"I've finished that chapel I was painting. The Pope is quite satisfied." - Michelangelo

The Last Judgement - photo from Wikipedia

We’d booked a tour of the Sistine Chapel and St Peters Basilica on the advice of our travel agent in Oz, the same as we’d done for Giverny and Versailles in France. Today’s excursion was a half-day event and we were picked up at the hotel early so we had to cram as much breakfast in as possible in about 15 minutes! The little bus we were in stopped at a few hotels on the way and then we were all disgorged at the travel agent office in the middle of Rome and divided into different languages. Though we were on the English tour there were only a few English people, a trio of Irish and the rest Americans and other nationalities. We were the only Aussies. The Irish trio all wore caps and was led by a little woman who wanted to be first in line for everything - Net was irritated by her right from the start!

We drove through Rome, crossed the Tiber and onto the Vatican then piled out and went through the turnstiles towards the Sistine Chapel. The tour guide gathered us outside the chapel for a introductory talk as tour guides aren’t allowed to give talks in the chapel itself. We were all issued with headsets and earphones and our guide, a stylish, tall, olive-skinned Roman woman, who brandished a yellow flag as our identifying standard, led us through to the chapel through a long corridor decorated with all manner of art including the most amazingly realistic trompe-l’oeil we’ve ever seen. You had to convince your brain that the paintings on the ceiling and walls weren’t actually marble statues and decorations!

Strange statue on the way in to the chapel


Fresco on the corridor wall


A section of the corridor's ceiling


We were happy, even though we look blue!

When you enter the chapel you can’t help being surprised that it’s not huge as you imagined, even though I knew it wasn't enormous. It’s 40.9 metres long by 13.4 metres wide and the ceiling is 20.7 metres high. I read later in Wikipedia that: “The ceiling of the chapel is a flattened barrel vault springing from a course that encircles the walls at the level of the springing of the window arches” but I thought that was obvious just by looking at it.

The tour guide gave us 25 minutes inside the chapel, which wasn’t long enough for me, although it is very difficult to look at the ceiling frescos because your neck gets so sore - you certainly can’t lie on the floor and gaze upwards. Because of this I spent a fair proportion of the allotted time looking at The Last Judgment which is on the same wall as the entrance to the chapel. You can get up close to the damned being transported to hell by demons in row boats. The small amount of time doesn't let your eye give justice to the works of the other artists on the other walls, including Botticelli and other Florentine painters.

It’s horribly crowded in the corridor leading to the chapel and you’re herded through the chapel door and told to keep moving. There are a number of guards in uniform and one, who was very tall and stern looking, though quite young, bellowed “Silenzio!” every few minutes. The noise level would drop after that and then rise again before the next “Silenzio!” issued forth from the stern young guard. We saw many people trying to take photos, which is explicitly banned, and one silly Japanese woman took a photo with flash and was quickly escorted out of the chapel, which was a good thing; I’m not sure she knew what as happening to her until she actually got outside the chapel! I sharply, though quietly, remembering the "Silenzio!", rebuked some fool who was trying to take a photo but he kept at it after he moved away from where I was. Although tour-group leaders are banned from giving commentaries, a few were obviously doing it - I felt like dobbing them in to the stern young guard!

Our yellow flag waved after 25 minutes and we were whisked into St Peters Basilica, which was also terribly crowded, though it’s so huge that it absorbs people much more effectively than the chapel and the corridors leading to it. St Peters is obviously very impressive, especially the statues, which are everywhere, including Michelangelo’s Pieta, which is behind a thick glass wall because of some crazed Australian citizen who smashed it with a chisel in 1972.

Another impressive feature of the church are the mosaics which look exactly like paintings - it’s only when you get up close that you see all the little tiles.

The dome is stupendous and more ovoid than I thought it would be, very different to the hemispherical dome of the Pantheon, which the ancient Romans built in the first century AD.

A Swiss, guarding the Pope

Everything on the tour was done quickly and our guide was very fast in her feet, even in the huge crush of people, so we were soon out in St Peters Piazza in the bright, blazing sun - it was our hottest day yet! We were shown where the Pope’s bedroom is and where he stands when addressing the 150,000 people who can fit into the piazza and then we were encouraged to buy souvenirs in the designated souvenir shop and then we waited some more time in the merciless sun until we piled onto the bus, the Irish trio got on first of course, and back to headquarters.

The Pope's bedroom is the top-right one

Net rested in the afternoon but I can never rest as I have restless legs so I took the Metro to Cavour Station and walked up to the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, a large church which is owned and operated by the Vatican, even though it’s in the heart of Rome. It’s impressive inside but there were hundreds of tour groups all snapping away. I had our compact camera but I kept it in my pocket because all the photo-taking made me feel a bit sick. One German tourist even tried to take a photo of a confession in progress and looked surprised and slightly put out when the priest waggled his finger at her and said “no!”

