We spent all day today at The Vatican. Our tour was supposed to be 1-4, it didn’t actually end until around 6:45 which was pretty great minus the pain from standing/walking, hunger and thirst. Needless to say we had pretty awesome tour guide. Had we gone through everything on our own, we wouldn’t know what the hell we were looking at, well, you know, besides, oh that’s pretty, oh, there’s Jesus, ya know.
Obviously the highlight of the tour was the Sistine Chapel. People really like to take photos, flash photos, even though the flash destroys the paintings. You’re not supposed to take photos at all in there, but so many people do, apparently they’ve stopped trying to tell them not to.
He talked quite a bit about this famous image from the ceiling. Our guide there was a doctor who took a tour of the chapel and he pointed out to his guide that on the right, it looks like a brain, so it’s like God transferring knowledge into Adam. He and his guide wrote a book about it together.
Most pictures I took were of St. Peter’s Basilica. They don’t have paintings in there, just statues and mosaics.
We spent a lot of time looking and talking about . Michelangelo was quite young when he sculpted it. Our guide said Michelangelo had heard people talking saying someone else had sculpted it, so it went back late at night and put his name on it.
Lunch and dinner were both very tasty. Of course we also had some gelato as well :)