Day 8 - The Vatican: St. Peter's Basilica

Remember when I said there wasn't a word to describe how big the cathedral in Florence was? St. Peter's is bigger. It is also, historically, far more historically important: it's the church that started the Reformation. In order to pay for its construction, the Pope allowed for the sale of indulgences, which led to one little German monk named Martin Luther posting 95 Theses on the church door of Wittenberg, and the rest is history.

Pictures (which, by the way, don't even come close to capturing how beautiful the chapel is):

Views from the top of the cupola - breathtaking

Helena, Constantine's mother

For dinner that night, we went to a nice restaurant, and I decided to get a little adventurous. The pasta dish I ordered translated into "swallows' nests with pecorino and warm honey." I ordered them, and they turned out to be little cup-shaped pasta filled with cheese and honey. They were so good, I plan to have them again if I'm ever back in Italy!

Day 8 - The Vatican: the Museum

Two parts to this, because we went to two amazing chapels in Vatican.

The first one was a large complex that included a mind-blowing museum, a couple of smaller chapels, and the Sistine Chapel. It is against the rules to take pictures of the Sistine, but in the lesser chapels and the museums, it was a picture free-for-all. I overheard a tour guide say that if you dedicated just one minute to looking at every artifact in the museum, you would be there for twelve years. It included an Egyptian section, an Etruscan section, a hall dedicated to Greek and Roman statues, a tapestry hall, and, my favorite, the Hall of Maps. The artifacts were well-preserved, and you could get a really good look at some of them, especially the Egyptian artifacts.

Pictures:

This was my favorite item - it's an envelope!