Roma

Saturday was a busy, exhausting, but very good day.  It was our day in Rome and in the few hours we spent in the Eternal City, we packed a lot of visiting in.

We had booked ourselves on an excursion from the ship.  Cunard offers a variety of excursions from each port ranging from those that are very scheduled and guided all the time to basically shuttle buses on which you are on your own once you reach your destination.  Because Civitavecchia, the port for Rome, is about 55 miles away, most people on the ship going into Rome booked one of these excursions.  The one we booked was in the middle range; a tour in the morning until about 1 p.m. and then about three hours on our own. 

Once we disembarked the ship and made our way by coach into Rome, we met up with our tour guide, Roberto, who drove us through the city a little bit and very briefly explained its history.  The coach stopped and we got off near Capitol Hill, where Rome's city hall now sits.  Behind it lies the ancient Roman forum, the meeting place for centuries of ancient Romans.  We walked parallel to the length of the forum on one of Rome's busy streets stopping to see or hear about another ancient ruin.

The highlight of the tour for me was our final destination, the Coliseum, the ancient and huge entertainment center of the first few centuries A.D.  Of course, only a part of the wall stands that enclosed the Coliseum but standing looking at it and imagining those who entered the gates and what must have been going through their minds as both participants and spectators went into that arena.  We did not have the opportunity to go into the Coliseum but spent some time outside it before heading back to our bus.

The bus took us then to St. Peters Square in the smallest country in the world.  This was exciting for me for at least one reason: I have a dream of visiting the smallest countries in the world some day and Vatican City, as the tiniest at, I believe, 1.6 square miles, is the best place to start.  Marilyn, Allen, & I forewent the chance to go into the basilica of St. Peters, the largest church in Christendom, instead opting to go into the Vatican Museums in order to see the Sistine Chapel.  The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel was frescoed over a period of four years by Michelangelo, the great Renaissance painter.  Michelangelo was not necessarily very skilled in frescoing when he began this monumental work, but he learned the craft quickly and to marvelous results.  Getting to the Chapel is a bit ridiculous: one has to wander through almost the entire series of museums in order to reach it.  Everyone travels the same route and there are plenty of crowds traveling those galleries filled with paintings and sculptures and ancient maps and all sorts of other artwork.  It's an exhausting and, in our case, hot process leaving one little energy to actually enjoy the tremendous gem that is the Sistine Chapel when you reach it.  Part of the joy though was going through the several rooms frescoed by Rafael, which were done at the same time the Michelangelo was working on his ceiling.  Eventually though we did find our prize which turned out to be smaller than I expected but still no less grand.  The ceiling was restored to its original grandeur and vibrant colors in a restoration in the 1980s and 90s.  At the center of the ceiling is the famous creation of Adam as God reaches out a finger to instill the spark of life to a reclining Adam.  As exhausted as we were and as crowded as it was, it was hard not to be awed by this exemplary work of art.

Leaving the museum, again through a byzantine labyrinth of unavoidable galleries, we found ourselves outside again and in need of a quick meal to sustain ourselves for the coach ride back to the ship.  A fast pizza sufficed for each of us and we scurried, as much as we can scurry, back to meet our coach.  Naps on the hour plus ride back seemed to be the order of the day for most of us and we got back just in time to refresh ourselves a little and then go to dinner.  The evening following was fairly low key as we just strolled about the decks of the ship, had a drink in one of the many bars onboard, and then trundled off to bed, not before heading into an at sea thunder storm, something I hadn't experienced yet.

Today, Sunday, we are heading into Florence, a town we are all familiar with already.

Ahoy!