Day 5: Vatican Museum

The journey up the St Peter's cupola is 320 steps.  The exertion of the walk and its purpose to reach the top of the  cupola looking directly over the main altar and Peter's tomb below - metaphorically between heaven and earth- gives the sense of pilgrimage.  The view of Rome was also great!

Today we tackled the Vatican Museum and there were no lines when we arrived at 11.30 am.  Although there is far too much to see in a day we gave a good account of ourselves.  Each collection in the Museum deserves a day to itself.

Our only gripe today was the interminable tour groups who blocked the exhibits at times.

Venus

Highlights if you are looking to select the galleries to go to are:

• Pio- Clementine Collection.  
• Bracco Nuova collection
• Egyptian collection.  I liked the shadow effect on the figure of Annubis - Egyptian God of Death
• Raphael's rooms.  We loved these 4 rooms with examples such as the School of Athens depicting Plato, Aristotle and all the famous philosophers talking together
• The Sistene Chapel.  On e of the things that struck me from the audio guide was the theological mind of Michelangelo.  He was clearly well versed of the bible texts and expressed his theogical interpretation through his work eg in the Last Judgement the figure of Adam in the painting of the fall is the same as the figure of Christ in the last judgement panorama.  This alludes to the text in Romans where Paul talks about the first Adam and the second Adam being the fist man and the new man.

Hercules in bronze

Anubis

Caeser Augustus

The School of Athens

We filled up on pasta at the small restaurant around the corner from our apartment and crawled into bed with sore calves from our walk up and down the cupola.  Late start tomorow!