Day 2 Rome: August 8

When planning our trip to Italy, we realized we couldn't see or do everything. We focused our time in Rome on art, architecture, and history, choosing one or two sites a day to explore. On Friday we visited the Vatican City in the morning and then refreshed ourselves with a session at the Rome temple.

Our hotel served an excellent breakfast every morning.

We walked to the Vatican, taking a bit longer route so we could cross the Ponte Sant'Angelo. The bridge is decorated with 10 heroically sized angels, each bearing a sign of the passion of Christ. We were early enough that the streets were nearly empty.

All ten statues were designed by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, a giant of the Italian Renaissance who led the transition to the Baroque period. Bernini selected the sculptors for each angel and completed 2 of the statues himself, including this angel holding the sign that says "INRI." INRI is an acronym for Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iodaoerum, which is Latin for Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.

This is our first view of the Vatican City, the smallest country in the world. Ancient Romans only allowed emperors to be buried inside the city. Others were buried in a necropolis located here, including Peter the apostle, following his execution. When Emperor Constantine stopped the persecution of the Christians in 313 AD, he built a church on the site of Peter's grave and gave the church to the pope. It took over 1000 years for popes to choose to live here and to remodel the church and build the palace to match the luxury they were accustomed to.  

Our first stop was the Vatican Museums, one of the great institutions of the art world, containing over 70,000 priceless treasures. We booked a tour with a guide to help us focus our time at the museum and make sense of what we were seeing. This is a photo of our guide, Serena.

Many of the pieces in the collection were acquired by popes who were decorating their living spaces. The early part of the tour was dominated by priceless masterpieces created by ancient Greeks and Romans. A courtyard is decorated by a bronze pinecone and peacocks are from Rome in the first century AD.

This is a statue of the River God of Arno from the 2nd century. For some time it was used as a fountain and the sarcophagus in front of the statue was used as a basin. The river god is classically posed and Serena pointed out its influence on Michelangelo as Michelangelo posed Adam similarly when he painted the Creation of Adam in the Sistine Chapel.

Michelangelo was working on the Sistine Chapel in 1503 when this statue from 40 BC of Laocoön was discovered by a farmer working in his vineyard. Laocoön was a resident of Troy and warned the city not to bring the Trojan horse inside the city gates. Poseiden sent sea serpents to kill Laocoön and his sons. Michelangelo copied the pose of Laocoön when he painted Christ in The Final Judgement.

Becky was excited to see the sarcophagus of Queen Helena. We first learned about her when visiting Jerusalem. Queen Helena was the mother of Emperor Constantine. She converted to Christianity and made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 326 AD. She found many ancient relics, including the true cross, and identified the locations of many events in Christ's life. Helena's body is not in her sarcophagus. She became St, Helena and now pieces of her skeleton are preserved as relics in churches in Italy, France, Germany, Greece, Cyprus, and Romania.

One long hallway of the museum was painted with detailed maps in the 1580s, a reminder of a time when popes ruled like kings.

At the same time Michelangelo was painting the Sistine Chapel, Pope Julius II commissioned Raphael to paint 4 rooms that made up his private apartments.

Our guide, Serena, thinks the Raphael rooms are more impressive than Michelangelo's work in the Sistine Chapel.

Raphael immortalized his rivalry with Michelangelo in his fresco, The School Of Athens. He painted Michelangelo's face to represent Heraclitus, a brilliant Greek philosopher who was known to have a difficult personality. Heraclitus/Michelangelo is the figure sitting at the front of the painting, writing on a cube. We couldn't take photos in the Sistine Chapel, but photos are readily available online. After viewing both, we disagree with Serena. The Raphael rooms are beautiful, but do not compare with the scale of the paintings on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

These robes are identified as belonging to St. Peter and St. John. While their original owners might be impossible to verify, they are very old.

The Vatican Museums' collections include modern works. This painting called The Precursor was painted by Giulio Aristide Sartorio in 1926-1927.

The Vatican Museums own one painting by Leonardo da Vinci, an unfinished work titled St. Jerome in the Wilderness. St. Jerome is most famous for translating the Bible into Latin. His time spent repenting in the wilderness is a popular theme for religious paintings. We learned that da Vinci often abandoned works before finishing them. Despite being one of the most famous painters of all time, he is only credited with about 20 paintings and of those, he only finished about 10. 

Bernini created these angels out of clay and straw to check out the scale of the decorations for an altar Bernini was constructing for St. Peter's Basilica. Bernini decided these angels were too small and went bigger for the angels he made out of bronze for the altar. The models are graceful and elegant, even made out of lowly materials.

After the museum we walked to St. Peter's Basilica, The obelisk in St. Peter's square is the only obelisk in Rome that hasn't been moved since it was brought to Rome. Caligula brought this obelisk from Heliopolis, Egypt to Rome in 37 AD to decorate a chariot racing track that was in this space. The obelisk is over 4000 years old. 

This year, 2025, is a Jubilee year for Catholics. Jubilee years happen every 25 years and Catholics are encouraged to make a pilgrimage to Rome. We arrived in Rome near the end of a special event for youth and saw lots of Catholic youth groups touring the city. While the downside of the Jubilee year is bigger crowds, the upsides are all of the sites in the city are cleaned, restored, and ready for crowds. Also, we got to enter the Basilica through the Holy Doors in the center of the facade which are open to everyone during the Jubilee.

We saw some of the famous Swiss Guard, the elite military force of the Vatican. Besides being Swiss, members of the Swiss guard must be unmarried men, Catholic, and at least 5'8" tall. It is a myth that Michelangelo designed their uniforms. Their current colorful formal uniform only dates to 1910, and is intended to invoke the Renaissance.

Michelangelo definitely carved The Pieta, displayed in a chapel inside the Basilica. Michelangelo was only 19 years old when he completed this statue. He signed the statue by carving his name across Mary's sash, which wasn't typical of the time he worked, but many people were skeptical this could have been made by a 19 year old.

The bronze pavilion known as the Baldacchino covers the area where St. Peter is buried. While there is plenty about relics to be skeptical of, there is some evidence that Peter the Apostle is buried in St. Peter's tomb. The 98 foot high Baldacchino was sculpted by Bernini.

We enjoyed our visit to the Vatican, but much of Catholic tradition is inscrutable to us. We took a long bus ride from the Vatican to the Rome temple, where we attended an endowment session. The Rome temple is beautiful, but also familiar and restful.

The visitors' center has copies of Thorvaldsen's Christus and the Apostles. We had seen photos of the visitors center before we came. In person, we realized that the Christus is much bigger than the statues of the apostles and the difference in height creates the perspective of a bigger space than the statues actually occupy.

Here's a photo after the session.

The temple is surrounded by the only green lawn we saw in Rome. Two robotic lawn mowers were working while we were there.

We took the bus back to the center of Rome. Walking back to our hotel we saw a very old church. We could tell it was old because it was located far below street level. Rome has rebuilt on top of itself many times.

We learned the church was named San Vitale al Quirnale and that it was built in 401 AD. The inside of the church was more ornate than we expected.

We ate dinner at a restaurant around the corner from out hotel.

This was our first experience eating salad in Italy and the waiter brought us a bottle of olive oil and a bottle of balsamic vinegar to go with the salad. In our experience, all of the restaurants served salad this way.

We ordered pasta: penne with tomato sauce for Brandan and tonarelli with cacio e pepe (cheese and pepper) for Becky.