Italy Day 6: Rome Italy Temple & The Palace of Caserta

Guten Tag. This is Big sis and I'm going to tell everyone about our adventure the the Caserta Palace and the Rome Temple.

I have to say, the temple grounds were the best tended to then any other temple I've been to. Even in the winter time, the plants were all blossoming and beautiful. Their were about 10 people cleaning the grounds and tending to the temple. Of course we didn't go int the temple itself, but we planned on going to the visitors center instead. We arrived there at around 8:45, but it didn't open until 9 and so we explored the grounds and saw the beautiful temple from the outside. It was absolutely gorgeous. 

We finally were able to go inside and we got to see all of the 12 apostle stature and the statue of christ. I am pretty sure the the Rome temple visitor center is the only one that holds all of the original 12 apostle statue. These however aren't originals, but replicas of the actually statue in other churches scattered around Italy. There were two missionaries and a nice elder who were there and they told us the background and some stories about all of this wonderful statues. 

Then the took us the the other side of the wall were there was a 10 foot long stained window that held 140 stories from the New Testament. Everything in the window at least represented 2 stories. For example, the woman reaching towards christ represented the woman touching Christ's garments, the woman at the well, and the story of the adulteress. The artist of this window even put hi face in the glass, he's the man walking toward christ, he also represents the one leper who came back and thanked Christ after healing them. There are so many stories and symbolic things. It was so amazing. Eventually, we had to leave, but before we did, there was a scaled model of the outside and inside of the temple. So, yes we didn't go inside, but we still got to see the inside of the temple. 

After saying goodbye and going back onto the rode, we stopped at one of the largest Palaces in the world. At the front of the palace, it didn't look very big at all, but the completely changed when we went inside.

We first wanted to see the English gardens in the backyard, and though it would be fun walk around. We thought that it would be a little walk, but we were completely wrong. The the backyard was at least 2.5 MILES LONG!!!!!!! And it just so happened that the gardens only entrance was at the very top of the 2.5 mile hike to the end of the palace.

So we put on our determination faces and started the walk. We made up games and enjoyed the water in the middle while walking up and so the time didn't pass by terribly long. The gardens didn't allow entrances past 1 and we were half way at 12:30 and we had already been walking for 45 minutes, and we started to hustle to the top.

We finally got there at 12:56 and got in to the gardens with some time to spare. The workers told us that they completely closed at 2:30 and so we had lots of time to explore the gardens. We saw so many weird plants and structures.

There were some fallen trees and some broken house roofs from the fallen trees, but other then that, it was so beautiful. We saw many lakes and a man made waterfall with really cool cave. The spiderwebs were humungous and disgusting.

We walked around and saw some really things and then deciding to call it good. We left at 2:25. We had the great blessing at making everything just in time. When we saw the all back, we didn't want to do it at all, and so my family took the shuttle back while the Doland's ran the entire way down. Since they had all kids between 11 and 7, they made it down surprising quick for 2.5 miles. While we waited for them, we started our tour of some of the palace rooms. We didn't know that we would be doing that for at least on hour.

The rooms were very big and looked very elegant. All the room had many chairs and paintings and some other artfiacts such as super old books and stuff. The largest amount of chairs me and M&M counted in one room were I think 38. Including a couch to hold 6 people. Crazy. There was even a room that had the ancient kings personal library and another room hand the royal babies bed. Sadly, there are no more royals to live in the palace and so it's just used for site seeing now. Kinda a waste in my opinion.

We explored the many rooms that we were allowed in and then went to the front of the palace again. If you ever want to go to this cite, it's worth it. Just be prepared for a very long walk that paid off in the end.