So. After leaving St Peter’s we walked around to the Vatican Museum and queued for another 4o minutes to get into the museum! This museum is just incredibly unbelievable.
We saw so many marble statues:
And so many frescos, art, mosaics, tapestries, treasures etc..
Here’s just a very small sample (truly!!!) of what we saw:
This brown/red marble sarcophagus was for the mother of Constantine:
I had to remember to look down, as well as up:
View over Rome from the Vatican:
Room after room, and hall after hall filled with antiquities, frescos, artwork…
Full of marble and gold.
There were many huge tapestries:
And the ceiling in this hallway was just absurd; it was totally overwhelming with so many paintings:
Along the walls were huge maps:
Again, I had to remember to look down as well as up:
Wow, this staircase is so disappointing, there is NO painting on the walls. 😉
Finally we entered the Cistene Chapel and I was so used to clicking my camera that I took this shot which was quickly spotted by the Polizei on the right and I was told there was NO photography allowed in the chapel. Oops. 🙂 So here is my one and only shot of Michelangelo’s work on the ceiling, and Rafaelle’s work on the walls:
After the chapel the rooms just went on and on and on…
Even the windows were surrounded by artwork!
In rooms towards the end (ie after three hours of walking through!) there was room after room of cupboards on either side of a wide hallway. There were no two panels that were alike, each panel was unique:
Even the sides of the cupboards were decorated:
The Vatican averages 10,000 visitors a day. Even the exit was an experience:
This is a long post, but bear in mind that this really is just a small, tiny, sample of what we saw in the museum, and only a few of the photos I took too. Ha! This face sums up my reaction upon seeing everything in the museum:
That is SO overwhelming, and that’s just your small amount of photos! I can’t even imagine seeing it all in person… SO MUCH TO SEE!!!!
YES, totally overwhelming. I think you could be there for days and still not take in everything. We were there for over 3 hours and constantly walking through! It really is too much!!!