I caught the jam-packed Metro train back to the hotel and we had an excellent repast for dinner with plenty of wine. And so to bed.

"All things atrocious and shameless flock from all parts to Rome" - Tacitus

Sunday was the day for us to flock to Rome via Eurostar Italia. We went for one last stroll in Florence along the Piazza Santa Maria Novella where vintage cars were driving around and suddenly a platoon of soldiers carrying brass insruments and with ostrich feathers in their hats started marching down the street we were walking on towards the one of the bigger Piazzi. They marched double-time after an ear-splitting brass flourish, stopped at the next Piazza and played marching band music at allegretto tempi and even sang a song.
After checking out of our charming but slightly shabby Florentine hotel we waited an hour at the chaotic Firenze station before travelling first-class on the high speed train to Rome. The scenery on the way was magical!
We walked to our Roman hotel with the and found it to be quite nice, more like Opera Cadet in Paris than anything else but with no bath and no extra bed.
After a quick freshen-up we walked to a nearby restaurant and Net had a good steak and I had a good pizza - finally some nice tasting food after the blandness of Florence!
Then we went on our customary stroll through a new city, though we'd never been in as ancient a city as Rome and ended up at the Trevi fountain which was as crazy as the Mona Lisa, crammed tight with camera-snapping tourists.

After breakfast the next day we decided to have a look at the Colosseum and thought it would be a good idea to take the Metro there as there’s a station called Colosseo right at the huge edifice’s doorstep. Rome’s Metro is nowhere near as extensive as Paris’s or London’s - there are two lines, Line A and Line B and our hotel has a Line B station nearby and it’s Line B that goes to the Colosseo and well as Circo Massimo, though we thought we’d leave looking at the Circus Maximus for another day. We walked to Roma Termini (Rome Terminus) rather than catching the Metro from “our station”, Castro Pretorio, because we had to confirm our St Peters and Sistine Chapel tour and the tour place was right near the big Rome intercity train station. It took us ages to find where the Metro actually was amidst all the Italian intercity and inter-country lines; when we found it we couldn’t work out where to buy a ticket and after more going round in circles we realised that the Metro was closed anyway because of a strike!
So we decided to walk, which is what we usually end up doing anyway - walking all day more often than not.

We stopped at a restaurant as we approached the Colosseum for a bit of a caffeine boost - Net was craving a real coffee after the slop she got at breakfast at the hotel and I thought I needed a Red Bull to last the whole day. We chatted to the waiter and thought we’d finally found a friendly Italian but he turned out to be Romanian. He’d studied to be an Orthodox priest in his home country but decided to emigrate to Italy with his wife for more opportunity. As he said, “Romania's government is like the mafia”. I asked him what it was like under Ceausescu, even though he would have only been a bambino then. He said that, though Ceausescu was bad, things were worse now.

We walked on and turned the corner and there it was - what a sight! The Colosseum has been standing there for one thousand nine hundred and thirty one years. We stood in front of this entertainment centre and did our usual-for-this-trip ritual of gasping and exclaiming to each other “I can’t believe we’re actually here!”, as we’ve done about a hundred times in the last month or so. But the Flavian Ampitheatre is the oldest building we’ve seen so far so it was special. And it’s terrible to think of all the ghastly things that went on in there as “entertainment” for hundreds of years. Gladiators were still killing and being killed in the arena until at least the middle of the 400s, long after the Roman empire became Christian, and there were animal hunts until the mid 500s.

Vespasian was the emperor that started off the building and it was opened during the reign of his son, Titus. It held 50,000 people and the arena was smaller than a modern footy ground: 85 metres by 48 metres. The arena comprised a wooden floor covered by sand to soak up all the blood. In fact, the word arena means sand in Latin. When you go inside you feel even more that sense of what a terrible place it was, the weight of all that history and all the death rituals that were carried out there for so long presses down on you, especially as you climb the incredibly steep stairs - how did the short Romans manage! The plebes had to go right up the top of course.

Centurions stopping for a fag

We’d marvelled at the exterior but before we actually went inside we explored the Palatine Hill and some of the Forum. People were queuing up for miles to get inside the Colosseum but we found a ticket office leading into the Palatine and the price included entrance to everything: the Colosseum, the Palatine and the Forum! Because I hadn’t done my research, I didn’t realise that the Forum is even more gob-smackingly amazing than the Palatine so we spent ages in the former and were too stuffed by the time we got to the Forum side as we wanted to keep some of our energy for the inside of the Colosseum. The intense heat here makes sight-seeing difficult. You get drenched in sweat and the sunshine is very intense so you need to be well sunblocked or covered up. We couldn’t imagine how hot it musty have been in summer!

