Another European birthday

I turned 42 in Switzerland, and I turned 50 in Rome, Italy.

Today's goals were to mail postcards, pay our parking fine, buy a suitcase, and tour the Vatican.

We mapped out our route. We found a post office in roughly the same part of the city as a Scarpamondo and the parking lot for the metro. So we'd hit the post office, mail the cards AND pay the parking fine there, then drive to Scarpa for the suitcase, then park at the Anagnina station and catch the metro to get to the Vatican Museum by 3 pm.

It was a solid plan except for how long the post office took. The post office had a strange entrance of double doors that only allowed one person through at a time. I think it took your temperature and only let you in if you didn't have a fever. I'm not 100% sure, but I saw a sign that made me think that may have been the case. 

Inside, it was akin to the DMV. You took a number and the wait seemed very slow. I asked a guy that worked there if I could pay my parking fine there (it said on the ticket that it could be paid at any post office) and he said no. We finally got called and, by using Google translate, got the postage for the postcards. I also took a shot at asking about the parking fine again and though she seemed very unfamiliar with dealing with parking fines, she was able to process my payment for it (plus a €2 convenience fee).

It was interesting how something as simple as mailing postcards to other countries seemed to be so difficult here. In the States, you can buy an international postcard stamp for $1.40 and it's good for sending a postcard to any country in the world. Here, they had to use different stamps for USA, Germany, and South Africa. And the girl disappeared into the back for a good 5 minutes before coming out with the stamps. And the total came to over €2 each. A little bit of perspective to help appreciate the oft-maligned USPS.

The postcards and parking fine dealt with, we unfortunately had no time for the suitcase, so we headed straight to the Anagnina parking lot. Parking was very full, but there was one spot that was very tight because a car had parked too close to the line (the parking spaces in Italy are tiny to begin with). It took a lot of back an forth, but I finally squeezed in. We got our tickets and caught the train.

We were taking the metro almost from the start of a line to the end, so we were on the train for a good 30-40 minutes.

We got off at Ottaviano and once we got our Google maps working, heading off on foot towards the Vatican Museum.

We made it there just a little before 3 pm.

Grand Central Vatican

The tickets we got thru email were a little vague, but it wasn't hard to figure out what to do once we got there. The Vatican tours are a well-oiled machine, cranking out millions of visitors each year. We got together with our guide and she started off the tour at a large video touchscreen to discuss details of the Sistine Chapel, since she wouldn't be going inside it with us (there's no talking or photography allowed inside). We were also given little earpieces to listen to her with, which was handy because there were so many tours and noise all around, it would be impossible to hear her without it.

Our guide on the left with the touchscreen visual aid

Once we felt well-versed on the Sistine, we followed her into the museum, which is essentially gigantic halls filled with priceless sculptures, paintings, and tapestries. It was overwhelming. The Vatican has a serious art hoarding problem.

I know I sound like a broken record, but it. Was. Hot. A few parts of the museum were air conditioned but most of it was not. Except for one photo op outside, at least it was all indoors.

Usually the photos don't show how hot it was, but we do look hot in this one

The tapestries had to be air conditioned. Not complaining.

Raphael's Disputation of the Holy Sacrament

And finally, we reached the main event. The grand finale. Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel. The chapel ceiling is one of the most influential artworks of all time and a foundational work of Renaissance Art. Painted directly on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the masterpiece depicts key scenes from the Book of Genesis. The complex narratives and skillfully painted human figures were first unveiled to the public in 1512 and continue to impress the thousands of us tourists from around the world who visit the chapel every day.

We weren't allowed to take photos inside, but here's one from Google:

It was pretty cool that they let you stay inside as long as you wanted. It was crowded, but it was air conditioned, and there are benches along the walls, and if you wait long enough, eventually someone will get up and you can take their spot.

Funny, you think this is such an amazing work of art, such a holy location, so famous... and it is. But when you're there, crammed in with so many other tourists, it definitely takes some of the mystique away. For example, at one point after we found a spot on a bench where we could marvel at the paintings and rest our necks a bit, I was sitting next to some guy that kept burping. Like, a lot. He was doing it kind of quietly, and he was wearing a mask, but as I studied the Fall of Man fresco, I just kept thinking what did this guy eat?

We spent a good 45 minutes in the Sistine Chapel (Bella kept track) then made our way through the last remnants of museum and of course the gift shop, where you could buy poster-size images of the Sistine Chapel that you weren't allowed to photograph.

As we were in the last parts of the mueseum, Bella and I had left Cristina behind. When she caught up, she had made a friend, an American from Tampa who graduated from UF and had done a year in Italy as an exchange student in high school. 

Vatican parking lot. You won't find posters of this in the gift shop. You're welcome.

These stairs were kind of a work of art themselves. The steps got progressively deeper and shorter as you went down. The staircase was built in the 1930's to mimic the famous Bramante staircase, which was actually two staircases intertwined like a double helix (long before DNA was discovered) that was built for the same pope that commissioned the Sistine Chapel to be painted.

We hadn't had time for lunch or even a snack, so once we left the Museum, we looked for a place to eat. We tried to get a bit away from the Vatican Museum in hopes that the prices would be more reasonable. We found a nice little cafe and had pizza, french fries, and suppli.

We hit a few gift shops near the Vatican to finish off some of our shopping list, then caught the metro back to Anagnina (no parking ticket, thank goodness). We drove home and stopped at a grocery store to get a few items to take home as well as some pizza and farro salad (and tiramisu) which we ate at the Airbnb for a late dinner. Our last night in Italy.