These messages are from a series of e-mails written after our vacation to Paris and Italy, in the summer of 2002. The events recounted in this internet diary occurred on Tuesday, July 2.
--Jim McQueen
Tuesday was our last full day in Rome. We planned on spending it seeing the Vatican. Nancy's dizziness had cleared, but my back was still sore.
First we set out for some shopping. We took the kids to the English bookstore I'd located, and bought some reading material for the next day's plane ride. From there we went to the nearby Amex office to cash our remaining travelers checks. (I remembered it wrong, we had some left after Venice.)
The Spanish Steps were still closed for the TV broadcast, but that piazza had one of the few subway stations in Rome. The city has only two subway lines, apparently it's hard to dig in Rome without destroying antiquities, even far underground. The trip from the Spanish Steps was the only time the subway was going our way, so that was our only ride. The Rome subway was dirtier and more crowded than the ones in London or Paris.
We emerged from underground a couple of blocks from the Vatican, and it took a minute to decide which way to walk. I'd have thought there would be a prominent sign to the Vatican, I guess the locals all know the way.
Once we arrived, our first destination was the Sistine Chapel. It turned out to be on the tour of the Vatican Museum, so we joined the hordes and bought tickets for the museum.
The Vatican Museum is amazingly large. Just a week or two before in the Louvre, we'd bypassed a lot of art on our way to see the most famous pieces. We were just as bad in the Vatican Museum -- every time we'd reach of a surprisingly long gallery, the door would open into another surprisingly long gallery. As we hustled down the center of the aisles, I was again aware that we were ignoring fantastic art in great quantities. How could anyone do it justice without moving to Rome, and spending the rest of their lives haunting the enormous galleries?
We were probably most of a mile away from the museum entrance when the galleries gave way to state apartments. These were just as wonderful, with high ceilings and frescoed walls. They were just as crowded, a lot like waiting in line for a ride at Disneyland.
We finally moved through narrow passageways and down steep stairs towards the Sistine chapel. When we at last entered it, there was a bit of an anticlimax. The room was a bit plainer than most of the others we'd just been through, and the famous Michelangelo paintings on the ceiling were smaller than I'd imagined, and hard to see on the high ceiling. There were signs with pictograms indicating no flash photography, but I was scolded by a guard as I was preparing to take a photo without using my flash.
After the chapel, there were more long galleries to lead us back near the entrance of the museum. We took these at a slower pace, finally spending some time to enjoy some of the exhibits. The tour ended with a very large gift shop, but we didn't buy anything. (Most of the items were very tasteful art reproductions, but they also had a jogging suit emblazoned "The Vatican City" in gold -- it would have fit in in Las Vegas.)
At the museum exit, there was a very large modern spiral walkway down to the level we had come in on. The kids took the spiral, but I waited for an old-fashioned elevator with an operator controlling an up/down arm. At the bottom was a cafeteria with several areas with different menus -- we chose the pizza section because it had the shortest line. Without much presence of mind, I got a diet coke with my pizza, thus passing up an opportunity to drink beer in the Vatican.
Love,
Jim
After lunch in the Vatican Museum cafeteria, we set off to find St. Peter's Basilica.
We walked around the perimeter of the Vatican walls, to the big piazza at it's front. It was another hot day, and we'd already had quite a lot of walking in the museum. We found the famous piazza surrounded by columns, and sat in the middle, looking at the basilica and the balcony where the Pope holds public masses.
We'd had a long day, at the end of a long vacation, and we took a little time to gather up the energy needed for a visit in the basilica. When we set off for the entrance, the kids were whiny and uninterested, so we let them sit it out. We told them to stay put in the center of the piazza, though later we would have to search around to find that they had moved to the shade of the colonnade.
There was a quick security screening on the way into the basilica, and several tourists were turned away for dressing too informally. We bypassed a tour of the dome, and went in one of the massive front doors.
St. Peter's Basilica is the best of the cathedrals we've visited. It's the largest in the world, and the most opulent we've seen. It's impressive to see what people can do with a proper budget.
The huge interior was wide open, I guess they bring in whatever pews they need for particular services. The perimeter was lined with tombs and memorials to popes, each majestic enough to be a tourist attraction in it's own right. All the marble was well polished and completely dusted. There was so much to see that we just skimmed the surface, I really wish we'd spent the entire day right there.
We came out and located the kids, reading their books from the English bookstore. We looked at a map and decided that the direct walk to our hotel was about the same length as the walks to and from the subway stations.
On the way, we saw several more sights that we were way too tired for -- we just read about them in a guide book as we looked from a distance. We walked from the piazza in front of St. Peter's down the wide boulevard to the Tiber river, crossing on the modern Pont Emanuele. From the river we had a view of Castel St. Angelo, a "Roman imperial tomb, fortress in the Middle Ages and a Papal pleasure dome in the Renaissance." Once across the river, we navigated a business district, and stumbled through the maze into Piazza Navona, "in ancient times the site of the Circus Domitianus, now a lively plaza with cafés, and three sculptured fountains." We knew we were nearing our hotel when we popped out behind the Pantheon, and walked past the restaurant where Nancy had attempted stringy pasta. Nancy and I dropped the kids at the hotel, then popped around the corner to Trinity College for another couple of pints.
After a well-earned nap and some showers, we planned dinner at a nice-sounding restaurant. We had located the Pizzeria le Grotte in our book "Italy with Kids", but that night our kids had no interest in dinner. The two of us left them in front of the TV, and had a nice final dinner there, with starters from a very exotic appetizer bar and a bottle of sparkling Prosecco.
On the way back, we bought souvenirs for the kids from tourist stalls by Trevi fountain, and picked up calzones for their dinner, from a tiny family-run hole-in-the-wall. We packed our bags for the morning, and all slept very soundly on our last night in Europe.
Love,
Jim