So I arrived in Rome on Monday around midday. Made my way to the hostel, a conveniently short walk from the train station, and dumped my backpack there to go exploring for the day. While checking in the reception guy convinced me to go on a guided walking tour of the Vatican and St. Peter's Basilica. Oh, why not. I'm in Rome, I kind of wanted to go there anyway, and it saved me figuring it out for myself.
Leaving my bag, I headed back to Roma Termini train station to take the metro over towards Vatican City, The Vatican. Fun fact about Rome: unlike most other major European cities, Rome's metro system is tiny, just two lines. Why? Because modern Rome is built on top of the ruins of several older cities of Rome, and no serious metro system can be built without destroying that. I made it to the right station, stopped in a pizza place for a quick lunch and then headed to the meeting point for the tour. After half an hour or so the nine of us - seven young women, one older guy and Daniella, our guide - left the country of Italy and headed into the state of The Vatican.
Big fat travel tip for The Vatican: everyone wants to go to St. Peter's Basilica. Don't. The queue will keep you amused for hours. Instead, go to the Vatican Museums. After five minutes in the queue, you'll get a combined ticket for both the Museums and the Basilica that lets you walk straight from one into the other, which is what we did. The Museums are overwhelming. Imagine the Louvre crammed into a space one-third the size. Every single place you look there's a statue or an artefact - beautiful, but diminished by the prolificity.
What I really enjoyed was the Basilica. We laughed at the silly tourists lining up all the way across St. Peter's Square for tickets as we walked out of the museum and into the Basilica. It was amazing. I was surprised. I'm not the biggest fan of the top dogs of the Catholic Church, so I figured a lot of the hype about The Vatican, St. Peter's Basilica and so on was just hyperbolic and the ramblings of ignorant tourists. Well, maybe I'm a little too skeptical now.
The Basilica is amazing. It's huge beyond belief - it's the biggest church in the world, and after my travels, especially through Italy, I thought I'd seen some damn big churches and religious buildings. Even after all that, St. Peter's Basilica took my breath away. The size of it really is incomprehensible - and there's even a series of marks on the floor of the centre aisle from the main doors marking the length of the nave of other major churches around the world - but the decoration is also astounding. The amount of effort and material that goes into decorating a building of that size is beyond belief, and it looks lovely.
I got particularly excited by two things - the first was seeing the tomb of King Kristina, one of my heroes. Yes, King Kristina. Born on December 8th, 1626, exactly 366 years before me, she was raised as the crown prince and heir of Sweden following the death of her father, and was formally crowned as its sovereign king at the age of 24. Though female, Kristina insisted on being addressed and crowned as the king because in Sweden the queen was the powerless puppet wife of the king, and it was her husband who held all the power. Essentially, she was one sassy woman with a funky name and the same birthday as me. Though I knew she abdicated the throne after a few years to convert to Catholicism (Sweden was a strongly Protestant country) I didn't know that she was buried in the Vatican. That was pretty cool.
The other thing was part of the architecture. Along the top of the wall of the Basilica runs a mosaic strip two metres high bearing an inscription in Latin, I can't remember what. There's another inscription running around the base of the huge, vaulted dome above the central nave of the Basilica, too, which says something like 'You are Peter, you are the rock and to you I will give the keys to the kingdom of Heaven'. In Latin. See, my name comes from Latin. Actually, it comes from the Latin word for heaven. So the part where it says 'keys to the kingdom of Heaven' (which is actually rendered 'of the heavens', by the way), reads 'CLAVES REGNI CAELORUM'. Quick Latin lesson - 'caelum' is the singular nominative form of the word for heaven, that is, the singular subject. 'Caeli' is the singular genitive, i.e. possessive ('of heaven') and 'caelorum' is the plural genitive ('of the heavens'), but they're all just conjugations, forms, of the same word. So my name is written in two-metre-high letters on the walls of St. Peter's Basilica. Me, the girl who could never have the personalised mug or t-shirt or ruler with her name on it like you see in shops because my name is never one of the options. Me. On the walls of St. Peter's Basilica. Nice.
We walked outside and watched the Swiss Guards for a while (think the Italian version of the Secret Service out of the 1600s and you have some idea) and then finished the tour in St. Peter's Square just before sunset. I then amused myself greatly by standing on the edge of St. Peter's Square and jumping from one foot to the other and thereby jumping the border between Italy and the Vatican. In Italy, now I'm in The Vatican! Back in Italy, now in the Vatican again! It was the first time I've visited another country and known where the border was, so I took advantage.
I sat down for a hot chocolate and then walked down to Castel Sant'Angelo, again, a Dan Brown reference. It was dark by this point, so I wandered for 20 minutes in the mosquito-ed cold and then decided that I'd 'seen' the castle and I should go and have dinner and go home. I found a little cafe in a random street, ate a margherita pizza followed by an espresso coffee (true Italian and French espresso - yuck! I don't know how they can drink the stuff!) and then began the walk back to the metro to take a train home to the hostel.
Day 2 and Day Last in Rome - basically a bombarding of my poor senses. I accomplished exactly two/three things with the whole day - il Colosseo e il Foro Romano e il Palatino. Translated, that's the Colosseum which is just down the road from the complex that houses the Roman Forum and Palatine Hill. The Forum is a big, ongoing Roman dig complex that's massive and easy to get lost in and hard to see all of at once. Palatine Hill is a giant hill with some still-intact tall structures that you can walk up - the stairs are still there. Both are thoroughly worth seeing, and rather than waste time and words I'll simply post some photos below. (Also, another travel tip: to avoid the queues at the Colosseum, buy the combined ticket at the entrance to the Forum or Palatine Hill and you can literally walk straight through the barriers at the Colosseum afterwards). My foot got the hugest workout between the two complexes and my brain became overwhelmed by about 4pm and I decided to bail, go back to the hostel and get stuck into the homework that was due the afternoon that I returned to France. I did my best to focus on homework, taking a break only to go upstairs and eat the free pasta dinner that was provided. Then I repacked my bag, set my alarm for 4am and crashed out around 10pm.
I was actually up at 4, was clothed, cleaned and checked out by 4.30am. I made it to the station, hopped on the next shuttle to Ciampino airport and made it into the boarding queue for my flight just in time. No weight problems this time, despite my concerns, either because I was wearing all my clothes under my coat or because all my heavy textbooks were in the handbag discretely slung over my arm. A short, two-hour flight and I was back in Paris (well, Beauvais). Shuttle to city, walk to metro, take metro to Le Bourget, bingo baby, I've been to Italy!
Mind you, I had class that same afternoon, and my first assignment was due in...
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| Random architecture in Vatican City |
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| Room of Animals |
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| A ceiling. With painting |
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| The seal of...goodness-only-remembers which Pope |
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| St. Peter's Square from outside the Basilica |
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| Fuzzy photos inside the Basilica |
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| King Kristina's tomb |
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| My name. In the Vatican. |
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| The Swiss guards (and they were pretty cute, too) |
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| Sunset over St. Peter's Basilica |
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| Il Colosseo |
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| Some local wildlife... |
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| Il Foro Romano |
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| A Roman stadium |
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| Views of Rome from Palatine Hill |
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| That's St. Peter's over to the left |
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| Failed attempts at being arty |
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| Inside the Colosseum |
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| Bored, footsore experimental Colosseum photograph |
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| The Colosseum from the upper levels |
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| Clouds and Colosseums |
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