The complex that the ticket price of 20 Euro gets you into is a huge open-air museum. There is so much to see, it’s absolutely staggering! There’s the house of Livia, Augustus’s wife, the Temple of Cybele, the House of Tiberius, the second emperor; the Flavian Palace - the Flavian emperors were Vespasian, Titus and Domitian, the Hippodrome of Domitian; it just goes on and on and it’s an essential part of the Roman sightseeing itinerary. And then there’s the Forum which is mind-blowing but, as I said, we didn’t give ourselves enough time; I ducked down for a relatively quick look while Net stayed in the shade of the Arch of Titus.

The Hippodrome of Domitian


Roman statue in a museum on the Palatine Hill

By the time we’d finished at the Colosseum we were completely stuffed! The Metro strike finished at 5pm and it was 5.30 now but there was only one ticket machine working and the queue for that was way too long so we ended up walking all the way across Rome to our hotel. Another full day of walking in the heat!

In the Forum


In the Forum


Between the Forum and the Colosseum


Inside the Colosseum


Inside the Colosseum


Net inside the Colosseum


Net inside the Colosseum

And so to bed - with Vatican City, St Peter’s Basilica and the Sistine Chapel to come tomorrow.

Our Last Day in Florence - Have Pitti on Us!

Italy has this ability to keep delivering knockout punches in the cultural/artistic ring. We’d been rendered speechless by Siena’s Duomo and Florence’s Uffizi and Il Duomo (the king of Duomos) and there was still so much to see and no time left. I decided that we should take a good look at the Palazzo Pitti aka the Pitti Palace on our last full day because the admission ticket included everything the vast building had to offer as well as entrance to the huge Boboli Gardens; but we really had no idea what to expect exactly when we walked through the gates because neither of us had done much research on the place. We’d seen it from the outside the afternoon before and it impressed us with its sheer size but it was only after we’d been inside for about half an hour that we realized that it’s the most extraordinary experience. One thing that makes it so special is that tour groups are banned, or, at least, tour group leaders are not allowed to lead tours through the palace and stop at set points and give talks; they’re also not allowed to have everyone in their tour (for the groups still come in, though not in the throngs that ruin many other places of interest, mainly because of the restrictions I’m listing here) rigged up with headphones so that the tour leader can give them a less noisy audio experience to go with the phenomenal visual extravaganzas. Another great aspect is that photography is not allowed inside the palace. These factors make visiting the galleries in the palace a much more serene experience and makes one realise that half the problem, or maybe the main problem, with tourism in a lot of places, is tour groups. So, we exhort all other tourists - be a tourist, because that’s what we all are, let’s face it, but try not to go with a tour group.

Fountain in the Palazzo courtyard


Another fountain in the courtyard

I had a little notebook in my pocket and made many jottings as we moved through the Palatine Gallery and there are exclamation marks all over the pages, plus many “wow”s as well as the names of artists and paintings and feeble attempts to briefly describe the indescribably ornate and lavish rooms, which just keep coming.

It’s a Baroque wonderland and I had no idea there was going to be so much stupendous art on the walls: there are Raphaels all over the place plus scores of other masters like Caravaggio, Tintoretto, Titian, Velazquez, Giorgione, Bronzino, Rubens, Veronese and hundreds of others. The rooms are almost beyond belief with huge frescoes on every ceiling, fringed by gold and marble statues, elaborate wallpapers of a different colour scheme for each room. It just goes on and on; it’s a breathtaking experience! Once again, words cannot express how wonderful this whole building is! And it wasn’t crowded at all. If you go to Florence, you’ve got to come to this place and concentrate most of your time on the Palatine Gallery.

One of the many Raphaels

And then there are the gardens. The combination of the Baroque opulence of the Palazzo, especially the Palatine gallery and the beauty and expansiveness of the Boboli Gardens reminds one of Versailles, but without the swarming mass of people and tour groups. Versailles is more extravagant, both inside and outside, but it’s almost too much in its Rococo over-the-top-ness; the Palazzo Pitti and gardens are more intimate, though they’re still amazingly excessive in their riches.

View of the Florentine hills from the gardens


Another beautiful view from the edge of the gardens


Net loving the gardens

We were lucky enough to be let inside a strange grotto in the gardens. It’s one of the weirdest things we’ve ever seen, all dripping pumice stalactites and bizarre figures emerging out of the rock, and a fountain with classical figures. It’s an almost hallucinatory experience being in there.

Top of the entrance of the Grotto


Grotto's ceiling

We spent almost a whole day in the place and gardens and slowly wandered back to our hotel through the mass of people swarming all over the Ponte Vecchio.
The next day was dominated by the train trip to Rome and the usual problems of dragging suitcases on and off trains and along cobble-stoned streets trying to find our hotel with little help from the curt locals. Italy isn’t nearly as friendly as France, the people seem much less inclined to give you any of their time unless you’re a customer and even then they tend to be at best unenthusiastic.

