Today was absolutely packed, but we had so much fun! We started the day with breakfast a few minutes from the Vatican, which was absolutely delicious! After this, we met up with our tour group for our three-hour Vatican tour.
The first thing we did was learn about the history of the world famous Sistine Chapel, or la Capella Sistina as they call it in Vatican City. Speaking of which, the entire time we were inside the Vatican, we weren’t in Italy at all! Vatican City is considered to be an entirely separate country from Italy. I found this very cool.
After learning about the Sistine Chapel, we started off through the various sections of the museum to enter it. Along the way, we went through many beautiful art galleries, where we learned about how the painters during the renaissance era were masters of painting in forced perspective.
Entering the Sistine Chapel and seeing some of the famous paintings I learned about years ago in Social Studies class was absolutely crazy! Every part of the room was absolutely stunning. Unfortunately, we were not allowed to take pictures of it, and we weren’t even supposed to talk (though that didn’t stop most people from doing so).
After this, we took a shortcut straight to the large square in front of St. Peter’s Basilica. The architecture was breathtaking, and St. Peter’s Basilica, which was my favorite place we visited today, was just as beautiful inside as it was outside. As it turns out, there are no paintings inside the basilica, but you would never know because there are beautiful mosaics with some pieces so small that they were comparable with the string on our tour headsets!
This ended our Vatican tour, and we took the metro back to the area near our hotel to regroup in the room and then walk to the Colosseum for our next tour. On the way, we had some absolutely delicious gelato. We arrived at our meeting place just past the Colosseum with plenty of time to spare.
Our first stop on the tour was the ruins of the Roman Forum, which was a Roman hotspot of activity way back around the time of Jesus. We saw the ruins of many temples, beautiful chiseled archways, and a panoramic overlook on Palatino Hill which was stunning.
After this, we went to the Colosseum and learned about its history and the sorts of events that would have taken place there. We got to walk around inside of it and take a lot of great pictures, and the architecture was so cool!
After this, we ate dinner near our hotel, which was the best meal I’ve had so far on the trip. We finished it off with a second round of gelato before heading back to the hotel for the night.