It's good to be the Pope

Today's trip was a tour of the Vatican.  What Perillo does is not put you in a tour group, but buy you tickets to things through a company called City Wonders.  For some tours I ended up with a bunch of people I recognized from earlier tours, but on others although we were scheduled for the same tour we would be grouped separately.  But these tickets are a bonus in that they are skip-the-line, because some of the lines I have seen are scary long.  Today at the Vatican we got in through the tour group entrance, with no wait except for crowds from other tours.  I have some pictures, but your best bet is to buy a book or look things up online to get better pictures with explanations.

Meeting point, looking up toward the museum.  Of course I got off the subway and carefully followed the directions wrong and started off the opposite way before I finally figured it out.

This old hippie in the sandals was a hoot.  When the tour guide said to put his tour group sticker in a prominent place, he stuck it in the middle of his forehead and left it there.  You rock, old stoner.

First, the Vatican museum, which contains something like 5000 pieces of sculpture that have been dug up in various Roman possessions.  Because I know you people will expect it, I was on penis lookout.  If a statue had lost his due to age and time, he and his stone scrotum could stay as they are.  But any sign of a willie, even on a putto or child, had been primly covered with a cemented-on fig leaf like some highly decorative sports cup.  Except this child.  What is different?  Is it his African features?  Were he and his equipment considered non-human and therefore not threatening?

And just for balance, here is a goddess of fertility, and some other interesting stuff:

Does this jar make my butt look big?

I love mosaics, and found the ornate ceilings fascinating.  Samples thereof:

These are painted, not sculpted.

I had to wonder, with something this ornate, how many jokes the artisans had sneaked in, assuming nobody would ever see them.

My phone camera finds things like this too confusing to focus.

Then through various papal apartments with beautiful paintings, and finally the Sistine Chapel.  I'm glad I get to see it after the cleaning - the colors are simply beautiful, although I'm pretty sure Michelangelo did not have a lot of up close and personal experience with live female bodies.  I especially love the patches of uncleaned ceiling for contrast - I can feel the pride of the cleaners, who didn't make the paintings and can't sign their work, but are proudly saying "look what I did". 

Onward to the basilica and massive sculptures therein, by which point we had been going for 3 hours and my feet were really hurting.  And there is no air conditioning in most of Rome.  The museum was hot, the rooms were hot, the church was hot, the subway was hot, the sun was hot, but the day started off two-sweaters cold when I left the hotel.  And it's dry.  One tour guide said there had been only 2 days of rain since May 20th.

A few more random things I liked in the Vatican:

Map of Sicily, home of my peeps

Stone skeleton under a stone blanket.

It's good to be the Pope, to paraphrase Mel Brooks.

As I left, I ran into some of the other people from the Perillo trip who I had spent time with on the bus trips.  As expected, we were sorted into different tour groups, but we had tickets to all the same things and are heading out of Italy tomorrow.

What next?  Between the Vatican (which is an independent country, and you can walk around its walls in 45 minutes - try that with any other country!) and my Metro stop was a restaurant that got good reviews for having a gluten-free menu, so I made my way toward it without too much stopping to consult the ever more raggedy map, and found it.  I had a wonderful lunch - let's hope I get to keep it.  Potato gnocchi with buffalo mozzarella chunks and tomato sauce, followed by saltimbocca alla Romana, which came with mashed potatoes and a wonderful sauce.  They assured me all of it was gluten-free, but I came back to the hotel afterwards just in case.  Two hours later, so far so good.  I would have loved gelato but was full - maybe later.  Now I only have one more meal to obtain.  I have a restaurant that comes up when I google Rome gluten-free, but its website has disappeared and I'm not sure it still exists.  I don't want to walk all the way there just to be disappointed.

Other random things:

Really?  Your store is named D-Bags?

For graffiti fans.

Other than that, I'm done here.  Just some souvenir shopping when it gets cooler, dinner, and pack up.  Then on to Barcelona with a wary eye on the news.