Roma?!

(Saturday, April 10)

We woke up fairly early Saturday so that we could take full advantage of the breakfast offered at our hostel - toast and coffee. But this wasn’t just any ol’ coffee - this stuff so strong it needed about 5 packets of sugar to kill that coffee taste. Yum. We headed out to find the meeting point for our tour and found that it met at a fountain in Piazza Repubblica. It’s just up the street from the train station, Roma Termini and we had passed it the previous day while searching for our hostel. Go figure! We sat by the fountain and waited and realized that we would probably need some more food to hold us over if we didn’t stop for lunch while on the tour so Katie and Rachael made a food run and headed off to some golden arches across the street. We returned with food in time to find our tour ready to go and learned that they would break for lunch once we got to Vatican City. Well, shoot! We would still enjoy our awesome Mickey D’s. We went and bought bus tickets and with our tour group hopped on a bus toward St. Pete’s. We got off at a point outside of Vatican city and walked toward the river.

From here we could see St. Peter’s Basilica, the bridge of Angels and Castel Sant’Angleo (where Tom Hanks beats up that other guy in Angels and Demons). We learned all about the history of Rome, how the Christians moved into this area and how Vatican City came to be. It was a real history lesson for the Woodmere Gang! From there we walked across the Bridge of Angles which is lined with 10 angels depicting the passion of the Christ and made our way toward Vatican City.

Once at the main square we refilled our water bottles (Rome is famous for it’s awesome and plentiful water fountains) then went to a panini place for lunch. Having already been fed, the Woodmere Gang went in search of some gelato to hold us over. After everyone finished dining, we left to go inside the Vatican, bought our tickets and began our tour.

We learned about how and why the Cathedral was built where it is, different "gifts" (aka artifacts plundered from past civilizations such as the Egyptian pine cone in the picture above) how the Cathedral has changed over the years depending on who is holding the big seat, and how the Catholic church chased Michelangelo down a couple of times to put him to work. We then went inside and saw parts of the Vatican museum, the hall of maps and eventually the mother lode - Saint Peter’s Basilica. While learning about the Vatican earlier, our tour guide Justin pointed out that since Michelangelo spent so much of his life painting the famous Sistine Chapel ceiling, once he was commissioned to paint the Last Judgement on the altar wall, he painted himself as St. Bartholomew holding his skin, so as to say that the Catholic church had skinned him dry after making him spend the better part of his life under their ceiling. We feel a little sorry for ‘ol Mikey but are sure glad he took the time to create this fantastic work of art. It is absolutely beautiful. Once inside the Sistine Chapel, you are not allowed to talk or take pictures… but what the Pope don’t know won’t hurt him!

Check out a full 360 panoramic experience of the Sistine Chapel here

After checking out the Sistine Chapel, we headed outside where our tour wrapped up. We bid adieu to our tour guide, Justin, who we would see later on for our evening tour. We walked around a bit more then went inside the Basilica to look around.

After having our fill of Vatican City we left and headed back to our hostel to take a quick nap. We woke up about an hour later then headed back out to Piazza Repubblica to meet up with Justin again for our evening tour. Our tour started at Piazza Repubblica. In that area, there are several big important things to Rome’s history, one being an old brick building that formerly held Roman baths. There are also some fancy hotels in the piazza as well as Rome’s most important movie theater, which is where Italy premiers all of its big movies. The fountain in the middle is also pretty cool.

From there we headed to another area and saw the Church of the Immaculate Conception which is designed and filled with bones of past monks. Mmm… juicy. From there we headed to the Spanish Steps and learned about its history. On the top side of the hill was the French Embassy. On the bottom side of the hill, the Spanish Embassy. The Spanish were getting’ real tired of hiking up the hill and things were starting to get a lil’ tense so the Italians one day said “hey fuggedahbout it and cut it out already!” so the French, being French, said “sorry ‘bout cha hill, Spain” and they built them a nice set of marble stairs. So they are now called, the Spanish Steps.

We walked down the steps, snapped some cool pics then made our way to the Trevi Fountain. We learned about how it was designed (and it’s haunted!) and built and threw in our obligatory coins (1 coin = You’ll come back to Rome, 2 coins = You’ll come back to Rome and fall in love, 3 coins = You’ll come back to Rome, fall in love and get hitched).

We then made our way to Piazza Navona and learned about the Four Rivers Fountain. It’s being refurbished at the moment so we saw a lot of construction materials as opposed to the fountain. This is why Al Gore invented the internet and by default, Google. Our tour ended there, so we bid adieu to our buddy Justin but not before snapping a few pictures of him and his dazzling magical beard.

We decided to grab a quick slice of pizza then head back toward our hostel to go to a little internet café and research transportation to Barcelona. The Rail Europe website that we have been using to determine transportation our whole trip told us to hop a train to Rome, then to Milan, then to Nice, then to Paris, and from there, take an over night train to Barcelona. I don’t know if y’all know this but Paris is a bit out of the way. That’s like saying to get to New Orleans from Miami, you should drive to St. Louis then drive back down along the Mississippi to New Orleans. Trains were looking, for the first time on our trip, the least efficient mode of transportation! We looked at flights and luckily found a Ryanair flight from Rome to Barcelona for an amazing price of $50 per person. We had typed in all of our information and were about to book it when the price jumped up to $300 per person - YIKES! We decided that the Roman Gods were obviously against us (or that midnight was a bad time to be booking a flight for the day of departure) and decided to try again and sort it all out in the morning. We went back to our hostel and went to sleep.

XOXO J&K&M&R