I can't believe the day has come that I finally finish posting all of my pictures from our Italian Vacation back in December. It took much more work than expected getting my new blog up, editing, and posting all of our Italy pictures, but the work was well worth it, as I will always be reminded of the experiences we had during such an exciting time in our lives.
For the final part of our Journey we ended up in Rome visiting the colosseum, the Sistine Chapel, and St. Peter's Basilica, all of which we saw in one very full, very exhausting, but memorable last day. For those of you wanting to travel to Rome as well, I would recommend splitting them up and doing the Colosseum and ancient ruins in one day, and the Sistine Chapel and St. Peter's Basilica in a second...but they can definitely be done in two days comfortably. We tried squishing a lot into a week, and it ended up working out because we came during the off season, and we didn't have to fight off as many crowds.
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Our first stop was the Colosseum. We made sure to get there early in the morning to allow for St. Peter's Basilica and the Sistine Chapel later in the afternoon. To be honest, I never did very well in my history classes growing up, but if we could have come here to see all of this, I would have payed much more attention! I knew violence happened in the Colloseum, but I wasn't aware of the extent of it. It was so chilling and real being surrounded by the original stone walls, some of the original staircases, and the archways people would sit in to watch the atrocities that played out. We got the audio guide to try and get some more of the history of each section, which I highly recommend! It was nice because you can choose to go at your own pace, and skip around to hear what you want to...plus we were pretty short on time.
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| One of the original ancient archways |
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| Some of the original ancient writing in stone, I'm not quite sure what it says, but it was neat to look at! |
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| It was so eerie seeing all the corridors that they used to keep the animals used to fight criminals and such for entertainment. Apparently they somehow lifted them up from underneath. |
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| The Arch of Constantine |
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Ancient Ruins: The Roman Financial District - Many of the old original buildings from the center of commerce during the ancient
Roman Empire have been preserved. |
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| St. Peter's Basilica - The line was hours long, so we paid for a private tour, we thought it was worth it because we only had a day to see everything. |
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| The Famous Stefaneschi Tryptich by Giotto di Bondone- I took pictures of many other famous paintings, but already had so many pictures to choose from, I just included the one on my blog :). After all my art history classes in college, they were really neat to see. |
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| St. Peter's Basilica |
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The Basilica was just lined with statues like these, I can't quite tell you which one this is, but I wanted to capture a few at least to get an idea of how
neat they were! |
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| I was shocked at the size of the Basilica, we would have surely been lost without the tour guide, and all the ceilings were as ornate as this one! |
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| The Holy Door of the Papal Basilica of St. Peter - I remember studying this door in Art History and remember the tremendous amount of work and resources it took |
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| The front of the main chapel - St. Peter's Basilica |
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| The ornate details inside were just astounding! |
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