ROME!, pt. 2

Just to backtrack a little bit...when I got to the hostel, the guy there gave me a map of the city. Between Saturday night and Sunday, I realized that I had pretty much covered the entire east half of the map. So naturally, I decided that Monday and Tuesday would be spent covering the West side of the City...plus a few sites I may have missed the previous days. When I woke up on Monday, I decided to go to a cool looking place that I had read about in my Rome guide book, the Santa Maria della Concezione church. This church was supposed to have a crypt where all the bones of dead Monks were used as decorations (I guess that's the word to use). I found out that the place was only a few blocks down from my hostel, so I got there bright and early and walked into the place only to realize that it was only a few rooms connected to a hallway, but it was definitely an interesting place. Each room had a theme, such as skulls, or collarbones, etc and the walls were covered in each. The didn't allow picture taking there, but I bought a few post cards and took pictures of them...hah. Overall the place didn't really meet up to my expectations, but it was still pretty interesting.

After that cheerful morning, I decided to wander around the southeast part of the city, which looked all green on the map. It turned out to be a giant hill that climbed up to a couple really awesome views of the city. I then took the rest of the day wandering past a few of the shops in the city, including a Bentley dealership, a Ferrari store, an interesting liquor store, and a fountain pen shop, which only some of my readers would appreciate. Later in the day I visited a couple other churches which were amazing and by the end of the day, I decided that I'd at least take a stroll past the Vatican to see what it's all about. It was quite the amazing place, but more of that to come later. The rest of the day was spent wandering down the river that's in Rome.

The last day of my trip I had planned to go to the Vatican City and check out the Vatican Museum and St. Peter's (or Basilica di San Pietro for one of my readers). I figured because it was no longer Easter Sunday or Easter Monday, that the lines wouldn't be as long for Vatican related things...wow was I wrong. I got into a line for the Vatican museum that didn't look to bad at first. I then realized that it wrapped around a corner...then a couple hundred feet down the road it wrapped another corner...then another corner...you get the idea. The wait ended up being about 2 hours, but finally I got to the museum. Unfortunately, I was worrying the whole day about making my flight home that night, so all experiences in the Vatican were shortened a bit. Anyways, the museum was amazing though. My first thought though when I saw the amount of people pouring in was..."Wow...the Vatican is never going to go broke." It was just insanity the amount of tickets being sold. The museum itself was very impressive, even at a high speed pass. Some of my favorite items were paintings such as these, which seemed to be a little newer than most of the other artwork,
Raphael's room's that were pretty much covered in paintings from top to bottom, and of course the Sistine Chapel. I then got inline for St. Peter's, which was luckily a lot shorter than the museum line. St. Peter's was an insane church...about twice as huge and glorious as San Giovanni in Laterno, which I had visited a few days earlier. After visiting the Vatican, I decided it was time to start making my way back to the train station and to the airport for my farewell to Rome. The flight home was uneventful and I was home at about 10:30pm Tuesday night. Overall the trip was amazing, but pretty tiring. For my next European trip, I might find a place where there's not so many historical sites to run around to...maybe a place where I can just sit out by a pool with a Margarita...but we'll see. My work is already asking me about coming back to Ireland towards the end of May, so it looks like I might have future chances to visit other cities in Europe. Until my next adventure...Buona Sera!