25/March/2024
Today we went to The Vatican museum, The Sistine Chapel, St Peter’s Basilica, and The Dome of St Peter’s Basilica. We first went to the Vatican museum, the first thing that we saw was a really cool looking staircase, the staircase was a massive spiral staircase that led to the exit. We would have to obviously have to wait to walk down it. We then saw some old egyptian pots and statues, we even saw a super creepy mummy (it was real), the mummy’s skin was black and all shrivelled up, it looked quite disgusting.
We then saw ancient roman statues and vases, some of the vases had pictures of athletes. We also saw some candle holders and spears. We then went to a very long hallway filled with old roman statues, Abi kept on pointing out all the grape leaves on the you-know-what's. After that we went upstairs to look at lots of old roman things that would be used at home, like cooking tools, more vases for carrying water home from the well, and even a shield! (I have no idea why a shield would be in a tools for home display section) We then saw lots of old roman bracelets and some even older looking necklaces, after staring at gold for a while, we walked along the hallway to get to The Sistine Chapel.
Even though you weren't allowed to take photos inside it, mum told me to just because she wanted to have some photos. So I had to sneakily take selfies and photos of the roof and walls. After we had taken (enough) photos, we left the Sistine Chapel (but before we left completely, we went to the statue garden. The statue garden has lots of different types of statues, one of the most popular statues was a statue of a man and two children being killed by two snakes, I have no idea why people crowded around it, it was horrible) to go to the St Peter’s Basilica.
When we arrived at the Obelisco De Plazza Sien Pietro/ St Peter’s Basilica, the sheer size of it blew me out of my socks! It had a whopping total of 284 columns! Mum said that there was a special circle in the Basilica somewhere, and if you stood on it, you couldn’t see the three rows of columns, only 1 of each row. We walked around the Basilica for a while before joining in the super long queue. Let's skip all the boring pain and misery of the line, and skip to the interesting part. When we finally got to the front of the queue, we had to queue up again if we wanted to climb up 551 steps, and deal with the bonus; a huge amount of aching pain in your calves and thighs (for mum and dad). Meanwhile, I really like the sound of 551 steps and were really looking forward to running up every single one of them. The reward for it was definitely worth it though.
The reward was a great view of the inside of the Basilica, you got to have a 100° view of the (horrible construction work) beautiful walls in the middle of the Basilica. To my surprise, we got to climb up even more stairs to the very top! The walls curved a bit because we were walking inside the walls of the dome! I was kind of annoyed at the curved walls when I bonked my head on the ceiling. (Stupid curved ceiling!) The view at the top of the dome was one of the best I have ever seen in my life! It was a 360° view of the surrounding area! (I was mostly looking at the Vaticani gardens*, because they looked much better from a bird's eye view) We sadly had to leave the great view from the top of the dome, to go inside the Basilica so we could look at the wonders inside.
On the ceiling of the Basilica were so many golden flowers that it looked like a field of golden giant sunflowers had grown on the ceiling! At the back of the church was a giant sun-like-thing that had a dove in the middle. (I didn’t know what it was, but it looked important) The Basilica is a giant triple cross, so we explored all 7 edges. We went into the pope’s burial chamber, it had a lot of tombs with the face of the pope that was buried inside. The last thing that we saw was a big statue of Jesus on his cross.
THIS DAY WAS A VERY INTERESTING DAY, I LEARNT A LOT.
*(tap on the URL below to see the Gardens of Vatican City on Google maps)
Commenti