D139 -- Vatican City

We figured after all that partying last night we should get ourselves to church. Vatican City here we come! St. Peter's square was beautiful. The lines weren't too long, so before we knew it we were walking into St. Peter's Basilica.







Whoa! That's pretty much what all three of us said when we walked in. Thomas and I have been to some pretty ornate churches in the past few months, but this place takes the cake. It’s massive in size, the floor is completely made of marble, there are beautiful mosaics, marble statues, and gold leaf everywhere... it's insane. Yet unlike a few of the churches we've visited that seemed gaudy, all of this grandeur felt completely appropriate. It is, after all, Vatican City.


It was really peaceful inside, despite all of us tourists. We walked around for a couple of hours listening to info about the different statues on our audioguides. The most famous of them was Michelangelo’s Pietá. I would have loved to get a better look, but after some crazy guy attacked it with a chisel a few decades ago, you can't get anywhere near it. Many of the statues are built on top of tombs of popes. Two or three of the popes were not in metal tombs, but glass ones. Is it sacrilegious of me to say that it was creepy to see embalmed bodies, even if they were popes?

We didn't have time to go to both the dome and the crypt beneath the church, and we'd seen enough bodies, so we chose to climb up to the dome. From inside we had a beautiful view of the altars (2) and the mosaics lining the dome. Funny, from the ground they look so small, but they're actually huge.



More stairs (we're really working off all that mozzarella) and we were outside the dome, checking out the views of Rome. Ah, la dolce vita!

-Elva