It's been a very busy couple of weeks indeed! On Wednesday last week we headed to the fabulous Rome. It wasn't as stress-free a morning as it should have been heading to City airport because on Tuesday evening I had a full seizure. The ambulance crew were here until after midnight. I was fine and didn't hurt myself at all, but it was very stressful for Matt. I think the past month has just been very stressful with the virus and leaving China and having to put the cats into the cat hotel, not knowing when we will see them again, or if we will even return to China. Anyway, we weren't going to let it ruin our holiday, so we just got a taxi to the airport instead of getting the train. Luckily we flew from City airport, which is really close to Matt's parents, so it didn't take long. We landed in Rome mid-afternoon and went straight to our hotel for a restorative nap.
We ate some seriously good food on this trip, including pizza, calzone, pasta, caprese salad with the freshest buffalo mozzarella, meatloaf, salmon pasta, meatballs, deep-fried meatballs. Italian wine is just the best, even Matt was enjoying drinking it. And the ice cream, oh the ice cream - chocolate, coconut, yoghurt, pistachio, hazelnut, fererro roche, whiskey - delicious!
We actually had a really busy few days, since we were up early anyway for various skype meetings and lessons. Then we ended up doing over 20,000 steps per day each, since it was easy to walk everywhere. The Vatican was about a 30 minute walk from our hotel.
On our first full day we had a Vatican tour booked for 3 hours. You could walk around the 7 km of museums there for days without seeing it all, so we did the highlights tour, with a fantastic guide. We saw so many beautiful artworks by some of the most famous Italian painters and sculptors in the world. The museum itself is stunningly beautiful, with the most incredibly painted ceilings and domes and archways. There is a whole suite of rooms that a Pope used to live in, painted by Rafael. The shear number of treasures is overwhelming. There is a long gallery with walls covered in paintings of maps of Italy, which is just wonderful. Another long gallery is covered in tapestries, with a ceiling that is painted to look 3D. The Sistine Chapel was a real highlight of the tour. The ceiling and walls are exquisitely painted by Michaelangelo depicting various scenes from the bible. The colour blue in paint was very expensive, so there is none on the ceiling because Michaelanglo was paying for it, but on the back wall, the Vatican paid for it, so it is covered in blue. The blue was made from crushing precious stones. The chapel was smaller than I expected, considering how many people they squeeze in there to elect a new Pope. It certainly was spectacular though.
St Peter's Basilica was even more impressive in my opinion. It is enormous and absolutely covered from floor to ceiling in marble and paintings and shiny things and sculptures. It's impressive but really rather over the top. We paid a bit extra to walk up the 355 stairs, which were very narrow and steep and the wall was at an angle, to view the basilica dome from the walkway at the top. It's magnificent up close. There were more stairs then to get to the outside of the basilica, where we had a fabulous view over the red roofs of Rome. No buildings in Rome are allowed to be built taller than the basilica, so it really was a great view.
The next day we spent a lazy morning in the hotel, because Matt had a meeting at 10 with the school's management team. Then we headed off to the Colosseum. It's wonderful to imagine this enormous building as it would have been thousands of years ago, at the height of the Roman empire. We went into the Colosseum and got to walk on the ground level where the gladiator fights and animal fights and races would have taken place. You can then walk up several flights of very steep stairs to get to the different seats. Just like today, the cheap seats would have been at the top. The Colosseum ticket also gets you into the Roman Forum, which is next door and access to Palatine Hill. Ancient Rome was built on 7 hills, the most important of which was the Palatine, where the Emperor and all the important people would have lived in extravagant villas. There are some great ruins left today of the villas, including those of Emperor Augustus and his wife Livia. The Forum was where all the important business would have been conducted and various temples and shrines would have stood there too. Everything is in ruins now, but it adds to the romanticism of the city. The last time I was in the Colosseum and forum, I had just completed my degree, so I was full of information about ancient Rome. I thought that I wouldn't be able to remember any of it, 11 years later, but I managed to keep up a steady stream of random facts that somehow lodged themselves in my brain for the past decade.
After the forum closed at 4pm (we were kicked out we'd been in there for so long!), we walked back to the hotel via an enormous building. I'm still not entirely sure what it was - some sort of shrine to someone I think. Anyway, it was a huge columned building, high up via lots of steps with white statues lining every inch of it. There were enormous winged horses on the roof too. You could walk quite high up and get a really good view over the forum and palatine hill, with the Colosseum in the distance.
On the walk back to the hotel, we managed to go via the Trevi Fountain too, and threw a coin in for good luck and to ensure our return to Rome.
The following day, we set off for a general wander. We started with the Spanish Steps, which are a popular social meeting place, with a fountain in the middle of the plazza and a pretty church at the top of the steps. At the top there is also an enormous park, which we spent a happy hour wandering around in the glorious sunshine. We were in jeans and jumpers, but didn't need coats, and the sky was a brilliant blue every day. Glorious.
We headed to the nearby church Sant Ignazio du Loyola, which had a spectacular ceiling that you could look at via mirrors on the floor so that your neck didn't hurt staring up at it for ages. Very clever.
We also went to the Pantheon, which was a perfectly round church built by the Emperor Agrippa. The Pantheon is lovely on the inside, and the domed ceiling has a hole in the centre of it. It must get very wet inside on a rainy day!
The next day was Sunday and the Pope was doing a 10 minute address in St Peter's square. He does this every Sunday that he is in Rome. We decided to go, so ended up back at the Vatican once again, watching the Pope appear from a window in the apartment where he lives. He spoke for 10 minutes in Italian, waved to everyone and then off he went. There were so many people there to see him. St Peter's Square was pretty full. We had a lazy rest of the afternoon, having a long nap because we were out at the football that evening. It was Lazio Roma Vs Inter Milan. Lazio have an afilliation with West Ham because Paulo Di Canio used to play for both of them. We even found West Ham/Lazio football shirts, which of course, Matt bought! The match didn't kick off until 8.45, but it was really good fun. The crowd was very loud and had lots of flags and banners. They also had individuals holding different coloured pieces of paper, so that when they were all held up at the same time it created a giant picture. The match was good and Lazio ended up winning 2:1. There was singing and car horn beeping all the way on our 45 minute walk back to the hotel! I felt sorry for the people trying to sleep as it was nearly midnight!
Monday was our final day in Rome. Our flight was in the evening, but we had the whole day to sightsee, so we ended up back at the Vatican for the third time! This time was to do a tour of the Vatican gardens. They don't run many tours in the gardens. It was so interesting to see all of the shrines and grottoes and fountains that had been gifted to the Vatican over the years. You could also see the original Vatican walls which are about 100 feet closer to the centre of the Vatican than the current walls. We saw the outside of the exclusive building where guests such as Bill Clinton have stayed, and we saw the outside of the apartments where the Pope who stepped down currently lives. There was an English garden, an Italian Garden and a French garden. They were very pretty.
After the garden we could go and look around the museum again if we wanted to. We were pretty tired by this point, but decided to go in again and see some of the 7km of museum we had missed on our highlights tour. We saw the huge spiral staircase that is currently featured on the Viking cruises adverts on TV, and then went into the extensive Egyptian section of the museum for a look at the treasures there.
We went back into the Sistine Chapel because, to mark the anniversary of Rafael's death in 1520, his beautiful, enormous tapestries were hung in the chapel for a week. Monday was the first day. The last time they were on display was for 1 day in 2008, so we were very lucky to see them.
