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Can you see the Pope?
the Pope giving his blessing in St Peter's Square. Rome in a Day!
It was an early start for our big day in Rome. We needed to be up early to catch the 6.50 train to Rome. It takes about 2 hours by train. The train station is right in the middle of Rome, just a 10 minute walk from St Peter's Square.
Rome is very, very big, not only in size but in its buildings, the number of people, cars and scooters. There are people everywhere! After a quick breakfast and coffee at the railway station we head off in the direction of St Peters Square. We can tell we are going in the right direction because we can see the dome looming overhead.
Word on the street from those trying to sell guided tours that St Peters basilica was closed as every Wednesday for mass and the Papal blessing in the square. (So yes we got to see the pope from a distance. He did wave, but we didn't wave back.) So we headed towards the Vatican Museum. We had heard that the queues were very long, and the crowds huge. However we walked straight in – NO waiting at all. I think if we had been a
hour later it may have been a different story. So our visit to part of the museum was relatively crowd free. I was easily able to take pictures without people standing in front. The only place that was crowded was the Sistine Chapel, mainly because people were reluctant to move on. It was difficult to take everything in in the museum as there was so much to see. We only visited a small fraction of it. The Sistine Chapel was certainly a highlight. It was a lot larger than I had imagined and the colours were quite vivid. There has been a massive cleaning operation as apparently it was very dark and quite black. I thought the whole thing was just quite breathtaking. It is very hard to describe. Just stunning really. You weren't allowed to take any photos but the Sistine Chapels work is well documented.
Next on our list of places to visit was St Peter's but we didn't make it inside, something for next time. Instead we saw the Pope. Checking the map we headed off to the Pantheon (Basilica di S. Maria ad Martyres.) The scale of the building is quite immense. It is as wide
as it is high built in 27b.c. It is the biggest covered place without immediate supports that was built before the invention of reinforced concrete. It has a hole in the roof with a little drainage hole in the floor. One of the few buildings you can enter for free.
Next as we headed to the Coliseum you pass the Roman Forum, a large area that once use to be the centre of Rome. It has all been unearthed as it is well below the road. You can go on a guided tour around it. Something for next time perhaps. The Coliseum looms up.. You can see it from a long way. It also as a major ring road going around it so parts of it are pretty back from all the pollution. It is an immense structure. It took quite a while even to walk around it. Here there was a long queue that snaked out the main entrance. But by spending a few extra Euros for a guided tour we managed to avoid all the queuing. The coliseum looks like it is riddled with huge bomb or bullet holes. After the fall of the Roman Empire the Popes
of the time stripped the coliseum of all the iron that was used throughout the building to hold it all together and started removing other building materials as well. This is why it is not intact any more. Seeing all the corridors and cells and pens etc where they kept all the animals etc was quite amazing. They have built a small bit of the floor to show what it would have looked like.
We headed back across town walking past many amazing buildings, streets and fountains. We were off tho the Gallery Borghese. It was definitely worth the walk. It was quite small but some of the works were quite breath taking. Some of the marble statues were my favourite. This was the only place we visited where we had to book in advance. Only 250 people in at a time over a 2 hour period, so it is not crowded inside the gallery. Well worth a visit again sometime.
We found a great restaruant that had a great write up. The food was lovely. We enjoyed it so much we decided we would never make it to the train in time for the 8.30 so we wandered the
streets, threw coins into the Trevi Fountain and enjoyed the lit up buildings. Rome is a pretty crazy place, very random, traffic appalling but a place where you could easily spend a week, so we'll be back one day.
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