Certaldo - An Interlude in the Tuscan Hills

On Friday we decided to explore some of the countryside surrounding Florence. On the way back from the trip to Siena on Wednesday, we’d noticed a lovely looking little town, about halfway between Florence and Siena, named Certaldo. The buildings around the train station looked nice and we could see there was an older collection of buildings on top of one of the surrounding hills that looked iconic-ally Tuscan to our eyes. I did a little bit of research on the Internet and found that, though Certaldo was sometimes mentioned in a search of "Tuscan hill towns", there was an obviously even more iconic Tuscan town with towers and everything, closer to Siena, named San Gimignano, a trip to which involved getting off the train at Poggibonsi (great name!) and catching a bus, but we decided Certaldo was easier and would maybe be quieter and we felt like having a nice, relaxed day; another clincher was that the writer, Boccaccio, was born and died in Certaldo and maybe wrote the Decameron there during the black death of 1347.

The Funicular

We got the 10.10am Siena train from Firenze SMN, which arrived at Certaldo at 11am precisely. My researches had informed me that a funicular railway takes passengers to the top of the hill so we ambled aimlessly up the street of this sleepy little town until serendipity brought us to a sign saying “Funicolare” with a funny little train symbol. 3 Euro got us both a ride up in the crowded small railway and we arrived at the walled town.

There were very few tourists about and the local tourist-related businesses were just beginning to open up shop. The atmosphere was lovely and relaxed and we imagined immediately that we were pilgrims a thousand years ago as we walked through the narrow streets and looked at the thousand year old brick walls, some with grape vines growing all over.

The museum and info centre was staffed by a lovely lady who was more French than Italian in her courteous customer-service skills (staff in the Uffizi and other Italian establishments we’ve visited almost always seemed unfriendly and uninterested). This lady was charming and warm and told us a bit about the place and that the price of the ticket included a look at Giovanni Boccaccio’s house and entrance to the Palazzo Pretorio right at the top of the hill. Unfortunately most of the upstairs section of Boccaccio’s house was closed because of a conference so the lady gave us a discount on our tickets. The house was reconstructed after being destroyed by British bombs in WW2 and while the exhibition was interesting, the Palazzo Pretorio had a lot more to offer.

The following is from the photocopied guidesheet to the Palace: “The structure we see today is the result of many centuries of building and change from the feudal castle of the counts of Alberti of Prato. In early 1400 it was the seat of the Florentine Republic Vicarship and housed local government - the courts, jail and judicial administration. It represented the civil power that counterbalanced the Church power, in the form of the Church of St Thomas, connected to the building with an arch and a fishbone pathway. The severe and prohibitive facade interlacves with simple windows and the colourful family crests made of terracotta and stone. It recalls a small world on the great river of history.” Boccaccio died here in 1375.

We visited the old jail and there was one cell that had been used as a torture chamber and had a very creepy and sad feel to it. There was an exhibition of modern sculptures spread throughout, something you see a lot of in Italy.

Net in the jail


Mugshot of a typical Tuscan 14th century criminal


Modern art interspersed with medieval

As we sat down to another bland Tuscan meal (I had pasta with wild mushrooms and the whole dish had no flavour of any kind whatsoever so I had to smother it with parmesan cheese; it seems Tuscan cuisine is very bland to us salt-lovers as we’ve never had a good meal the whole time we’ve been here. Maybe you have to pay a lot to eat well. The Tuscan bread is made without salt so perhaps they just prefer low-salt taste?), I consulted the train times between Florence and Siena - the timetable didn’t list any of the stops between and calculated that there should be a train stopping at Certaldo and returning to Florence at 2pm. Then we got talking to a couple who I’d thought were Italian but it turned out they were Dutch and were a lovely couple and so time went quickly as we chatted away about Italy and travel and Holland and languages and Australia and distances, etc. The restaurant staff were eyeing us in a way that suggested they wanted our table for new customers and I realised that we’d better get going as we had to catch the funicular and then walk to Certaldo station by 2pm. We made it onto the train with about 2 seconds to spare and got back to Florence at 2.50 pm. Then it was back to the hotel for a freshen up and then off for more strolling to Piazza della Signoria, where all the great sculptures are, then on to Ponte Vecchio and the huge Palazzo Pitti, then back near our hotel for dinner at some restaurant where I had a bland pizza and some really crap wine - so far the house wines in France, Spain and Italy have been fine for my non-oenophile taste but I could recognise that this really was a horrible drop; I only just managed to finish it. And so to bed, for tomorrow we planned to have a closer look at the Palazzo Pitti.

Sculpture in the Piazza della Signoria


View from the Ponte Vecchio