Yesterday's forecast was for rain all day, so Patrick had the bright idea that we would go to the Vatican so that we would spend the day mostly indoors. As you can see from this photo of St. Peter's Basilica, it was definitely a gloomy day. I even braved the drizzle and my camera getting wet to get this photo. I was standing near the Vatican Museum.
There were a lot of different little museums all in one. In one museum there were a lot of sarcophagi. Patrick and I did a little bit of reading, because the descriptions talked about the differences in the design of the sarcophagi, so that was interesting. Alex was done after a couple of them. He said, "They're all the same." In another museum, there was a lot of pottery. None of us spent much time in that one.
I have to relate one funny story about the interactions between Anthony and Alex. Warning--this may be offensive to some people, but it was funny in the context of the two brothers having fun together. For some back story, one of the museums we saw in Venice had a painting of Jesus, and his facial features were not "conventional", to put it in a nice way. Alex took a picture and called him "Autistic Jesus". So, when we saw these two paintings at the Vatican Museum, Anthony pointed out the Jesus figure with wings in the upper right corner of the painting on the right, and he called him "Bird Jesus". Alex built on that and referred to the painting on the left. He dubbed the bearded person "Dumbledore" and said that the lion figure in the lower right hand side of the picture on the left "Aslan" as in the lion figure from "The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe". I love how the boys are constantly joking with each other and having fun.
There was so much to see, that I really only took photos of things that looked interesting or that caught my eye. This photo is of one of the panels on the ceiling on the way to the Sistine Chapel. I liked it because most of the painting was in black and white with the focal point in color. There other panels like this one with the black and white with color, but the rest of the paintings were all in color.
At one point, we had seen so many pieces of art and artifacts that we skipped some "museums" and went directly to the Sistine Chapel. We weren't allowed to take any pictures there, but Anthony and Alex both managed to sneak a couple of photos in. They had several people there that were watching for that sort of thing. I listened to a Rick Steves podcast about the Sistine Chapel, so I spent a lot of time listening to some interesting info about Michelangelo's paintings, then we were able to go out the tour group entrance and got to skip a huge line to get into St. Peter's Basilica.
But first, we climbed a whole lot of steps to get to the top of St. Peter's Basilica. We opted to walk the whole way, and honestly, we're all physically fit enough that it didn't matter, but that top section was tough because it was very small and the ventilation wasn't good. The top section consisted of narrow steps that only one person at a time could climb. One area even curved because the walls were curved in that area. Everyone who wanted to go to the top had to go through that section, even the ones who took the elevator up to a certain point, because the elevator did not go all the way to the top. There some spectacular views from up there, even if it was a cloudy, drizzly day.
After going to the top, we were able to go into St. Peter's Basilica itself, a very massive building filled with so much to look at. This is a picture of St. Peter's Tomb. There were several other tombs there also, and the catacombs that included the tombs of previous popes were underneath.
At this point, Anthony was very hungry and focused on eating lunch. It was already 2pm and he had not had breakfast. Everywhere we went in Italy, there were local restaurants with people waiting outside trying to get customers to go into their particular restaurant. There were so many restaurants that I guess they had to do whatever they needed to get people to go to their restaurant. We chose one of these men that were standing near the exit of St. Peter's Square with a flyer. His restaurant was a couple of blocks away but he went with us to show us which one was his. We all had pizza for lunch then we got off at an earlier Metro stop so we could walk around.
We ended up going to the Pantheon next. It was a little tricky navigating through the various streets. Honestly, there were a lot of interesting looking buildings and piazzas that I took pictures of some just because they were cool. There were so many, though, that I tried not to take too many of what would eventually look like the same thing over and over again.
It was nightfall by the time we made it to the Fountain of Trevi, but at least that meant that we could see the fountain lit up for nighttime. Interestingly, I had Anthony take this photo of Patrick and me with my phone. After a few seconds of posing, we realized that Anthony was making faces at the phone and then pointed it towards Alex. He was taking selfies of himself and then took photos of Alex, too!
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