Smallest State Capital and the Roman Forum

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Day 46 ROME St Peters and the Vatican
All roads lead to Rome, so the saying goes, it seemed to us all the queue’s lead to Rome. We made an early start to make a day of it in Rome, to mainly see the Vatican Museum and St Peters Basilica. We had heard that queues could be long, so thought we should get in early. At the start of the queue there were many ambitious tour touts, One said it will take us 2 and a half hours to reach the museum, saying we could skip the queue for the princely sum of 45 Euros with guided tour - the usual price is only 15Euros, we declined - after a wait of 40 mins we were inside!
The Vatican museum was great, although there was queuing to get in it was relatively comfortable walking about, in the air condition rooms. There was Roman, Greek and Egyptian antiquities, and our favourite, being travellers were the old maps. Towards our exit, saving the best to last, were the Raphael Rooms and the Michaelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, these contain wall to wall fresco by these two famous artists.
Kim nearly had his camera confiscated for taken pictures inside the chapel.
After this we called into St Peters and the square-doesn’t seem as big as it does on the telly!.

Roman Forum and Palatine Hill,
Boy, this was a marathon, it covered a large area and it was hot. So equipped with our new hats- set at a jaunty angle, we set off to imagine ourselves in ancient Rome. The Roman Forum is Rome’s most famous ruins and was the hub of the Roman Republic. The Palatine was the posh area of Roman times, where the city is said to be founded and Emperors lived.
Exhausted we set off for the Trastevere area of Rome for a meal amongst the quaint streets here.

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