Somehow, during our 5 days in Rome we went to Vatican City 4 times.   While he has been dubbed the cool Pope, we actually only intended to see his world twice.   But on our first real night in Rome we saw the lights from across the river and decided to just walk a little to work off our gelato…and it was stunning at night.   Nearly empty and free of the men hawking selfie sticks to everyone EXCEPT the people actually taking selfies (seriously, shouldn’t those be the folks you target in your marketing since they have proved they actually take selfies?  5 days, not one of the vendors ever approached a person taking a selfie….), St. Peter’s Square (is it still a square when it is distinctly oval shaped?) was beautiful at night.

On Tuesday, we had prebooked tickets for our Vatican tour.  We go there early in hopes of finding a passport stamp, but they apparently no longer do those, so we settled for buying a few postcards to send out instead…but we didn’t send them then either. 

Inside the Vatican museum, you honestly cannot see everything.   The rooms are crowded with art, statues, fountains, and behind every display are old tapestries clinging to the walls.   Then your eyes travel up the tapestries and you realize every ceiling is painted in an ornate scene.  

By the time you have be pushed and shoved along and up and down stairs to get inside the Sistine Chapel, it almost just runs together with every other room in the building!   But then you find a spot to sit along the wall and soak in your surroundings with the AC and the silence (okay, silence is a stretch….every 3 minutes a guard gets on the microphone and booms SILENCE PLEASE in 6 languages…but it is definitely a little more reverent without the large tour groups talking to their crowd from under their colored umbrella, so it was a retreat) you start to observe just how huge this ceiling is and consider that Michelangelo laid on his back for hours at a time to not just create the scene everyone knows which is in the very center, but 20 other scenes surrounding it upon the ceiling and moving 10 feet down the walls on each side.  It’s magical the effort that went into these buildings and a little sad how lost this level of art and appreciation of it is today.  

Outside the museum, it was time to find the adorably dressed Swiss Guards.   Why, you might wonder?  First, to take a picture, because I find the hilarious even if my husband reminds me they are trained to kill and probably hide large weapons inside those circus tent knickers…but in reality because they held the tickets to see the Pope!   We had learned before we left the States that the Pope does a general audience in the courtyard of St. Peter’s Square every Wednesday morning he is in Rome and since this was the last one before his first ever trip to America, we felt it was our duty to go and bid him “Bon Voyage”!  (ed. note: brownie points for me were obtained by speaking to the guard. They hand out the reserved-via-fax general admission tickets at 3pm. I talked to him at 2:15 and dude had two magic tickets just for me. Saved 45 minutes.)

The audience Wednesday morning was something to experience…and sadly not for the reverent words of Pope Francis as it was all in Italian or Latin and the translations read in at least 7 languages was just the Cliff Notes version.   No, the people watching was divine.   Imagine showing up somewhere around the same time as 7,000 other people…in a country that has a very loose relationship with lines.    We were pushed and we pushed to make our way around the barricades and through the metal detectors before we could get inside the courtyard.   Unfortunately, our metal detector line was held up for a while by 2 brides…in full bridal gear.   I’m talking beaded, ballgown dresses with hoop skirts that set off the metal detector, veils, tiaras, sparkly shoes.   But once they made it through the machine with an all clear, they didn’t allow anything to slow them down. 

It was the Catholic running of the bulls.   Nuns in full habits.   Packs of Priests wearing collars and baseball caps.  A couple of Friar Tuck-esque gentlemen, complete with brown robes.  Elderly Midwesterners on a Church Pilgrimage with matching t-shirts.   Everyone sprinted the fastest they were able to into the front of the seats and press their bodies up against the walls.  And as the front area filled, we watched from our prime center aisle seat 20 rows back from the stage and saw the running continue for an hour as people young and old fought for space and packed the Square that was empty and silent just a few days prior.

When the Pope finally appeared, the crowd was deafening.   He rolled out in is Pope-mobile (no bubble for this pope – his Pope-mobile is all open-air) waving and kissing babies.   No, literally kissing babies.   Parents thrust their infants through the crowds and over the fence so that the Pope had no choice but to hold the child, place a kiss upon it’s head, and then hand it back to his security guard…then the guard would walk backwards to find out who to hand this confused child back to as the Pope-mobile had kept rolling on away from the parents.  This continued for 20 minutes as he wound his way up and down each path in the square before he was finally able to ascend the stairs to the stage.  

The audience was…long.   And the strange group of teens next to us kept breaking out in claps and chants.    I’m all for cheering and will shout and holler all day at a basketball game…but something about starting up a boisterous chant of “Papa Francesca!” over and over while said Papa Francesca is trying to offer his wisdom on the purpose of family in the Catholic Church seemed out of place.  My husband seemed to be done at this point.   The morning started early to secure our good seats and the Homily is a great time to take a nap, so he might have shut his eyes for a minute or 10… (ed. note: 100% true. I was sleepy.)

When it was over, we took our leave and fled Vatican City for the day.   With 20,000 people there (7,000 seats, plus standing room filling the entire area) plus more coming to do all the tours, we where thankful we had already seen all we wanted to see there!  And about 2 hours later, we realized in our haste we forgot to write our postcards about our time chilling with the Pope and would have to go back there once more before we left Rome if we wanted to actually mail the blasted things!   Maybe in the next country of Europe we’ll get better at this planning thing…