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.

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.