My Ramblings: Vatican City

Beautiful Staircase at the Vatican Museum

As a part of my last year's trip to Europe, I had the opportunity to visit the holy Vatican City. It is one of the most beautiful places I have visited in Europe. We had 3 places to visit in our agenda- Vatican museums, Sistine Chapel and St. Peter's Basilica. Most of this blog is going to be pictorial and I will try to explain in the captions to the best of my ability.

Some fun facts about Vatican City-
1. It is a country surrounded by Rome.
2. It has its own currency, police and military.
3. It has about 696 citizens. It is not easy to be a citizen of this country. I was told that one has to be a high flyer like Governor of a big national bank etc to be a citizen of the Vatican.
4. You do not need a separate visa. A Schengen visa is good enough.

We stayed at Rome and Vatican City is a high walled area which separates it from Rome, it is quite close to central Rome. It is best to take a guided tour to understand the place. Otherwise, it is just a place with a lot of pictures which may not make a lot of sense. The bad news for us was- they had prohibited photography when we went to the Sistine Chapel; and also the Pope had closed the St. Peter's Basilica for an important meeting with the bishops so we could not go inside but were only able to view it from the outside. Also, I took hundreds of photographs here and I do not think I can put each and every picture in this blog. I have hand picked some of them for this blog.

So here goes the pictorial blog:

This is the wall of the Vatican City which separates it from Rome

This is one of the domes from Vatican City which is supposed to have inspired the dome of the Pantheon

This is a painting of Apollo and the Muses on one of the ceilings of Vatican Museum by Tommaso Conca

This is one of the beautiful mosaic floors that was seen at the Vatican Museum

The beautiful ceiling at the Gallery of Geographical Maps- This is one of the most beautiful galleries which houses a lot of geographical maps of different parts of ancient Italy which are near accurate. Considering the time at which is was painted- 1500s and the kind of technology they had at the time, it is really commendable to have this level of accuracy.

One of the maps in the Gallery of Geographical Maps

Resurrection of Christ- If I remember correctly, this was painted by Raphael

The below 2 paintings are part of the same one- A massive painting by Raphael called School of Athens. This was an interesting painting for me for several reasons. Please click here and here to read more.

This is one part of the famous painting called the School of Athens. Some notable people here are- Socrates in the Olive Green robe having an argument

The person in red robe is Plato and he is in conversation with Aristotle. The person right is front left, in deep thought is supposed to be Michaelangelo.