Rome!

We arrived in Rome at like 6:00 a.m. I wasn't as tired as I thought I would be, but I wasn't exactly well-rested either. Plus my feet hurt a lot because I didn't think to take off my shoes on the night train. We went to the hostel to use the bathroom and drop some of our bags off in the luggage storage area (way too early to actually check in to our rooms). Luckily for us, we got to have an extra free breakfast since we were there so early. (Actually we got there before the breakfast even opened!). Yay, more money for gelato!

Feeling slightly refreshed, we decided to do the Vatican that day (Saturday), and the Colosseum the next day (Sunday). We headed to the metro station at the Piazza della Repubblica, which was pretty close to our hostel. The Piazza was huge and beautiful, with a big fountain in the middle. It also featured the Santa Maria degli Angeli church, which was huge! Or I thought it was until I saw the Vatican.

The metro ride to the Vatican was only 10 or 15 minutes, but then you have to walk a ways to get to the actual Vatican. It's not that far, but the whole time we were surrounded by thousands of other tourists and tons of people yelling at us to buy their maps or souvenirs, or telling us how we could get in for free/skip the line/meet the Pope if we just signed up for their very reasonably priced tours.

Anyways, we finally got there (again entering a foreign entity without going through customs), and the Vatican is incredible! The main part is this enormous plaza with a fountain and obelisk in it, and on the right is St. Peter's Basilica, which is amazing. As you can see, there's a huge line to get into it, even at 9:00 a.m. Luckily, it moved pretty fast, and we only had to wait about half an hour. There is a lot of security; they check your bags and you have to walk through a metal detector, and inside there are a lot of guards and nuns walking around.

 St. Peter's Basilica is easily the biggest church I've ever seen, and every inch is amazingly ornate and detailed. There are so many statues and paintings and altars, and there are so many different sections besides the main hall. Even the floor has intricate tile designs on it.

Next, we decided to go to the Sistine Chapel, which I was really excited to see. I hardly know anything about art history, but even I know Michelangelo painted the ceiling! We were a little confused, because you have to go outside and around the main plaza to find the entrance, which is the same as the Vatican Museum entrance. We thought we were only paying to see the Sistine Chapel, but it turns out the tickets are for both. And they really make you work before seeing the Chapel! The Vatican Museum is actually dozens of tiny museums, all attached together, with miles-long hallways in between, and the visit routes make you go through all of it. We quickly realized our mistake in taking the "long itinerary" route, but even though we switched to the "short itinerary" as soon as possible, our fatigue from two days of nonstop walking in Venice plus the night train caught up to us. Eventually, we found a bench, took our shoes off, and rested for like half an hour. It was a little bizarre to be sitting in the middle of this beautiful hallway with a gold-plated ceiling, rubbing our feet and eating granola bars, as we watched a sea of tourists stream by us.

When we finally managed to put our shoes back on, we walked another 20 minutes and eventually got to the Sistine Chapel! I imagined it as a smallish room, with only the ceiling painted, but it's actually a huge room, and the ceiling and the walls are all painted. It's so packed with tourists that you can barely move, and two guards stand in the front yelling alternately "Silence!" and "No photo!" in thick Italian accents every couple minutes. This was not very effective; everyone was loudly fake-whispering, and some people were even holding iPads up over their heads to take photos. At least I was a little more discreet, with the lens-poking-out-of-the pocket move.

Next, we got lunch (spaghetti! gelato!), then saw a couple smaller tourist attractions near the Vatican, and then headed back to finally check in at the hostel and take a nap. And rest our feet!

That night, we went to Palazzo del Freddo, a gelato place that my friend recommended to me. It was amazing! They had so many flavors, and a large enormous cone was only 3 euros. I got dark chocolate, hazelnut, and café flavors, and they put a huge dollop of whipped cream on top! The gelato was so good. I had heard that eating gelato in Italy will ruin all other gelato for you because nothing else will never be as good, and now I totally understand what they were talking about. In fact, we loved it so much, we came back the next night too!

The next morning, we got an early start and went to the most famous monument of all in Rome - the Colosseum! It is indeed pretty amazing. Again, there was an incredible amount of tourists there; we had to wait for over an hour even though it was only 9 a.m. The inside is really impressive. A lot of the Colosseum was destroyed by earthquakes and fires, but what's left is really well-preserved. You can see some of the seats in one section, but everywhere else is mostly the skeleton of what the arena once was. That floor part in the foreground of the photo is a reconstruction of the floor that used to cover all of the bottom of the Colosseum; the hallways underneath were the area beneath the floor, where the gladiators got ready.  On a related note, one nice advantage of learning French was that I could eavesdrop on both French and English language tours! The photos of the Colosseum don't really convey how impressive it was in real life; we could have spent all day taking in the sheer scale of it. But we only had one day left and a lot to pack in, so after a couple hours, we headed off!


The rest of the day was pretty much a quick-see-this-famous-monument-then-that-one-then-one tour of the must-see sights in Rome. We went down the famous street Via del Corso, which cuts down the middle of most of the more famous tourist attractions. We saw the Victor Emmanuel II Monument (very cool), the Pantheon (cool but mobbed by so many tourists we could hardly see it), the Trevi Fountain (huge and very impressive), the Spanish Steps, and ended at the Piazza del Popolo. We somehow managed to climb up the Spanish Steps, despite how tired we were. The view from the top was worth it though, we could see all the way to the Vatican across the city!

Later that night, we went back to the Colosseum to see it all lit up, and then of course back to the gelato place! Then the next morning, we got up super early and took the bus to the airport to fly back to Bordeaux. I wish we could have spent more time in Italy, there was so much to see! I would definitely love to go back some time, to see Venice and Rome again, but also to see all the cities we couldn't make it to, like Pisa, Milan, and Florence. Not to mention all the gelato flavors I didn't have a chance to try...

À bientôt!