After we settled into our Airbnb, Anara and I headed out for our 3:00 tour of the Vatican Museum. Before we left on our trip, I’d bought us some Rome City Passes and unfortunately, they ended up being pretty confusing to use. In the end, we missed seeing at least one place I’d wanted, but that’s how it goes sometimes. Luckily, The Vatican Museums wasn’t one of these. But more on this later…

The hour-long or so (or so because we were doofuses with no map) walk towards Vatican City was absolutely lovely. Here’s the (very!) approximate route we ended up taking. We could have done it in less, but wouldn’t have strolled along the Tiber in front of Castel Sant’Angelo had we done so.

I have to say, at least in my own humble opinion, the bridges in Rome, as famous as the Ponte Vecchio in Florence is, are far prettier that span the Tiber. We crossed several of them, (because we were lost most of the time) and each time I was amazed at the art atop each one.

I love that about Europe in general- art is embedded in so much, and here things are just so… utilitarian.

Then again…

We marveled at each scene that unfolded as we wound our way towards Vatican City.

The weather was partly cloudy and a perfect temperature for trekking around the city; Autumn is a perfect season to head to Italy, should that be on your bucket list. Speaking of which… (some of you have already answered this on Facebook, but hey, drop a line here!) what places to travel to are on yours?

Eventually, we made the semi-circular trip around to the north side of Vatican City where Museum Tours begin. Even the outside has some amazingly famous and OLD works!

It wasn’t long before I realized the QR code/ticket I was sent wasn’t going to work.

How could it with no internet? No, still haven’t fixed that connectivity problem, but soon. Promise, soon.

But for now…. Thank Goodness I had printed out a hard copy of our payment and ticket confirmation and handed that to the lady at the window. A tip that’s ESPECIALLY important for international travel that I’m learning the hard way: PRINT YOUR CONFIRMATIONS OUT!! I re-learned not long ago from a friend the beauty of a Trip Binder.


**** Warning Nostalgia Trigger Ahead****

Umm, remember when, if you’ve been following my own TRs for long enough, that some of us used to make fancy, decorated binders for Disney? Before apps and all that? I did. With cute stickers too. They had all the printed ADRs, schedules, lists of stuff we wanted to see and do, resort reservations, MNSSHP hard tickets, you name it, the binder had it. There were even fancy templates right here on the DIS for that! But, I digress. Today, we were thankful that I had printed out our tickets (and actually even remembered to put them in my bag. My senility is settling in far faster than I’d like).

With a quick scan of the paper tickets we were assigned a group and told that our tour would start in about 15 minutes. Just in time!!!

You know what’s hilarious about this entire affair so far? I had ZERO idea we were even ON a tour or had paid for one! Seriously. I thought we’d simply bought entrance to the museum and we were going to wander through the zillions of rooms all by our lonesome. Which is even more hilarious. Because we were faaaaaaaaaar from lonesome. It was so packed we could literally hardly move through the exhibits, and even keeping sight of our guide was a joke. I had NO idea what to expect, so really couldn’t be that disappointed; it was what it was.

With just enough time to hit the loo, we met up with our group and were given our earpieces. We found out right away that we got a very good and knowledgeable guide and were glad in the end to have “signed up for a tour”. I’ll just say up front that, if you’ve never been to the Vatican Museum, you could spend days… weeks… in there and not scratch the surface. There are dozens of rooms chockful of every artform you can imagine from well before the Renaissance up to Modern Art. It was good that we were taken to the best highlights, including the Sistine Chapel, and the 2 or 3 hours (def lost track of time!) we were there was honestly enough . It was overwhelming at times, both physically and spiritually(?). We both felt that the art and works were not something we wanted to rush through nonchalantly.

With a brief introduction, in the “Welcome Area” and short tutorial about the use of color and some of the symbolisms we’d see, using a giant digital painting behind her and an interactive screen presentation, we began our immersion into the vast Vatican collections. Only 15 minutes into our tour, we both realized it was definitely already worth the price!!

I’m not going to give a ton of commentary for each of my load of photos; I took too many and honestly don’t even remember half of what it was all about now. But I did have some favorites and will share a few tidbits along the way. Enjoy what I did get in two posts. I have far too many photos for one.

I’ll start with mosaics, because we all know how much they float my boat:

I mean remember the mosaics from Delos and even Pompeii?? Yeah, these blew those out of my mosaic boat-floating waters!

Many, but not all, of those are from The Round Room:

https://vaticantips.com/round-room-at-the-vatican/

And sometimes it pays to look up too!

I’ll finish up in the next post- maybe even 2- with more art: Marble statues, paintings up the wazoo, and even tapestries. Just so much mind-blowing art, My Friends!