In Feb 2011, Sara and I spent a couple of days travelling around the Vatican during a holiday in Rome.

     

We turned up on a Saturday to find the pope was ordaining five new Bishops in the main church (St Peter's Basilica) and it was closed to the general public. So, we decided to take a tour around the rest of the Vatian. We hadn't booked anything and were a little wary of the number of people touting for tours on every street corner around the Vatican but when we saw the size of the queue (hundreds if not thousands of people) we decided to give it a whirl. I'm still not entirely sure if the tour we joined was legit as our entry into the museum involved us queue jumping rather than entering through the tour group entrance, but it seemed to work well enough.

After getting some earphones and a headset so we could hear our guide, we followed her around while she waved her favourite flag with a bee on it. She really knew her stuff and seemed perfectly happy switching in and out of several european languages and was doing the tour in both English and Spanish simultaneously. Randomly, she also had the most public school english accent I've ever heard which is no mean feat for someone not from England... I've been to a couple of fairly posh schools and spend a fair amount of my time in central London but she was probably the most quintisentially English sounding person I've ever met. I can only imagine she had elocution lessons from the queen!

The tour included started in the square, explaining the history of the buildings, Rome, the popes and what to expect inside. We then proceeded to the Vatican gardens and some of the museums with a big explanation of the history of Michealangelo's involvement in the Sistine Chapel and what was depicted in all the paintings. We covered a sizeable chunk of the 7km of museum exhibits on the way to the Chapel.

     

     

As we approached the Sistine Chapel we walked through a series of truly amazing rooms. For a cluster of rooms that are essentially a massive corridor this was pretty insane. Some of the rooms were filled with tapestries covering the walls from floor to ceiling while others had massive painted maps showing all of the geography of the surrounding areas. But what really stood out were the ceilings. Every ceiling panel for as far as the eye could see was lavishly painted with stunning images and surrounded by paint effects simulating 3D cornicing. Throw in priceless statues in every window and these were impressive rooms- it's hard for my photos to do these spaces justice!

     

  

I have to be honest... After the rooms approaching the Sistine Chapel I was a little underwhelmed by the Chapel itself. Perhaps it was because it was much darker to protect the paintings from light damage or perhaps because it was rammed with people. While the guards were trying there best to keep the noise level under control there was certainly no sense that this was a place of worship or something special. I'm glad our tour guide had explained what all the frescos and paintings were and what to look for as after seeing the previous rooms it was very apparent that painting wasn't Michaelangelo's strong point! It was a bit surprising how small the paintings were. Somehow I'd got the impression that Michaelangelo's infamous painting "The Creation of Adam" (the one where god and Adam are touching fingertips) was going to be huge. In reality it was a regular sized painted panel but on a ceiling a few floors in the air.

I chanced a photo of one of the walls (see below) but the guards really weren't keen on people with cameras. They didn't seem too bothered by me as I took it without a flash of course but it was amazing how many people were using flash photography all the way through the Vatican museums and in the chapel itself.

Our guide left us at the chapel but suggested we may want to come back the next day to see inside St Peter's Basilica and join in the pope's Sunday blessing in the main courtyard. This sounded like a good idea so the next morning we returned to the Vatican and queued up. Now this is a church! None of the white stone walls we've become accustomed to in England as everything was dripping in marble, gold leaf and painted murals. It is a huge with shafts of light forming mesmerizing Crepuscular rays (aka god rays). As a guide to scale, the statue of liberty could be stood up comfortably beneath the dome!

     

     

Next, we did something I was really looking forward to. We climbed up into the dome (aka the Cupola). I'd recently played a computer game called Assasin's Creed 2 which includes a level climbing around the inside of this church and leaping around the ceiling and this was all I could think about while I was up there. It wasn't the toughest climb in the world but if you don't like small spaces it may not be for you. You are walking between the inner and outer skins of the dome so you have to lean against the dome wall to avoid the outer wall coming in at head level. As you get closer to the top the staircases keep getting narrower and narrower until the final staircase which was slightly narrower than the width of my shoulders!

At the top you can walk around the inside of the dome looking down into the wings of the cross shaped church. This is very impressive and you get a full sense of just how high the dome is from the floor of the church. After walking around the inside you can then go outside the dome and onto the roofs of the church for fantastic views out over the city.

     

     

Finally, we went down into the courtyard for the pope's Sunday blessing. We'd been hearing all week how much the people used to love the previous pope (John Paul II) but the current pope (Benedict XVI) was pretty impressive. We didn't really know how long he would be there and were only expecting him to wave out the window and vanish but he was there for a very long time doing a long blessing in Latin followed by the same blessing in several other languages. I wasn't keeping count but Latin, Italian, English, German and Spanish were definitely in there. Then with a cheer from the crowd and the release of lots of green balloons he took in his little window carpet and went back to whatever it is the pope does on a Sunday.