I Musei Vaticani

After a night of no sleep and a shuttle ride from the airport, we arrived at the Crown Plaza St. Peter. It was only 10a, so there were no rooms available. We freshened up in the lobby rest rooms--earning sympathetic glances from a group of ladies who had been through the same ritual only the day before.

We checked our luggage and set out for St. Peter/the Vatican. The hotel shuttle dropped us nearby, but we needed some fortification before all the Catholicism to come, so we stopped for our first Italian meal--pork cutlets, spinach and potatoes--at a local osteria.

Much restored, we headed for St. Peter's Square in the mild drizzle of rain that greeted us in Rome. The square was vast, but a little drab under the gray sky and without the fanfare of a high holiday crowd. We found our way through the square to the entrance of the Vatican Museums, passing by numerous unfortunates with mangled or missing limbs displayed lying on the sidewalk and begging us to place some coins in their weathered styrofoam cups.

The series of Vatican museums is impressive--the sheer volume of works of art (almost entirely religious in subject--as was the case throughout much of history) is astonishing. The Pinoteca was organized chronologically, and it was interesting to watch the humanist influence enter in the mid-14th century. The opulence of the rooms is breathtaking--every surface, including floors and ceilings is decorated with gilt or marble seemingly--but it's bewildering after awhile, and in our jet-lagged stupor, it began to blend together.

That is, until we got to the amazing Galleria della Carte Geografiche--a long hall with a gilt ceiling that immediately catches your eye only to lose it to the remarkable paintings of places, mostly Italian cities--old world maps rendered in oils of Liguria, Mantua, etc. Maybe it was the relief in the change of subject, but I thought these maps were the most miraculous things I saw.

The Sistine Chapel still to come...