Rome II

We spent our second day in Rome at the Vatican. It was pouring rain so it was the perfect day to spend in the Vatican Museum and St. Peter's.

I only took one picture in the Vatican Museum. It is of the ceiling in a room that is about 400 feet long. The entire ceiling is decorated in the same way and the walls of the room are covered with maps of different regions of Italy. I liked this room better than the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles or the Sistine Chapel:



After wandering through the museum we saw the Sistine Chapel. It was neat, but not as impressive as I had expected it to be from the way it had been portrayed in movies and books. I had just imagined it differently.

Next we went into St. Peter's. It's huge and filled with statues and tombs of all the previous Popes. I tried to take some pics, they're a little blurry but you can get the idea.

Here's some pics of the ceilings (hard to get because there are lights shining down at you from the ceiling):





Here are the chairs where all the normal people get to sit during mass:



Here's where the Pope hangs out, this huge pulpit is in the middle of the church:



This stained glass piece is in the front of the church, where the priest usually gives mass from in a normal church. This one small bit of stained glass is beautiful and quite moving:





And here's the whole church, from the back ... a little blurry but you can see the pulpit with the stained glass way behind it:



St. Peter's is 5.7 acres big. There are four statues surrounding the large pulpit in the middle and under or behind them are buried or hidden pieces of the cross that Christ died on and the sword (or spear?) that killed him and the veil that was used to wipe his face. Underneath the church, you can tour the tombs of many of the Popes of the past. There is an area in front of John Paul II's tomb where there were a lot of people praying.

And now here are some pictures of the outside of Saint Peter's and around the Square. The buildings all have statues of saints on top of them (140 statues in all) and they line the entire square. As you can see, the sun started to come out!





I don't think there is usually so much stuff in the square (chairs and large screens set up and the obelisk in the center all blocked off). I think it was all here so people could watch the big ceremony for the 24 new Cardinals on Sunday.





And here's the Swiss guard! They're super colorful. If I was the Pope I'd have the Swiss guard me too ... the Swiss have no wars to fight so they might as well go guard the Pope to keep busy.