David and Pop-Pop's Europe Trip
Rome, Italy (The Vatican)

At the Vatican courtyard, you do not need chairs. The pillars work fine.

Here is a picture of the courtyard in front of Saint Peter's Cathedral.

Here is the same courtyard seen from the cathedral's dome. Notice the statues of the twelve original apostles that line the front of the cathedral's roof.

The dome itself is terribly impressive from the inside. Notice, above the circle of words, the "tiny" railing of the walkway.

The cathedral's main altar is clevery lit with colored and clear windows.

I tried to take a picture of Michaelangelo's La Pieta, but since the statue is behind glass my picture came out beset by both blur and glare.

For a better picture of the Pieta, taken by someone else, please click here.

Diary--July 7th, 1994

I was hoping there would be a shady place at the Piazza Navona, so I didn't write at the Pantheon. The Piazza Navona had Pop-Pop's favorite ice cream store, but no shade. So now we are sitting with the pigeons under the columns in front of St. Peter's after having seen the Vatican museum which includes the Sistine Chapel and a Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit.

Before today I had no idea what the Pantheon really was. I'm still not sure. It seemed to be a combination of resting place, tomb, and sundail.

Piazza Navona was being rigged up to film a movie. One of the Bernini fountains there had statues (cherubs, horses, and fish) which I thought had amusing faces, but I am not sure if they were supposed to be.

The Vatican museum has hallways with the busiest walls and ceilings I can imagine. All the artwork is impressive, most very much so. Unlike at the Louvre, where the paintings I liked best were not generally the most famous, the Sistine Chapel is clearly the climax of the Vatican museum.

While there, some random important person with his entourage walked in. I guess that is how Europe and Disneyland differ; both have many tourists, in Disneyland you always bump into someone you know, but in Europe you bump into people you are supposed to know but don't.

Diary--July 8th, 1994

I'm on the bus again, just north of Ferarra. After seeing St. Peter's I went to the pool at the hotel and wrote postcards until dinner.

St. Peter's is so ornate that when I first entered I could not see it in three dimensions. I won't even try to summarize what there is to see. The "paintings" are mosaics, which do not dim with age, and in some sculptures it is easy to mistake marble for cloth. I climbed to the top of the dome for a view of Rome, and after Florence was diappointed. The cathedral dome's stairs in Florence were tightly squeezed into the walls; climbing a spiral staircase I was hard pressed to see the stairs ascend enough within each rotation, but somehow they did; at the end the stairs go straight up the longitude of the dome, steep enough so that coming down I had to face the staircase. In Rome, St. Peter's dome's stairs have mostly been modernized, hiding any learning about the architecture and at one point even become die cast metal stairs (this seemed a bit out of place coming up, but on the way down I forgave these metal stairs because their banisters were good to slide down).

From atop St. Peter's I had a good view of the Vatican, but none of the famous places of Rome were visibile because of buildings or hills. The city looked much like any city might that was similarly fond of ochre. Sigh.

I wonder how much vistiting cathedrals is a religious experience for Pop-Pop? For me, the cathedral holds a desire to know God better that is almost tangible even without a religious service going on.