The History of the Vatican City

I woke up and decided to visit the Vatican. After an incredibly crowded metro, I got off near the area and was quickly assaulted by someone representing a tour company. I never really liked these big audio tour groups but I didn't know very much about the Vatican, so I thought I might give it a try.

This tour girl led me through a maze of roads and security checkpoints before dropping me off at a meeting place, where another guy shepherded everyone to another place to meet the actual tour guide. It was quite complicated. Apparently I was joining the tour halfway. They probably charged me the full price though, sigh. However, there was a discount for students, in the form of a guy who would look at your little badge and if once of the indecipherable squiggles meant "student", he would hand you a 5 euro note with no explanation.

The basic idea of an audio tour is that each guide has a little microphone and each tourist has a radio with headphones. If the radios are on the same channel, you can hear what the guide is saying over the cacophony of a busy museum. If you wander off you can still listen to what's going on and each guide holds a different coloured flag so you can find them again.

My guide, fortunately, was very good. She took a short phone call (in Italian) without turning off the radio, then apologized, saying it was her boyfriend. Haha. Probably no-one knew Italian though. However, the tour went very quickly so after it was over, I retraced my steps and went through the museum again.

OK, so there's the basilica, of course, which you saw above. Here are some other shots of it:

There is also the world's first broadcasting antenna, for the pope to announce things

and a famous pine cone

and a planet that's having a bad day, tectonically speaking?

Although the museum had many hallways of statues

by far my favourite ones were the muses.

Those are the muses of astronomy (which has been back-ported to mean all science), writing, and epic poetry I believe. I don't recall who this is.

I also photographed statues of Athena, of course

and also, a dog.

Here is a boy who got to be emperor

along with a goat who didn't.

The Romans conquered Egypt and mined all the red marble they could find -- so thoroughly that all the red marble we know of today is in the form of artefacts. They found it all. It really made me realize the physical power the Romans had over the world. Anyway, because it was so rare and somewhat purple (*), red marble was declared the property of the emperor. So everything made of red marble belonged to an emperor.

(*) Purple being the royal colour. You could only obtain purple dye by crushing several thousand seashells, and you could only obtain the shells by sending slaves to dive to great depths, a task which did not impart high life expectancy. Senators were allowed to wear a purple sash and emperors wore full purple regalia. Even better than wearing pure gold.

This next statue has been in the same spot in the museum for 500 years. It depicts some defenders of Troy being sabotaged and killed by Poseidon, god of the sea, because he was backing the Greeks in the Trojan War.

Amusingly enough, there were also at least two replicas of the Pantheon inside this museum...

Smaller, but nearly exact copies. These ones at least are housing Roman statues.

There were also some pretty fantastic maps -- I thought this might be the sea of death, but it's just the north sea --

There was an entire hallway with maps of the different kingdoms of 1600's Italy. For Italy was not unified then; most city-states had their own government, and the pope tried to convince them to get along. I guess having a hallway of the maps so that visitors would have to walk through it gave the impression that they were all under the rule of the church, although that was not always true...

Venice:

All in one:

(Here Italy is at an angle at least, the Romans assumed that the coast was due east-west so Italy was drawn horizontally. I guess this is the ancient equivalent of, the Earth is the centre of the universe.)

These maps are so cool. They look like every fantasy novel ever's world map:

Outside the museum

The highlight, of course, is visiting the Sistine Chapel. Speaking of extravagance, Michelangelo crushed vast quantities of lapis lazuli, a bright blue precious gem, to get the blue colour for his paintings. The pope was paying him so much money, might as well.

There are no pictures allowed inside the Sistine Chapel. Michelangelo was said to have been inspired a lot by this ancient Greek statue

and refused to make new arms and legs for it when the pope asked. Michelangelo said he could not hope to match the perfection of the original statue. Anyway, you can see a lot of this in the paintings.

I went to Saint Peter's Basilica, which is located on top of a hill. Very high up.

You enter first at nearly the ceiling of the church and look down. It's crazy big but because there are fine wire fences my best photograph is of the wall fresco.

I made the mistake of taking a wrong turn and climbing up even higher, to the very apex of the dome. 330 steps one-way. It was an extremely narrow passageway located inside the dome itself, and you had to lean to the side most of the time because the dome curved through where your head would really prefer to be. The passage was so narrow that once you started you couldn't turn around. It was like mountain climbing.

I really felt like the designers of the basilica were creating some kind of heavenly allegory here.

Nice view from the top though. Easy to feel like you're on top of the world.

Those last two images inspired me later. You'll see. Oh, and here's the river Tiber.

330 steps and a long elevator ride later, I'm at the ground level and the sun is low in the sky. I'm in a hurry to leave so I just grab a few pictures.

My favourites, as always, are the ones with cool lighting:

A side story

The reason I was trying to leave the basilica quickly is that I had a meeting with someone. I'd walked into a photographer's gallery the day before, by chance when trying to find an elusive square. There was one image that was quite beautiful and I emailed him later to ask for a print of it. Unfortunately, his English was not very good (and neither is my Italian)... e.g., he kept referring to his shop as "the tunnel". But I made it there before the shop closed and now I have a beautiful print to take with me as carry-on. No picture of the picture. You'll just have to see it sometime.

P.S. Italian buses suck. I waited an hour in the blistering sun for a bus that's supposed to come every five minutes.