Blogs from Vatican City, Europe - page 16

If you walked through those doors by foot you would have all your sins forgiven! Sweet as lets go! Then the guide tells us they had been sealed up after the holy year, bugger! Day 1- i left the hostel & walked to the republica cabic fountain, then to the colocca tranian ( huge pilla with a dude on top), the monumento avittrio emenuele 2nd, the arcodi titi & palatina (all the ruins, excavated and left as is, 1000;s of years old), the colosseum , Bloody impressive). That night i went out for pizza in 1 of the million pezziera's, tasty. Day2- I cought the metro to the vatican, i walked into the courtyard & a lad asked me if i wanted to go on a free english tour of the bisilica, i luv that word ... read more

Rome on Christmas Day Our journey to Rome began at mid-morning on an old, worn out commuter train out of Sorrento bound for Napoli. It carved its way through the mountains and 75 minutes later we pulled into the crowded madness of Napoli. The Napoli train station was like being trapped deep in an ant hill as some school boy stuck a firecracker into the hole. Thousands of people rushed about on multiple levels of the station. The concept of a single file line is clearly lost on the Italians. It was impossible to find anyone who spoke English and that, of course, made it very difficult to find the Eurostar train bound for Rome. After a great deal of frustration we were successful and began the 2.5 hour journey to Rome on a very comfortable, ... read more

The Vatican city is the smallest country in the world.....with its own private post office, newspaper, radio stations and even army!... read more

So last sunday was the papal mass!! it was an amazing experience. not only was this an opportunity to go to receive mass from the pope, but it was a cannonization mass where he cannonized 5 saints. how cool is that? so anyway that morning we all got up super early to get ready and go. The mass itself started at like 9:30 or 10:00 but we had to get there at about 7 in order to get into the gates and get seats. We all meet at teh bridge before the sun was even up and walk into St. Peter's Square. There are people EVERYWHERE. they all have flags and there's bands playing and huge groups of nuns and monks wearing ballcaps and bandanas and the groups of people are singing their natinal anthems and ... read more

Ok finally getting the Italy pictures up. There's probably going to be a lot of them and you will see more when I get home. But we had really good weather everyday we were there. It seemed to rain every single night, like downpour, but it made the days really nice out. We didn't really go inside anything but the colloseum because there was at least a 4 hour line for everything or it just cost way too much to go inside. So even though we all wanted to see the sistine chapel we decided to pass when we couldn't even find the end of the line after walking four large blocks. But we were able to find some really good pizza. haha. But we saw St. Peters cathedral and all of the ruins and the ... read more