Sunday, May 13, 2012

Day 3 - Rome II


Today we got to go to the Vatican City and see the world’s largest capacity church and all sorts of other cool stuff. We have been doing a ridiculous amount of walking the last two days, so my feet are kind of sore. First we woke up early again at 7:30am and had breakfast. Then we walked over to St. Peter’s Basilica which is the topic that I did my presentation on for the class. St. Peter’s Basilica is the largest church by occupancy in the world. It has the largest interior of any church in the world. It has many famous pieces of artwork including Michelangelo’s Pietà, Cambio's bronze statue of St. Peter (that people have traditionally touched so the foot is worn
down), Baldacchino di San Pietro by Bernini and others.

The other impressive parts of the basilica are Michelangelo’s Dome, which is one of the largest in the world. The building was quite impressive in its shear mass alone, but also in the details of the domes and the 140 statues that surround St. Peter’s Square on the colonnades. It was very cool to see some of this famous art that I had heard about in my Intro to Design class for architecture this last semester.




Then we made our way over to the Vatican Museum. It was one of the longest, biggest, fullest museums of art that I have ever seen or heard of! We were continuously walking around for several hours just looking at all of the sculptures, tapestries, paintings, painted rooms, and other forms of art. We walked through for a long time seeing statue after statue and paintings after paintings. It was so overwhelming to see the huge collection of art. We finally made it to the rooms that I was really looking forward to, the room Rafael painted and Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel. In Rafael’s room, I got to see “The School of Athens,” which I have seen in many different places in literature and I did not actually know where it was until we got here and were told we would be seeing it. Then we had to traverse through more of the art until we finally made it to the Sistine Chapel! It was amazing to see the detail and amount of work that had to be put into creating this masterpiece. I did not realize that there were so many different scenes depicted on the ceilings and on the walls. It was amazing to finally see the famous portrait depicting God giving life to Adam! Seeing these famous works of art in real life has been an incredible experience. You may be able to see the art and appreciate it, but the context provides so much more perspective to the meaning of the art. Then after making our way through 3 gift shops and a little more art, we finally made our way out of the Vatican Museum.
Then we went and had lunch at a local pizzeria. Next we made our way to the Castel Sant'Angelo which was the tomb of the Roman emperor Hadrian, a Papal fortress and residence, and a prison. We got to go to the terrace on top of the castle which has an incredible view of most of the ancient part of Rome. Then we were finally done with our class part of the day.
We went back to the hotel and played some card games and gave our feet a much needed rest. Then we went out to a restaurant for dinner and we had a pretty good time. We were taken down to this underground basement area and so it was really close, so they could not seat us all at the same table. We decided to share some pizzas and pasta. The other table had a little too much food and fun, and ended up spending 130ish Euro for 6 people! Haha. Needless to say, our table had a pretty good laugh about that. After dinner, we went back to the hotel and just hung out in the breakfast room for quite a while having some good laughs and hearing some funny stories from the other groups that went out that night.

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