Rome; Friday, 23 February, 2007

Friday was time for a day-trip to another country, sounds impressive, but not when you consider that the entire state is surrounded by Rome. The Vatican, the worlds smallest recognised state, and one of only two Absolute Monarchies left in Europe (the other being Liechtenstein). It’s also home, as I found out, to some of Europe's largest queues, though the Vatican authorities may be able to claim that the longest queue, that for the Vatican Museums and Sistine Chapel (two and a half hours long when I joined it) is only a couple of people long, the rest of the queue is in Italy!

I did manage to jump the queue a bit (i.e. from two and a half hour wait to 60 minute wait) by taking the generous offer of a guided tour of the museums and the chance to jump a significant distance up the queue, the tour costs €25, but the additional information, and the quick exit to the St Peter Basilica after the tour are worth it in themselves. (If you are thinking of taking a tour, try going to the very front of the queue and walking along it looking like a tourist, one of the touts is bound to spot you and invite you to join the queue much further up)

The tour lasts a little over 90 minutes, and by the end that's probably about the right length. The statistic quoted by the Vatican is, if you were to have each item in the collection on a conveyor belt, and stopped to look at each one for just 60 seconds, it would take 12 years to view everything (and that's without sleeping, eating etc.) How they then justify the massive entrance fee when most people who want to see the museum will come back on numerous occasions baffles me.

The tour ends in the Sistine chapel, home to possibly one of the most famous painting and decorating jobs in history. Michelangelo’s masterpiece is awe inspiring, and well worth the massive queues and long waits to see. After the tour, as I was in a group, we could exit into the main area of the Basilica, otherwise you go out by a different exit, back into Rome, have to walk back round to the basilica and queue up for the metal detectors all over again.

The basilica is the largest church in Catholicism, and is very impressive, though inside, because of the way it has been designed, you don't feel that it is that large. To get a true feel of the scale you can join another massive queue (I waited for a little over an hour) to go up to the top of the dome. You have the choice of a lift to about a third of the way up, or stairs the whole way. Part way up you come out onto a viewing platform inside the dome, looking down onto the church below, and it looks a very long way below from there. After another 300 or so steps you finally reach the viewing platform at the bottom of the lantern. The views over the Vatican, and Rome are stunning and worth the wait and the cost. On the way back down, you exit from the dome onto the roof of the Basilica where there is a Souvenir shop, post box and refreshment stop before you either take the lift or walk the last 200 steps to the bottom.

After climbing the dome I descended the short way into the crypt where the tombs of many of the former popes are. By far the busiest is, of course, that of Pope John Paul II.

By now I felt a little churched out (it was already gone three, and I had arrived at the back of the queue at a little after nine). So I walked back across the border, possibly one of the least well guarded but most baroque international borders in the world, into Rome and walked the short distance down to the riverside and the Castel St Angelo, and promptly back onto Vatican soil! The Castle was originally built by Hadrian (he of the small wall to stop the English entering Scotland, or something like that) as his mausoleum. Over the course of the next 1,500 years or so it became, amongst other things, a Prison, fortress and palace for the popes. Today it is open to the public to look around, and from the top offers stunning views of the one thing you can't get stunning views of from the top of the dome of St Peters, the dome of St Peters. Along it’s battlements there is also a quite nice bar where I stopped for a small cola and a chance to rest my, by now, seriously weary feet.

I finished looking around the castle and headed back along the riverside to Piazza Navona, which as close as Rome gets to a central point. I popped into a Café and brought an Ice-cream to eat whilst I had a wander around the square. It was very pleasant, with the sun setting and the last few rays of sun warming my face as I ambled slowly round a beautiful square in Rome, thinking that at that very moment my colleagues still had 30 minutes of work time left and it was cold and damp back in Britain, I don't know what the Italians call it, but the Germans call it Schadenfreude, and it was a very pleasant sensation.

After finishing my amble around the square I walked back to the bus stop and squeezed myself on a bus back to the hotel, where I took my boots off (and it were physically possible may have taken my feet off as well and put them in a bucket of water for a while) and had a short rest before heading back out for dinner.