It's time to do me!: The Religious side of Rome

February 26, 2011

We woke up bright and early this morning because we agreed with the comm. girls that we would all eat breakfast together at 8:15 in the lobby of our hotel. Breakfast consisted of a roll, your choice of pastry, coffee, and orange juice along with butter and different jellies to put on your roll/pastry. I helped myself to one of everything and as we discovered that there was chocolate powder to put in your coffee I ended up having 3 cups of coffee…I like never have coffee in Florence and I was really happy to have it here for free :]

The boys were meeting at our hotel at 9:30 so we could walk with Petra to the Vatican Museums to meet up with our art history professor Rocky Ruggiero so he could give us a tour of everything. In order to get inside the museum you actually had to walk all the way around this wall…the Vatican is almost like its own sector of the city. Just like yesterday we were able to surpass the lines and walk right on in the museum since we already had our tickets and our school had made reservations a while back. After a quick potty break and getting hooked up to these head sets to be able to hear Rocky, we headed outside into this little courtyard to begin our tour! Inside the courtyard was this huge bronze pine cone with peacocks set inside of this niche. One legend says that the pine cone was actually used at one time as the plug for the hole in the dome of the Pantheon, but the diameter of the pine cone is much smaller than the diameter of the hole, so mathematically it couldn’t be true. There was also this really cool gold sphere inside the courtyard that would spin and had different designs cut out of it.

Along the way we saw quite a few really cool statues that Rocky described in great detail, one of my favorites being the Loacoon sculpture which showed a giant snake wrapping around a man and his two children, symbolizing their fate for warning the Trojans about the Greeks’ tricky wooden horse. The fine details and good representation of the figures in such an early time period was so impressive and gorgeous! Out of all of the art and sculptures that we are seeing in Italy and everywhere we go, I don’t think this one will ever leave my mind. The Vatican museum was mainly filled with a lot of paintings and sculptures. It would be hard to describe the different things we saw throughout the museum because we saw so many things that I don’t even remember half of them. One thing that I can say though, is that for me, the things I was most amused by in the entire museum were the ceilings. The ceilings were always highly decorative and elaborate and after a while my neck really started to hurt because I would walk around with my head leaned back everywhere I went. One other cool thing Rocky explained to us in the museum was this huge purple marble-looking sculpture which he told us was made out of a material called porphyry. Porphyry was a display of wealth because it is a very rare and expensive marble and it is such a hard substance that most tools would get ruined if they tried to cut the stone.

At the end of the museum we walked through this modern art museum very briefly on our way to the Sistine Chapel which was attached to the museum. I was kinda bummed that we only saw the modern art museum for a few minutes because of what I saw, I was highly amused and impressed by the artwork and wish I would have been able to see more. But of course everyone, including myself, was anticipating going into the Sistine Chapel since the beginning of this trip. We were told that we had to remain very respectful of the chapel, so we shouldn’t talk loudly and we weren’t allowed to take pictures because if we were caught taking pictures they could delete all of the pictures off our cameras or even kick us out of the building. However, when we walked into the chapel the room was PACKED with people who were almost all sneaking pictures of the ceiling (the reason the Sistine Chapel is so famous since Michelangelo painted the ceiling in there) and guards were continuously yelling to be quiet. I feel like the atmosphere of the room was almost ruined by these things and I ended up not being very impressed or stunned in awe and amazement like many people say they are when they enter into the Sistine Chapel. I thought Rocky explaining the ceiling was very interesting, but I couldn’t have been happier to have left the Sistine Chapel and keep moving…probably something most artists and art lovers would slap me for saying.

Rocky was able to get special permission to take a path leading from the Sistine Chapel to Saint Peter’s Basilica so we didn’t have to walk all the way around the Vatican Museum and enter into the front of the basilica. As we were walking between the two buildings Rocky pointed out that there were two different other lines that people were standing in, which were both options that we could do later on in the day when we were set free; the one line was to climb to the top of the cupola (or dome) of Saint Peter’s Basilica which provided you with an amazing view of the city, and the other line was to go and see the tomb of Pope John Paul II. With the intention that I really wanted to see the tomb of Pope John Paul II later on in the day, we walked into Saint Peter’s Basilica which was enormous and beautiful just like everything else we were seeing today. Off to the one side was Michelangelo’s famous Pieta sculpture which was so heavenly and surpassed every expectation that I had of seeing it. The sculpture depicts Mary holding Jesus in her arms after he has died, and I don’t think a normal human being would be able to look at the sculpture without feeling some sort of emotion – for me I think I felt EVERY emotion.

I found the rest of St. Peter’s Basilica pretty interesting, even though I wasn’t really sure what to expect. The church is so big that in the center aisle there are markings that tell you a comparison or where other famous churches would reach inside of St. Peter’s. It was funny to see that the churches we have already seen that we thought were HUGE would fall meters and meters short from the entrance of St. Peter’s if measure from the back by the altar…there just was no greater comparison than to describe and explain to us how big the basilica really was. The high altar was very gorgeous with this stained glass dove and a grand baldachin over the altar (a canopy-like structure), and the different sculptures surrounding the altar, along with their history, continued to add even more beauty to the church.

