The Vatican

I suppose that since the Vatican is it's own country, it deserves it's own blog post. We spent the better part of a day at the Vatican, and it offered a bit of tranquility amidst the turmoil of Rome proper.

We arrived early to climb up yet another Duomo (see Florence), and this one proved substantially more crowded at the top. After making a few laps around the top, we headed down to check out the Vatican museums, including the pretty amazing Sistine Chapel. Along with even more paintings of Jesus, the Vatican museums also contain a huge assortment of other relics, including some really cool Egyptian mummies. For me, when it comes to museums, older = more interesting, so I was into the Egyptian stuff.

And for the record, we'd been into a lot of churches thus far on our trip, but after visiting the Vatican, every subsequent church seemed tiny by comparison.