The Vatican

Our first day in Rome we spent in the Vatican City. We arrived about 9am and got in line to go into St. Peter's. Here's a picture of me in line:

We decided to got to the top of the cuppola or dome. You rode up to the roof on an elevator and the you had toclimb close winding stairs all the way to the top of the dome. Here's a picture of the inside of the dome (sorry it's a little blurry):

There were some 323 steps to the top. And from the top we got great views of Rome, a little hazy but still good views. This picture shows St. Peter's square and Via Della Conciliazione (the street right in front of you). Also you can see the Tiber River at the end of the street. And at the end of the street on the left Castel Santa Angelo. We'll tell you more about the Castle in a later post.

This is a picture of the stairs going back down!

Then we went inside the Cathedral. It was one of the most beautiful cathedrals I have ever been in. It's very hard to capture in photos but here's a couple to try to show you a small piece of it. This is inside looking at the main nave.

Here is the dome again from the bottom floor:

This is out front, a statue of St. Peter just by his elbow on the left side of the picture you can see the place where the Pope stands to make some of his addresses to the people, mostly on special holidays.

Next we went to the Vatican Museum and Sistine Chapel. We spent nearly 3 1/2 hrs all together in there. Erik likes all the details that the audioguides provide and I just go ahead and wait when my feet get too tired. we were not supposed to take pictures of the Sistine Chapel and although everyone else was we realized that the pictures just would not have turned out that well as the lighting was pretty poor. Here's a few pics fromt he museum/grounds:

This one is a Roman Statue of one of the Roman Centurians and I loed how deatiled it was. Amazing what they did with stone:

There were many, many more statues and pictures we took of them but we'll move on... Here's a picture of a mummy they had in the Egyptian section of the museum

I never found out exactly what this golden ball was but this is in the courtyard of the museum and you can see a little bit of St. Peter's in the background. I took the picture from the second floor of the Museum. Well that picture won't load so I'll try it again tomorrow.

That's pretty much it for our first day in Rome. Tomorrow we're on to the Colluseum and Old Rome!