The Final Day in Rome

Ostia Antica is the only thing we did before we caught our train to Venice this day. 

Ostia Antica was a shipping port in the Roman Empire. Of course all that's left today are ruins, but they are well preserved enough to make a park from them. 

I'm just going to post pictures of the place for this post. 

Residential Area

The well.

More houses or shops. 

The Baths of Neptune. 

The arches of the theatre. 

The stage as viewed from the top of the seats. The stage is still used for productions today. 

Mosaics everywhere! 

These mosaics represented what the businesses that once stood behind them did or sold. Just like modern day advertising. 

The town alter, with some fabulous construction going on in the background. 

Ancient bakery! The rocks were once ovens and wheat grinding stations.

Café.

A small part of the city from above. Ostia Antica is huge. 

The town center, but more importantly,  pinecone. 

Baths. 

Temple remains. 

Ostia also had a museum of some of the preserved statues and such. 

A gorgeous, preserved mosaic. 

Now, we ate here and had to leave directly in order to get back in time to grab our things and catch our train. 

Here is a picture of us on the train, really enjoying our trip!

 

We arrived in our lovely apartment in Venice not terribly long after departure and settled right in.

We had two days in Venice, as we elongated our stay out of pure enjoyment. 

The posts from those days will come along shortly. 

Thank you for reading!

~Roaming Rapunzel

On the Third Day of Rome

You came back! Hello. 

The third day of Rome was for us to go to St. Peter's Basilica and then to the Vatican museum. 

St. Peter's Basilica looks like this. 

Doesn't look too exciting yet, but just you wait. 

And wait some more...

When that all finally ended we got to begin our climb to the top of the dome. It was 700-something steps to the top. 

What would this blog be without huge amounts of exercise. 

You get halfway to the top with nice, normal, even stairs. Then go out to this nice view. 

You can also go above the chapel and look down, through a guard fence. 

Looking down.

Looking up. 

Looking through the fence. 

While this was an awesome view, it still didn't compare to actually being down below. 

But before we went down, we had about 300 more stairs up. 

The first 400 were fine so no worries, right? Wrong. It was every claustrophobic person's nightmare. I think I might've even developed a problem with small spaces on the way up. Not only is it tight, the walls are slanted in, so you have to climb at an angle! Or nearly straight up, with a rope to hold onto.

So we climbed. 

And climbed. 

(Light!!)

And then when we got to the top, it was just tons of people all packed together in a small outdoors space, worse than the stairs! 

The view was terrific though. 

So far up! 

Then though, the foot traffic was all backed up and we had to stand out and wait to go down for 10-20 minutes. I was all excited to get off the top (because I was also learning a fear of heights pretty fast! ;) When I realized we had to walk those tight stairs all the way back down. 

This is exactly how I looked. 

It was a little traumatizing.

Curving back down.

From the roof. 

Behind the welcoming statues along the top. 

The inside of the Basilica was gorgeous.

Just so beautiful. 

The ornate alter. 

We also saw Michelangelo's sculpture of Mary with Jesus's body. It's locked behind a bullet proof glass case because someone tried to destroy it a few years ago.

This door is sealed for 100 years until the Pope opens it again. 

There were some very well dressed groudskeepers there. 

We then headed off to the Vatican. 

As a foreword to this, the only part of the Vatican I liked was the Sistine Chapel, which took forever to get to. This should explain the lack there is of pictures. 

A giant pinecone with peacocks.. Wow.. 

Oh my goodness! A random spinning golden ball that appears to be broken with weird structures inside?! My favorite! (Where is the real art in this place? Seriously.) 

Alright, this is a widely acclaimed and very impressive sculpture. Very good, Vatican, now you've got it. 

A room full of quite unremarkable sculptures. 

Elaborate ceilings and tons of people. 

Huge Catholic painting.

More intense ceiling. 

Pretty floor design. 

A very raw sculpture. 

A pretty swan sculpture on the way out. 

The Sistine Chapel was amazing. We pretty much stood in see for awhile, listening to our tour. There are absolutely no pictures allowed, so you'll just have to google it, if you want to see. 

This is the massive winding staircase to the Vatican. Quite impressive, really. 

Mum really wanted to go to the Appian Way that night as well, so there we went. 

  The Appian Way is where Paul walked on his way to Rome, and was met and encouraged by some of his friends(Written in the end of Acts.)  It was very interesting to see. It's also just 17 miles of old road besides that, so we left pretty quickly. 

We had to walk for a long time to get to the Appian Way, and then it took some time to get the bus back. We were exhausted by the time we reached the apartment. 

If you're still not tired, or want to check in tomorrow, we have the final day in Rome, Ostia Antica, up next. 

Ciao again. 

~Roaming Rapunzel