Blogs from Vatican City, Vatican City, Europe - page 3

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While MTV cribs brings some pretty impressive and often ridiculous homes, perhaps there is no more fitting home in the world under this category than that of Vatican City. Not only is the Roman Catholic Church home the world's largest collection of historical artworks (which proves how lucrative plundering can be under God's name), this 110 acre residence of 800 people is literally its own country. In many ways, the Vatican City is a unique part of the world in both political and social aspects. This country is a true theocracy, in which a Divine Right (leader chosen by God) is the government structure, of course putting the Pope as the leader of the country. This is truly the only nation one could visit in which every single part of the country is recognized as a ... read more

The Vatican City. It has it's own post office, police uniform and is technically a separate country to the rest of Italy. Unfortunately we ran out of time to explore St Peter's Basilica, as we waited hours in the line to the Vatican Museum. Probably should have done the former as the most interesting object in the museums was a 4000 year old mummified body of a small pharaoh. You could still see his fingernails and toenails. One of it's eye sockets had a patch over it, where they would have removed his brains from. It was fascinating! Of course there was also the Sistine Chapel, with the famous painted ceiling by Michelangelo, portraying various scenes from the bible such as The Creation of Adam and The Last Judgement. Unfortunately it was a bit hard to ... read more

My internship at the U.S. Mission to the EU was over and my Italian ‘vacation’ had started. (As if this entire trip hasn’t felt like a vacation.) It took me about two and a half hours to get from the airport to my hostel. As soon as I finally found it, the receptionist opened the door for me and asked if I have a hungry friend waiting there for me. I had to laugh because, yup, Michael was there, waiting for me so we could go out and grab dinner together. I was so happy that he was at the hostel as he no longer had a phone and I wasn’t exactly sure where/when I would be able to meet him. I put down my bags and we quickly headed out for some delicious Italian food. ... read more

14 Stations of the Cross On Friday night @ 9 pm Laura, Jordan, and I walked down to the Colosseo to see the Pope do the 14 Stations of the Cross from the Ancient Temple of Rome and Venus. There were supposedly 20,000 people there and from the looks of it I believe it. We fought our way through the crowd to a spot where we could at least make out the Pope's face and settled in for a ceremony that seemed extremely long but was probably due to the fact that it was in Italian and only understood every other word with one verse in English for each station. It was easy to get distracted by the Colosseo right behind us as you can see from my pictures. Regardless, it was was cool to feel ... read more