A visit to Rome is never complete without seeing the Vatican City. Beside its religious importance for the Catholic world, it’s a museum in itself filled with the best of many artists.

Vatican City (Vaticano) is basically a land of about 1km by 1km area located in the middle of Rome. Apparently it is its own country and has its own borders, Sounds funny! But I guess it’s safer if no country claims to own it. You can simply walk into the city from Rome. You will need to buy tickets to visit its museums or other attractions there, or even pay extra to use the elevator! Below is a map of Vatican, taken from the Roma map I received from our hotel, Hotel Des Artistes.

You see in the drawing that there is a large courtyard open to the city of Rome, surrounded with a wall of columns with statues on the top, which is called “Saint Peter’s Square”. The great wall of columns is decorated with many statues of saints on top of the wall. There’s a large Egyptian obelisk in the middle of the square and some beautiful fountains, like the one below:

In this picture you see on the far top of the building (Saint Peter’s Basilica) a clock and its bell, a similar one is at the opposite side of the building. Every half an hour the bells sing the soothing ding-dong song!

There are many rows of chairs in the middle of the courtyard for occasions in which people gather. The building at the end of the Saint Peter’s Square is Basilica di San Pietro, or Saint Peter’s Basilica. It’s the greatest building in Vatican City where exists the tomb of Saint Peter, one of the closest apostles to Jesus Christ. The string of saints statues on the surrounding walls starts with Jesus in the middle, right on top of the main entrance to the basilica, seen in the picture below (click to enlarge).

The history of the Vatican city goes straight back to the times of Jesus. Through time it grew larger, sadly by taking material from nearby historical monuments, especially Colosseum. Many artists worked on the building, such as Michael Angelo whose beautiful painting decorates the ceiling of Sistine Chapel, as well as his magnificent statue, Pieta:

Before you enter the building, you enter the Saint Peter’s Square and there you will have to stand in a very long and wide line, common to Italian museums that will usually take over two hours even in the month of September. The weather was scorching hot and you can imagine what a wait it was! Note that you can’t wear shorts and have to have proper attire when entering a church, just in case you didn’t know that already! This makes it even harder to stay in the hot weather of Rome.

When you are slowly getting close to the entrance you will see beautiful artworks on the ceilings and walls, below is the ceiling of the entrance to the Basilica:

Also you will see statues of past popes here or there:

The line we were standing in led us straight up to the top of the Basilica, right on the rooftop. The rooftop is the first stop before going even higher to the top of the dome. I truly loved the rooftop of the Basilica. It was a warm and quite place, so relaxing and calm.

It was away from crowd, everyone was quite and enjoying the moment. There you were closer to the dome, and you could actually climb all the way up, which we did.

You can’t really see it in this picture, but there are people on the top where the dome ends. The dome is some 150 feet or 46 meters higher than the ground level. It wasn’t easy climbing up the stairs to the top of the dome. You can imagine when the dome curves in, the narrow staircase walls curve too, making you fall on the opposite wall.

When you reach to the middle of the climb, right before the dome top, there’s a stop inside the dome where you have a close view of the beautiful artworks decorated the internal ceiling of the dome.

Then you start climbing further to the top. There you have a fantastic view of the Saint Peter’s Square and the city of Rome.

After this wonderful sight seeing, you go all the way down, even lower into the Tomb of Popes under the Basilica. In the tomb there are coffins of popes and saints all the way back to Saint Peter himself. Every coffin is an artwork, covered with carvings made of marble or other stones in many different colors. Unfortunately taking picture was not allowed there.

Coming back up into the Basilica, you will see the grand architecture of the building, as well as Saint Peter’s memorial , the high altar, on top of his tomb right under the dome:

The Basilica is filled with magnificent statues and master pieces of art, sculptures of popes, saints, angles, demons and many other people and beings.

After a full day of walking up and down the cathedral and viewing a world of art and beauty, we finally returned back to the Saint Peter’ Square and rested there in the warm weather of Rome. Finally I was able to sit by Sara and appear in one of the pictures! If you like to see more of Vatican City, also visit my Photo Blog Here.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 6th, 2008 at 8:37 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.