I have to say that this is the stop that I was looking forward to the most for this vacation, (not to spoil too much), I was not disappointed! Our original choice for the excursion for this day was called “Top 10 Sights of Rome”. This was primarily a bus tour throughout the city with a few short photo stops at key places. With such a short amount of time in such a large city with a ton of history, we wanted to try and hit as many places as we could. However, the night before, I was looking through the list of excursions again and was thinking about how much I really wanted to go inside the Vatican and the Sistine Chapel. Our original selection did not include this, just a drive-by of Vatican City. So with a little (ok a lot) of persuasion, I was able to get my parents to make a last minute change to the slightly more expensive excursion that included all of this. It was way more than worth it.
The port of call that we entered was Civitavecchia, a small town about a 1.5 hours outside of Rome. We hopped aboard our bus for the journey into Rome. Once again, the scenery on the way there was beautiful, rolling hills, mountains, small towns; and our tour guide gave us a synopsis of what we were going to experience throughout the day.
Our first stop was Vatican City. The traffic once we were getting close was a little crazy, and we could see the huge line to get into the Vatican starting to build. Thankfully, we were able to bypass all of that and went right in. We had a little bit of time to explore the museum a little bit before starting the tour.
The first part of the tour through the Vatican was an exclusive walkthrough of the Vatican Gardens. According to our guide, this is something that very few people are able to experience. This is a large garden area behind the Vatican where the Pope frequently walks and relaxes. Unfortunately, we did not see him out there while we were there. The gardens were beautiful and very picturesque. Again, our guide did not disappoint and provided us with a wealth of knowledge and history about the gardens and the entire area.
We walked back through into the Vatican, through many, many crowded hallways and staircases, and into the Sistine Chapel. Wow. There are no words to describe how stunning this is in person. Thinking about all the detail and how long this had to take to paint, I’m so glad they are doing everything they can to preserve the beauty of this. There is zero photography allowed in here and the security guards are very good about catching people. One brief moment of a visible phone or camera and they are on you about putting it away. There is even a large board outside the building of the paintings for people to take pictures of and explaining that no photos are allowed once inside. It took us a while to walk through all those long hallways, however there were plenty of paintings and tapestries and other works of art for us to look at along the way, which helped.
The next stop on our walking tour of Vatican City led us outside and into St. Peter’s Basilica. We had some free time on our own in here to explore and take pictures. I was not expecting this basilica to be as big as it is. Once again, it is visually beautiful inside, pictures do not do it justice. I am so glad we made the decision to add going into these buildings to our tour, it was well worth it.
We then continued walking out into the main courtyard area of Vatican City to meet up with our tour guide. We then had about 2 hours or so on our own to get lunch and explore the area before continuing on with the tour. We had lunch at one of the small restaurants in the square, the portion sizes were huge and it was delicious. I don’t remember if the restaurant was in Rome or Vatican City, it was very hard to discern where the line was which was also kind of interesting to me.
My mom decided to do some shopping, rest, and do some people watching while my dad and I went and did some more exploring into Rome. Our goal was to get to Trevi Fountain, but we didn’t have quite enough time for that. We did however make it to the Pantheon and walked around that a little bit which was very cool to see. We passed a few other interesting landmarks on the way there and back. We made it back to our meeting spot just in time and we made our way back to the bus to continue our tour.
Our bus took us through Rome and past many key sites such as St. Angelo Castle, Victor Emmanuel II Monument, Piazza Venezia, among many many others. We then made our way to the final stop of the tour, the Colosseum. We had about an hour to explore and walk around here. I actually did not realize that this was part of the tour and I was very pleasantly surprised. We likely would have had enough time to actually go inside the Colosseum, however we decided to just walk around the perimeter. To give an idea about how big it is, walking around the outside at a good pace while taking a few pictures took about 30 minutes. I would like to go back and see inside, but I feel like we got a good snippet of the history by walking outside of it. The architecture throughout Rome, and really all that we saw of Europe, was just incredible. Not something we get to experience anywhere in the States.
With that, our day in Rome was over and we were on our way back to the ship. The next day would be our 4th and final stop in Italy, with Florence and Pisa.
It's a Magical Life 