Summer Holiday

Rome - July 4
We hired the shuttles to take us to the Vatican where we were meeting Antonella for our next tour. It is always nice not to have to wait in a line, especially the one at the Vatican. When you are with a guide you get in immediately. I had already been there so it was nice to see it again with less photography pressure. The Sistine Chapel was not as crowded as it was the last time I was there. We actually got to sit for a while and study it all out. Michelangelo was amazing. As the story goes Michelangelo painted all of the characters as nudes which offended a particular Cardinal and he demanded that they be clothed. This infuriated Michelangelo so he decided to make his statement about the Cardinal in the Judgment Day wall. He painted him in hell with a serpent wrapping around him and biting a part that most men would not want bit. Eventually the Catholic church commissioned other artists to paint clothes on the nudes. It is an overwhelming room with so much to see. We then went to St. Peter’s Cathedral. My camera battery died which would not have been so sad except that we were going to climb the dome after the tour and I had never done that before and really wanted pictures. All of the so called paintings in St. Peters are actually mosaics which you cannot see unless you see them in the right light. It is so enormous. There are words that go around the main area in the cathedral and they are 6’ tall. They don’t look 6’ tall until you climb the dome and then you can see. Since the ceiling is so high they wanted a canopy to help with the scale, it is 100’ tall. When I was in Montreal I went into a Cathedral there and noticed that it looked like St. Peter’s. It had the same canopy except it was smaller in scale. Anyway we finished the tour, thanked Antonella for being so awesome and then lined up for the elevator to the dome. The dome was really cool. I feel like all I do lately is climb to the top of everything. It is not enough to go inside and walk around, I must climb it. My legs are getting a good workout, daily. Darrin offered to take some pictures of me and for me which was super nice since my battery was dead. Then we met up Darrin’s posse and one of the students and went to lunch at a place that they had all been about three times. I guess they liked it. It was good and the people were nice. It was such a hot day. We were all miserable. We tried to catch the stupid shuttle but some of us got kicked off by the driver who was angry and yelling (only in Italian) and giving me and one of the students dirty looks because we were sitting on laps in order to be seated. Apparently he was not okay with that but he then let two more people on and allowed them to sit on a lap. Welcome to Italy! We shared a taxi back to the hotel with a couple from London. We taxied back to the hotel and relaxed for a while. We had plans to meet up with Nancy and Courtney for dinner that night. Nancy had a list of some good places to eat from her friend who had lived in Rome for a while. We met them at the Pantheon and hung out in the piazza for a while and took a lot of photos. Then we walked to the restaurant and had a dinner. It was intimate and quaint. We took a taxi again and our driver was super cute he drove us to the top of this mountain that we always had to go up and then said turn around. We looked out the back window and there was the St. Peter’s dome rising above the city and glowing brightly. It was really great.