Yes, I’m feeling, Glad (iator) all over! - The Sea legs blog day 8

Rome! The eternal city!!

Bl***y hot and busy if you ask me! Well we did arrive on a Saturday in high summer, so serves us right really…

Our shuttle bus deposited us outside St Peter’s square, and in the in the five hours we were there, we had plans to “do” The Spanish Steps, The Trevi fountains, Colluseum, Vatican Museum, Sistine Chapel and the Pantheon.

We didn’t count on the queues in the Vatican Museum

Fortunately we forked out 25 bucks each to get a “queue jumping pass” in to the Vatican Museum and sailed past the queue that by 11am was snaking round the Vatican walls and off in to the middle distance. Once inside and through the metal detectors, it was all Italian efficiency and organisation. J The guide did not have enough tickets, so we had to hang about until she found some more, but at least the audio guides worked. We had a map with numbers and buttons to press, but the first number, an Egyptian gallery was not to be found. Even at Orford castle in sleepy Suffolk, they could come up with the “neat” idea of marking the galleries with the same numbers as on the guide map, but not in Rome, oh no, just the Gallery names, in Italian on the walls and English on the map!

We decided rather than follow the numbered route; we’d just follow the crowds and push the relevant number when we found a gallery name we recognised.

There are corridors upon corridors of sculptures and treasures built up by Popes over the centuries. I wonder if that is what St Peter intended his successors to do with his church’s money? I doubt it, but I that said it was a vast and wonderful collection. As we approached the Sistine chapel the crowds got more and more dense, and in once in there (much smaller than I expected) you couldn’t see the floor and a sea of faces seemed to merge seamlessly with Michelangeo’s stunning ceiling artworks.

The excellent audio guide described the images of the Last Judgement in great detail; from St Bartholomew, at the feet of Christ, flayed alive and holding his skin, to St Catherine, broken on her wheel and St Sebastian, body pierced by arrows; the horrors of the end of days in all its gothic detail. While at the foot of the painting, the boatman took the dead over the Styx, and the tourists just below them milled around and chattered like more souls in torment.

It was powerful stuff, and three hours of our five gone, seemingly in a flash. Coffee then out in the sunshine again, the earlier rain showers having abated, and the pavements had steamed dry we dived in to the back streets of Rome with a pitifully ineffective map. Too long in the Vatican meant that we missed out the Spanish steps and the Colliseum, but we flew past the others, found a magnificent market, got lost and just made the bus with 2 minutes to spare.

I’m sure we’ll return and spend some quality time in this magnificent city. Trying to do it in 5 hours can only be a taster.