Vatican Tour Day
Saturday 28 September 2013
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Pantheon and Piazzas
By the next morning we were feeling much better. We
are not tempted to move somewhere else. A new key solved the bathroom problem.
Chatting to fellow travellers at breakfast, we found out that the train
to San Pietro station ran all the way to Termini station. If the instructions
the booking site gave us had mentioned that route, we would have had no
problems. I think a note to the booking site is in order.
After breakfast we walked the short distance to Piazza San Pietro (St Peter’s
Square) for a preview of the afternoon tour of the Vatican we had booked online.
At 10 AM the long curved arms of colonnades on either side of the Piazza
enveloped seating for the many faithful expected for the Pope’s Sunday mass the
next day. The rest of the Piazza was already filled to capacity with tour groups
and independent tourists. There was a line of people snaking from one side of
the Piazza to the other and up to the side entrance of the Basilica. Our
afternoon tour had promised to avoid such line-ups.
From St Peter’s Square we walked down the broad Via
della Colcillazione to the Tevere River and the large fortified Castel
Sant’Angelo, the resting place of Emperor Hadrian of Hadrian’s Wall in Britain.
The view of St Peter’s Basilica from Sant’Angelo Bridge was spectacular. There
were rowers in racing shells below the bridge and bicyclists on a bike path
right next to the river. Tourists milled about enjoying the sunshine and buskers
tried to entice us to buy a scarf, a souvenir, or reward them for playing a
guitar or their skill at depicting characters as living statues. We headed along
the river to the Palace of Justice,
(Palazzo di Giustizia), the seat of the Supreme Court of Cassation and
the Judicial Public Library, popularly called in Italian the Palazzaccio (the
bad Palace). It is considered one of the grandest of the new buildings in
the capital city of Italy. More fun for us was watching small children ride
bikes and learn to ride a skateboard on the piazza in the rear.
We found a good
neighbourhood restaurant for our main meal of the day, a choice of pasta, a meat
dish with vegetables, water and a drink for €11 each.
We had plenty of time to walk off our lunch by the
time we reached our meeting place at the Vatican Museum for our three hour tour.
Marina, our guide, did a great job of herding her group of 20 through the museum
and the Sistine Chapel, all the while giving us up to date information on the
most important pieces of the collection, especially her favourites. There was a
huge number of art works in the collection and she made it much more interesting
for us. Yes, the Sistine chapel was magnificent, made more so by picking out the
quirks, highlighted by Marina, that Michaelangelo had incorporated into his
frescoes. It was a full three hours later when we reached the doors of St
Peter’s Basilica. After a short introduction, we said our farewells and had lots
of time to explore the largest Catholic Church in the world on our own. The
interior was still full of tourists, but the large space made it easy to get a
good view of everything, including a mass that was in session.
The culmination was
finally seeing the famed Swiss guards outside the Basilica. One guard was as
immobile as the Governor General’s foot guard outside the official home in
Ottawa. A second made time to chat to tourists and answer questions. It was a
fitting end to our Vatican visit.
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