, all of the human bones are arranged into patterns. It is very creepy - probably just like Jeffrey Dahmer's (or Leatherface's) living room - but worth seeing if you are in the neighborhood, just to say you saw it. I guarantee you'll never see anything like it anywhere else. 

Both of us had sore feet, so we went back to the hotel. After a few hours we went out to eat dinner and to buy the next day's breakfast. We stopped by the "Faulty Towers Hostel" for advice on where to shop and eat. We ended up going to a grocery store located in the train station...I wasn't having any fun. Outside the station the cops were breaking up crowds of drunks (if you're traveling with children, definitely do not stay near this station, it's much too ugly and depressing). We went for dinner at a small, fluorescent lit restaurant that "Faulty" told us about (dinners were 16,000 Lira each). We sat next to a young New Yorker named Benjamin who was traveling alone, and talked with him for about an hour, which was good because the service was very slow.

Day 20:  Roma (Rome) & Vatican City Italy September 28, 1998 (Monday): Vatican Museum, Coliseum, Forum, Pantheon

We woke up very early to get a head start on the day. We were out of the hotel by 8:30AM, and at the Vatican at 9:15AM. We went straight to the Vatican Museum. It is huge, probably bigger than the Louvre in Paris, with many wings. Many parts of the museum are as ornate as St. Peter's Basilica, especially the painted ceilings. We saw Egyptian statues and stones with hieroglyphics. Next we saw ancient Roman sculptures, then walked through the rest of the museum. The trip ends in the Sistine Chapel; it has many rooms painted with frescoes by Raphael (very impressive), then there is the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel itself painted by Michelangelo which, as you know, is perhaps the most famous painting of all time, with the possible exception of the Mona Lisa. We were surprised, it was very different than we had expected. The famous painting of Creation - God and Adam nearly touching hands - is probably only 3 meters tall by 6 yards in width. I had envisioned it as a huge 10 metre by 40 metre fresco. The Sistine Chapel was nice, but not as impressive as we expected.

We finished with the Vatican at 11:30AM, then took the metro to the "Colesso" stop. We saw the Coliseum right away: big and impressive. I think I was a little spoiled having seen the coliseum in Arles, France; after seeing so many awesome structures you become a little desensitized by all of the great architecture. Nevertheless, the Coliseum is worth it: bigger and better. You find yourself become more excited and awestruck as you get closer to the Coliseum, and I couldn't help imagining how the area must have been in Rome's heyday...traders, gladiators, thieves, the unwashed masses. We walked around inside the Coliseum and hitched up with an English language tour already in progress. The tour was very interesting. Legend has it that on the first day 5000 people (criminals) were killed in the Coliseum. There were two types of battles in the Coliseum: gladiator versus gladiator, and criminals or slaves versus lions. We heard a few stories, including one about one particular day when there were 100 lions on the floor at one time. Another story was of one Roman Emperor who called himself the "Ultimate Gladiator", and he was the only person allowed to finish any gladiator off. Nobody else was permitted to fight back against the Ultimate Gladiator. One day he climbed into the crowds and began beheading spectators.

There was no floor in the Coliseum, the plan is to have a wooden floor constructed before the year 2000. Pope John Paul II wants to hold mass in the Coliseum in 2000, so the facility is undergoing a facelift, which the tour guide doesn't believe is even close to being on schedule. The project involves removing soot (mostly from automobile pollution) from the Coliseum, and in fact most of the scaffolding we have seen in Rome (a lot) is to clean the city's historical structures for the year 2000. 2000 promises to be a very big year for the city of Rome.

We decide to move on to the Forum, the ancient city where everybody used to walk. Our guidebook said that admission was 12,000 Lira each, and we only had 22,000 Lira - L2,000 short. We walked about 6 long blocks and tries three different bank machines, none of which would work with Nicole's bank card. When we made our way back to the Forum we found that admission was free! The Forum was full of ruins, a few standing buildings and archways, and there was a large excavation project underway to uncover much of the ancient buried city.

We then went on to the Pantheon, about 10 block away. It was turned into a church after the fall of Rome (I don't know what it was before it was turned into a church). There is a wide shallow domed roof with a circular hole at the apex. The front is a bunch of columns (it looks like a court house). Inside are a few statues along the wall and nice marble walls, but there are no pews, just some chairs lined up. It is like standing in a big cylinder.

We walked back to "Barbinieri" metro station (where we visited the Cappucin Crypt yesterday) and metroed home. Rome is a crazy, polluted, busy city, but has a lot of character. I think that I would go nuts if I lived there, though.

We bought pizza for dinner at a little shop down the street from our hotel. You can pick squares of all types of crazy pizzas, including lettuce & corn, tuna & tomato, potato strips, and they weigh your order. With two cans of pop it cost L26,000 (about $22 Canadian dollars). We would never pay that much for pizza back home, but what the heck. The guys working at the pizza shop were very funny and gave us a lot of free samples. We couldn't finish our pizza and kept the leftovers for tomorrow's lunch.