Blog 5.2: Rome

We left Thursday afternoon for our long weekend in Rome! We took a train to cologne where we then met our connection to the Frankfurt airport. Our flight got in to fiumicino airport which is outside of Rome at around 1130 and we then proceeded to find transportation for an hour until we decided to just use the taxi. When I finally got checked in and into my room, it was already about 1:45 am on Friday morning. We woke up on Friday at 8am to head out on our days' excursion to see as many basilicas as possible! One of sams friends was our tour guide and planned a great day for us! We saw St. Peter's basilica in the Vatican, St. John the laterns basilica, St. Paul's outside the wall and one other basilica. Of all the basilicas we saw, St. Peter's in the Vatican was by far the most massive and St. Paul's outside the wall was the most beautiful. After our long day, our tour guide had made us reservations at a very nice Italian restaurant. There was a possibility for a 4 course meal but I could only make it through 3 of the courses!

We were on our own for Saturday while a large chunk of our group went to Florence for the day. We started off by doing the cupola at the Vatican and climbing over 500 stairs to get an amazing and breathtaking view over all of Rome! After coming down, we went to the Vatican museum where we spent the next 4 hours of our lives looking at some of the greatest art from the roman time period. We went through over 18 different exhibits and ended up in Michael Angelo's greatest artwork, the Sistine chapel. It's amazing to think after seeing how massive the chapel is that one man labored for a few decades trying to perfect the artwork. Not only would this be tiring of showing up to the same place for decades each day, but he also painted the ceiling showing the history of man starting from exile from the garden of Eden. This must have been brutal painting this because of the awkward body positioning he must have been in.

On Sunday, the rest of our group joined back up while rock, who had already done the colosseum, pantheon and trevi fountain, decided to go to Naples for the day. We started off our day by going to the colosseum and basking in the history of gladiator wars and ancient entertainment. We then went and looked around at the Roman forum, which was where most of the trading and such took place in roman times. We then finished off the day with the trevi fountain and pantheon. We went back to our hostel and got dressed up and went and ate dinner and then decided to go back to the trevi fountain to take some great pictures at night and also throw some coins in the fountain for good luck.

Rome was an amazing architectural accomplishment of its time with a bunch of the world’s history being defined by the rise and fall of the Roman Empire. However, Rome was a rather dirty city with just way too many tourists everywhere you go. This leads to a large group of people called gypsies trying to steal your wallets and phones at every popular location and especially on the subways. This is why I think it’s a good idea to see Rome, but once every thirty years is probably good enough for me!