Once Rocky told us he was done with the tour for the day and we were set free, the girls and I (even though I did appreciate Saint Peter’s Basilica) couldn’t wait to head off and get some lunch…we were starving! We walked along looking for just a little sandwich shop or something, and ended up being talked into eating at this one little restaurant where we ended up getting scammed. The guy brought us out these menus and described everything in great detail and the pasta dishes looked delicious and would have been more food for your money than a 4 euro sandwich, so the majority of us ordered pasta and I ordered their “specialty pasta” which was covered in a cream sauce with mushrooms. After sitting in the restaurant for a while (which took us quite a while to even get a seat inside and out of the cold because there wasn’t much seating) we started to talk more and more about the uneasy feeling we were getting from this place. One of the girls mentioned that they swore that they saw one of the people put a plate into a microwave and Isabelle said she thought she saw something on the menu that said something about pre-made meals, or something to that effect. Come to find out that this place sells these meals that they heat up in a microwave! I was BEYOND upset, but we had already ordered and we were starving and my plate was just brought to me…their “specialty”, even though I don’t know how you can claim to have a specialty if you don’t even make it yourself! I devoured the entire thing because I was hungry, but as I ate it the flavor got worse and worse and some noodles were crunchy and once I had finished my stomach was extremely upset. All of the girls felt the same way about their meals, and all we wanted to do was get out of here! I ended up being charged 11.50 euro for microwaved food…I was not a happy camper!

Clearly we needed something to brighten our mood and taste buds, so our eyes became peeled for a gelato shop or somewhere with pastries. We started to make our way towards the Spanish Steps, because it was one of the only things that we said we HAD to see today during our free time. Luckily as we were nearing the steps we saw this bakery/pastry shop that looked TOO GOOD! There were pictures of famous celebrities on the outside of the building, and there was no reason not to go inside. I ended up eyeing up these dough balls that had chocolate drizzled on the top and that I could tell were filled with some sort of chocolate or nutella. I asked the lady for a few and headed out with my sweets with the rest of the girls. I bit into my first ball and nutella GUSHED out of it…I swear the dough had to be the thinnest layer of dough because it felt like I was eating nutella right out of the jar. But I definitely wasn’t complaining…it was DELICIOUS! My tastebuds and stomach were in for a treat after a disappointing lunch! We also ended up walking by this large grocery store and I asked the girls if I could go inside really quick, hoping I could find some peanut butter. And by golly I found some! There was a jar that wasn’t too expensive and looked about the most normal out of all the peanut butters I have seen here in Italy, so I had to buy it. I also bought these little crackers to eat the peanut butter with, because I didn’t have a knife or spoon or anything like that.

It seemed as if this walk to the Spanish Steps was full of surprises and kept getting better and better! As we started to be able to see the steps we saw the MASS of people in the streets and all the way up the steps...a good indicator to know we made it! The road leading to the Spanish Steps was lined with designer stores and Tessa was getting so worked up because she loves shoes and she loves Gucci…two things that were prominent on the strip! We walked up on the steps and took a seat with the hundreds of other people sitting there and it never felt better to sit down…especially when you are eating peanut butter for the first time in two months! The view and sunshine was incredible on the steps and I felt like I could sit there for days because it was so comforting and peaceful. My peanut butter wouldn’t last for days though because I was devouring it, even though it tasted nothing like Jif…it tasted more just like crushed up peanuts or peanut paste without sugar. But honestly, it was peanut butter, and I was more than happy to have some in my life.

After sitting on the steps for a while we decided to walk down to some of the stores and souvenir shops. I went into Gucci with Tessa and Marissa and everything there you could tell was so expensive and I didn’t even want to move because I was afraid I would break something and be forced to fork over thousands of dollars for the items inside. While we were in there this woman did however back into a worker carrying a tray of champagne and the glass shattered onto the floor and EVERYONE gasped…clearly that was our sign to leave! At this little souvenir shop I finally found and bought a rosary bracelet that I loved along with a couple other souvenirs for other people. After a while we found our way back to the apartment to rest up for a little bit and get ready to go out to dinner, which our school had pre-arranged for us.

We all headed over to a really cute place called Trattoria da Luigi and were led up into a special room upstairs where they had 3 tables already set up for us. We all got a drink (I got a Coca-Cola) and not much time passed before we were given a bread basket that also had these long, thin, crunchy breadsticks in it. Our first course we were served was pesto pasta, and the pasta were these cute little disc-like noodles…really really good! Once we finished our pesto pasta we were served pasta dish number two, which consisted of rigatoni-style noodles in a red sauce that had small pieces of what I think was ham in it. After we had finished both pastas we were then served our meat course of thin pieces of veal that had a really thin slice of prosciutto placed on the top, with a side of potatoes. If that weren’t enough food already, we then had a choice between macedonia (fruit salad) and tiramisu for dessert. Of course I picked tiramisu, but eating the dessert was like torture because I was already so full, but the tiramisu was SOO GOOD I couldn’t not eat it! I honestly don’t know how Italians do this like every night! I mean, I probably could eat that much food every night, but I would be twice the size of what I am right now.

After dinner everybody had food hangovers, so we all decided why not go get a drink? A majority of us ended up going to this bar that was more like a fraternity house in the inside, but extremely classy with nice tables and these fire tubes to keep people warm outside. A few people from our group had come here the night before, so apparently we now had an “in” with the bartender. We all basically ended up getting just one drink (I got a Guinness) and realized all we really wanted to do was go home and go to bed; we have been moving non-stop since we got here yesterday (which definitely doesn’t feel like yesterday! I swear it feels like we have been here for 3 days now). Once back in the hotel we had a little girl talk with the comm. girls who are now our new best friends before we hit the sack!

Our lovely hotel room! (notice the silk comforters!)

Eating breakfast with my girls!

The gorgeous Tiber River.

The awesome bridge we took over the Tiber on our journey to the Vatican.

You would think we would walk towards the Vatican, but we had to walk
all the way around this wall on the outside of the Vatican in order to enter on the other side.