Parlez-vous Français?: If walls could speak

Saturday was our day to play tourist in Rome. Of course, when we woke up it was absolutely pouring rain - the kind of pouring that if you were to try to dash across a street you would be soaked before you got to the other side. So we had a somewhat slow morning and hoped that the skies would clear before we had to leave in the afternoon for our timed-entry tickets to the Vatican Museums. Our airbnb is only about a 10 minute walk to the museum entrance, and we did in fact get lucky because the rain let up in the late morning and it turned into a very lovely, if overcast, day.
The Vatican Museum was pretty neat. It also lived up to its reputation for being very crowded, and it's set up such that once you enter the galleries, you're shunted along a pre-set route through the rooms with the Sistine Chapel at the end, and then you're popped out into the gift shops. There were a few galleries where you could kind of escape the overall flow of people and look at the artifacts, but the really cool stuff was popular and therefore the crowd kind of moved you along. This was especially the case in the Sistine Chapel. You aren't allowed to take pictures in there, and honestly I think that's to preserve some of the mystique - it's smaller than I thought, and darker, and they pack a horde of humanity into that space which made me actually feel kind of claustrophobic - not exactly the feeling I expected in the presence of Michelangelo's masterpiece (which was indeed impressive). It's a tough balance between showcasing something magnificent and preserving some of the awe.

Not sure what the intended symbolism of this statue was supposed to be, but it looked to me like the gears were ripping apart the world... so that's cheery.

Lots and lots and lots of busts.

More marble!!

The ceilings were almost always impressive.

The muse of Astronomy, Urania.

The floors throughout the museum was probably my favorite - lots of intricate mosaics and inlays.

Floors, i.

Floors, ii

floors, iii


floors, iv In this case everyone else was staring at the ceiling (which was painted by Rafael, to be fair), and the room was so crowded you could hardly see that the floor was tiled with agate.

They actually gated off this mosaic off so people wouldn't step on it and you could see the details. Unfortunately they rarely provided information about them.

Mr. Serpent wasn't having a good day under the feet of some caesar.

The Map Room was my other favorite thing - a very long, narrow hall with handpainted maps of every region of Italy from the 1500s. And I guess intricate ceilings, too.

Sailing ships and sea monsters.

The perspective on the picture is weird to fit in the whole of Italy. The maps were large.

Proof we were there.

After recouperating for a bit back at the apartment, we headed out for a rare tourist-doubleheader (rare at least in the way we usually travel). We walking through Rome to get a sense of the city and try to make our way to the Colloseum, which seemed like a sensible destination to include if you have a short time in Rome. The walk there was about 3 miles across town, and we wandered past a lot of neat things on the way.

Just out of view is the very busy main road we were walking on - these ruins were preserved in a little square in the middle of everything.

A giant monument to Italy's first king.

Nearish to the Colloseum is a huge archeological complex of old Roman palace, temples and forts. I thought this was a really cool display of time - all the old buildings are sunken compared to the modern city, so you can literally see how the world built up and over itself, and as you go deeper into the earth the farther back in history you go.