feldmanlarry

My friends that I hung out with in Florence advised me to buy their 8 AM tour Vatican tour. It was about a 15 minute walk from my hotel and I had to be there at 7:30 AM. Ugh. But the rewards for getting there so early were great. Not only would I be able to skip the long lines, but we would enter the Sistine Chapel before the gates opened at 9. The tour was only a British couple and me, which was unusual. The tour company is wonderful. If you’re ever traveling in Italy, I’d highly recommend italywithus.com

Another guide had been hired for a family with small children. I’m guessing they paid extra after bad experiences with the children slowing up everyone else. This reminded me of what I was like at 4 years old when my parents took me on ships all the way to Sri Lanka and from there to Japan. I was a real problem for my parents. The quote my mother used to love telling was when I told her that I didn’t ever want to see another “interesting thing” for the rest of my life.

The Sistine Chapel was stunning. I can’t explain what it felt like to be in this massive chapel with the stories of the Bible painted in such wonderful detail and colors. No pictures were allowed there, which made sense to me. Here’s a picture from the internet.

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After the Sistine Chapel our guide took us to the Vatican Museums. Here’s a corridor which doesn’t look like the corridors in Stright Hall where I taught.

I’m not doing justice to these beautiful maps that were quite accurate.

Our guide’s pace matched my pace perfectly. She picked out the most important or fun items and kept us moving. She was working on her degree in archaeology and had a degree in art history. She knew her stuff.

We had to be let in by a guard to this room of animal sculptures. Another perk of this tour.

The guide explained that this tomb for a child was mass produced. Everything was done before except the head, which looks like the child who died. You can see a line where the head was added.

I loved this statue of Bacchus, the god of wine. I hope my eyes don’t look like that when I see alcohol.

The British guy with me on the tour joked that this looked like a toilet. The guide said it truly is a toilet. They put some kind of receptacle below the hole and emptied it when needed. The expression “going to the throne” goes back quite a ways.

Where there’s a toilet there should be a bath. As a side note, in the French village I stayed in and elsewhere in France, the toilet room is totally separate from the bath area. It’s convenient if two people need to use the two rooms but not if one person wants to use the two rooms.

My guide didn’t want to take this picture since she thought I was touching the statue. It’s a famous sculpture of Hadrian as the next photo explains.

A very different beautiful map, of Corsica.

The tour with the guide ended around 10:30 and after getting us to skip the line, she left us to appreciate St. Peter’s Basilica on our own.

It’s hard to give you a sense of how vast and ornate St. Peter’s is. This picture doesn’t help much. Sorry.

This was a list of the dead Popes ending in 2005 with John Paul II. There’s lots of room for more.

One of my favorite moments of this day is when I entered a room in St. Peter’s Basilica that was for prayer only. There was a guard making sure people understood that no pictures were allowed. I sat there quietly and reflected on my life and the people in my life. I wasn’t calling up any deities but it was a form of meditation. If there’s no god I was doing the same thing as prayer. If there is a god, it might listen to people who haven’t expressed loyalty to its particular form or not. It wasn’t prayer in the sense that I wasn’t asking for anything but maybe that’s not necessarily what prayer is about. Of course, I have no idea what prayer is about, never having done it in my life.

You have to take a picture of the Swiss Guards.

It was just 11 AM or so and I had done more than I usually do in a day at home. I went back to the hotel to rest before the 2:30 tour of the Coliseum and a classical concert at 8:30. I’ll write about that and the demonstration I joined in a separate blog. Here’s a picture of a woman putting her clothes out to dry as seen from my balcony.