Italy Day 2: Rome- Vatican, Sistine Chapel & St. Peter's Basilica with a stop at the Bone Chapel

Hey there, this is Big sis. I'm going to tell y'all about our experience in the Vatican Museum, the sistine chapel, Saint Peter's Basilica, and the Bone chapel.

After waking up early in the morning and get out the door super early, we made our 20 minute walk to the individual country of Vatican City. Weird as it sounds, Vatican City is a country of its own within Rome. It is so tiny that you can't see it on a map. Before we made it to Vatican, we made a pit stop to the Castel Sant'Angelo which was a palace for a past emperor, but is now used as a museum. We didn't go since we had to get to our tour on time.

There is an entire wall around Vatican City and we had to walk all around the wall before coming to the gate to get into the city.  After we meet our tour guide, Catja, and we start our tour of the Vatican Museum. Mom wanted to make this trip super fun and so she got this book full of scavenger hunts of items to find within our different  location that we go to, and so we have a scavenger hunt of things inside the museum and the two churches. When people go to the Vatican with out a tour guide, I can see why because if it was just us looking at room after room after room of random arts, then it would get kinda boring, but since we had a tour guide that was super enthusiastic and energetic towards the little kids, and was always showering us with facts, it was a super enjoyable experience.

The very first thing she shared with us was the facts about the euro coins. I had no idea that every country in Europe with a currency system of Euro has their own crest on the backs of the 1 and 2 euro coins. Vatican even has its own, but people can't have them, only tour guides just for showing.

The first section of the Vatican was all the statues made out of marble. Many of the statues where inappropriate, but only because back then, people saw these statues as a beautiful image, but I still didn't like it very much. Luckily there wasn't that many.

There were so many sections of different statues, some of past warriors, including one a Hercules, some of past emperors or rulers, even a whole room full of about 300 different marble statues of animals, and even a special section just for our tour, the pope's room. There was a rope and a guard and our tour guide lifted the rope and just our group got to go into a section of the Vatican Museum that no one else was able to go in.  It was really cool and made us all feel important. The pope had many statues of past popes, and then mosaic floors in his own personal bathroom. There's a quite disturbing backstory about the popes toilet, but I'm not going to go into details about that.

Here's a quick little fact. Not all of the marble was white, there was also blue, yellow, red, and green. All of these different colored marbles came from a different country around the world. For example, yellow was, I think, from Egypt, and green was from Greece. The others, I don't remember. But it was really cool seeing some different colored marbles. There was even one of a blue lobster.

After looking at thousands of marble arts, we transitioned into some room with the largest hand woven tapestries. Tapestries were used to keep in the heat of palaces of temple during the winter time. These tapestries were mostly scenes of Christ's life. There was one tapestry where Christ's eyes always looked at you, around the whole tapestry, and so you were always being followed. Really cool how the artist managed to do that.

After looking at these humungous tapestries, we went into a room with maps of Italy, in fresco form. Interesting thing about fresco's its a type of art were you as racing against time. In order to do these, the artist much pick a wall to do these art on and then they put on a wet plaster and then the paint on the plaster, and so these painting will last almost forever. But like I said, they have to race with time because when the plaster dries, it would be really hard to paint what they were working on. What is also really interesting about these Maos is the they were painted around 1580. These maps are surprisingly about 85% accurate. It is very impressive because they didn't have country or contents maps like we have today and so it is absolutely amazing that these artist were able to make such an accurate painting of Italy at that time.

The ceilings were really amazing too.  They had just as much art work as the walls.

After the maps of Italy, there were room with the paintings of Raphael about the war between people of philosophy and religion. Not actual wars, more like debates and arguments. There were so many of these painting that were super big.

Then, we took a little hall way straight into the Sistine Chapel. It was so crowded, and there was a lot of security people around the room. We weren't allowed to take pictures, but we were a little naughty and we took a super secret one anyways. Just one.

After we weaved our way through the crowds of people, we went into Saint Peter's Basilica.

This church is super interesting because there is not any possible way for this church to catch fire because it is made completely out of mosaics and marble. There isn't a single painting either, just mosaics and statues, even thought they look like paintings. The most famous marble statue in the Basilica was the Pieta, "The Pity".  This was carved by Michelangelo and this is actually the only statue that he ever signed.

The basilica has a door that is only opened and used when a new popes is anointed. Theres is a door called the holy door and it is the door that only the popes walks through when he becomes popes, and after that, they close it, and cement it shut. Wow!

Another really interesting thing is that the church was built right on top of the place where Peter was crucified.

The basilica is were people gather to hear the popes message every Wednesday and so it is the most crowded that day. Super glad we didn't go that day because it would have been a nightmare. We exited the Basilica and took time to walk around the square.  There were guards and so many people.

Catija was a really great tour guide.  She kept it super interesting for all of us kids.  She helped us find things in our Mission Rome book and she gave us her own scavenger hunt too.  It made the Vatican Museum something I will always remember.  I am so glad we had such a great tour guide.

We still had some daylight left and so we went to something indoors. There was a chapel, or crypt, or whatever, that had monks that had died and they were placed here. Some of their bones were used to design some really cool stuff and so we went to go check it out. At first it was stories of these monks and then we finally got to the bones. It was super cool, yet super gross at the same time. There was graves, and unburied bodies and hundreds of bones. The littles didn't like it after a while and so we hurried through. I thought it was super fascinating to see how they arranged the bones into some really cool arts. We wanted to respect the dead, so we didn't take pictures but I got a picture online so you can see.

After we left, we took a ride back to the hotel and called it a day. What an amazing adventure. I loved it so much. My favorite was the Vatican. Thanks Mom and Dad.