Rome: Y'all Forgot About the Vatican

Oops! Forgot to mention the Vatican. Well, it's not even technically Italy, so whatever.

The shadow of the cupola! YES I climbed it and YES I am very brave and THANK YOU FOR ASKING.

More photos/thoughts/what-have-you after the jump!

Ahhhhh the Vatican. This place is… mind-boggling.

The art and architecture on its own terms is stunning and incredibly complicated to think about. So much effort and money poured into these collections, these buildings, these grounds, rather than to, I dunno, serving the poor or whatever, but the flip side is… I’m not sure exactly what our current billionaire/trillionaire overlords are doing with their money, but I haven’t seen many glorious works of art coming out of our current age of excess, so let’s call this one a tie. If you gotta have a massive empire with some seriously flawed human moral failings, at least you could leave some nice buildings and paintings behind.

The other piece of this puzzle, of course, is: visiting the Vatican in the summer. In a Jubilee Year. With, and this is just a rough estimate, the entire population of the known universe. It was a total madhouse - hence very few photos (well, plus I'm not a huge museum-photos-dude these days). OK I took some.

Bacchus (THEATRE!) hanging out with his buddies, shoulderguy and biteycat. These are official facts.

I was CRAZY grateful to have read up on my Rick Steves before making the trip – able to make a reservation in advance to skip the line, knowing to cut upstairs to a second round of ticket windows rather than picking up my ticket at the more-crowded downstairs galleries, and generally having a sense of direction through the Vatican museums. (He’s also got a great shortcut from the Sistine Chapel to St. Peter’s, which otherwise would require a whole second security line/waiting-in-the-heat misery). So, I had it easy compared to some of the tourists I passed who were having the worst days of their lives. (Not to mention some of the vendors hawking wares in the square at the Vatican, about whom: I get that it’s a tough gig, but I’m guessing that wildly cursing out a tourist who doesn’t want to buy your selfie stick is nnnnnnot going to up your sales with the rest of the crowd?)

[Pretend this is a photo of the Map Room, which is stunning. I do not know what happened to mine.]

Anyhow. The museums were grand, though I’d recommend going at a time when there are no huge groups of frat bros sneering their way around the place. There was still a remarkable amount of glorious art on display, and some of the rooms were legitimately stunning (the map room in particular), but the sheer amount of humanity crammed into the museum even during a “low” tide made it hard to really reflect.

That was not the case with St. Peter’s.

That's just... something that sunlight does in St. Peter's. It's awe-inspiring, as is the building. Those letters, by the way? Are every word Jesus is recorded as having said to Peter. Oh, and they're all seven feet tall. This seems impossible until you climb the dome.

Also very busy (again: Jubilee Year!), but far more spacious and open, this building more than lived up to its reputation. Go with a guide – either a free audio tour (as I used) or a live tour guide in a small group who knows their stuff. Learning how massive the building is, and how brilliantly designed to seem smaller than it is, was one of the highlights of my trip.

Mosaic inside the cupola! It's bonkers being up in this thing, even if you don't (as I forgot that I did!) have a fear of heights. You are suddenly aware of how massive the bascilica is, and how incredibly thin that chicken-wire keeping you from falling into it is, and how sloped the floor is and oh no oh no can we go home now why did we come up here

Eventually, after a visit to the exterior of the Cupola (gorgeous views and more exquisite terror) you descend to a mercifully flat and large part of the roof and wander around and that's more okay. This, by the way, is where it's nice to be solo traveling, because you don't have to worry about a travel companion being grumpy with you for getting tense and phobic about plummeting to your death! You just get to quietly panic and then go take more pictures of things.

Seeing these from the ground outside the complex and then seeing them up close at their level? That's a trip, guys.

So: The Vatican. Everybody is correct. It is incredibly worth seeing. But: maybe at the crack of dawn in February in a non-Jubilee year, would be my suggestion.

Papal address POV. That is quite a piazza. Do you think it is a good job, being Pope?

OK, that is an end to Rome, so next up should be Florence unless I realize I totally forgot a month I spent in, Iunno, New Jersey.