Journey to Europe: Day Six The Borghese Gallery and Gardens

Itinerary

• 1:00 – Lunch
• 2:30 – Borghese Gallery tour
• 5:00 – Garden tour
• 8:00 – Dinner

A fountain in the park

Accordion player

Sunday, day six we got to sleep in and eat breakfast. We actually walked to the Borghese Park from our hotel wandered for a bit and then sat for a bit-watching people in the park. Then we got sandwiches at a little food stand, like the stands you see at like art fairs, and had a picnic in the park listening to an accordion play Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565 and other recognizable classical songs. That was probably my favorite lunch the whole trip; eating in the park, watching people, and listening to an accordion play classical music. 

Alec in front of the Borghese Gallery

Bernini's The Rape of Proserpina. That is made of
marble...

After lunch we headed into the Borghese Gallery for our tour. The Gallery was a very strict gallery, no camera, and no bags policy. If you needed to have something with you, you had to put it in a see through bag, even if it was just a water bottle. So we checked our bags in our tour group locker.

 It was fun learning about the Borghese family, seeing beautiful sculptures done by Bernini, and paints by artist I’ve heard of. Our tour guide was really good; she was Canadian, but now living in Rome with her Italian family. She told put so much excitement into her stories while talking about the sculptures and paintings, we hung on her every word.

Bernini's Apollo and Daphne
All Bernini's pieces had some kind
of exciting story to tell.

"Lake" in the park. What Italians consider a lake,
we Michiganders consider a pond.

A Passion Flower our tour guide found that reminded
her of her grandmother.

Immediately proceeding the gallery tour we took a tour around the park or gardens. There is a secret garden at Borghese, but it is not open to the public, but we got to sneak peaks of it through the iron fence surrounding it. It was just a short tour, where our guide would just tell us what a couple things were and pointed us in directions of where to go. We ended at a spot that over looked Rome and where most newly weds come to take photos, which a couple was up there.  

We walked down to the Piazza del Popolo to see a church that our guide pointed out to go see that had a famous painting inside, but we got lost, because there has to be over a hundred churches in Rome and near this Plaza there was probably five churches and it was a Sunday. The church that we thought it was in there was a mass going on, so we didn’t want to bother. We trekked back toward our hotel passing by the Spanish Steps, which surprisingly had a Marching Band of some sorts playing music on it. It was kind of cool, but still way too many people.

View of Rome

Following having dinner we went to walk around the Colosseum, we were going to go that morning, but found out there was a workers strike and was not able to go see it in its entirety. Thus we walked around it, walking there we saw some archeological site, of things workers found while working on the new metro line they are in progression of, Line C. Once we got to the Colosseum, we got a surprise, that night the moon was full and bright as ever. The pictures I took do not give it justice, but it was a beautiful scene. Being able to take picture of the moon peeking through the Colosseum was a great end to the day.

Journey to Europe: Day Five Pompeii

Itinerary

• 7:40 – Tour Bus to Pompeii
• 10:45 – Pompeii Walking Tour
• 1:00 – Lunch
• 3:15 – Leave Pompeii
• 8:00 – Dinner

Mt. Vesuvius

Early morning start with taking the metro to where we needed to meet up for our tour. Sadly, we were unable to have the complimentary breakfast that our hotel provided, on a Saturday breakfast started at seven. So with empty tummies we went to the meeting point for our tour, which wasn’t really a tour, but a bus that would transport us to and from Rome and Pompeii.

The trip to Pompeii was a little over three hours with a stop midway to use the restroom, stretch, or get a little snack to eat; so we didn’t go hungry for too long. Riding to Pompeii we got to see the Italian countryside, making it all the while. Beautiful rolling mountains with cute little Italian villages perched on them and farms and vineyards. What was also interesting to see a long the highway was a few fields covered in solar paneling, sort of like the wind turbine fields we have in the mid-west.

Tessera Mosaic Floor Design- reads "Beware of the Dog"

Mt. Vesuvius actually looked like a normal mountain other than it had some kind of white smoke around the top of it. It was pretty large over looking the city of Pompeii and Héculean. I don’t quite understand why anyone would want to live in a city at the base of a famous volcano, even if it was inactive.

Tessera Mosaic Floor Design 

At the ruins my family decided we would not go on a guided tour, but get two audio tours that were like a radio that you typed in the number of the site or building you were at in the ruins and hold the radio up to your ear and listen. It was an okay tour, but we didn’t know what to go see or where anything was. There was a map, but it only had names of places and their number. Another thing about the audio tour was that the audio guide dragged on and on about the stories and buildings a little too much. Pompeii is defiantly a place of ruins, it is cool to an extent, but after awhile everything looks the same.

A Fresco in the Villa of the Mysteries

The Most disappoint thing about the Ruins that I heard so much about was the things archeologist found buried beneath the layers of ask from the volcano that had been preserved. Also the process the archeologist did by using the ash that had harden, creating a mold around actual people who had been caught in the ash and had died of suffocation. They poured plaster into the ash molds to unveil what people looked like, what they wore, the tools they used, what their culture was like, and what they worshiped. But all of the findings were not there, there was only a few things locked up in a room that you could peer through, most of it is in Naples, Italy at the Archeological Museum. I found this to be very disappointed after learning about how cool the findings were in Art History and other history classes I had taken in the past.

We had lunch inside of Pompeii at the cafeteria they had there, which was packed with people and overly priced food. Once you leave the ruins you cannot enter back in without having to pay again. So we watched for tables that were leaving like vultures, because by that time our feet ached and we were all sweaty from the hot Italian sun. When we finally got a table, the people left a mess and we had to clean it off. While cleaning off the table mom accidently bumps and empty glass beer bottle someone left and it shatters all over the floor of the cafeteria and over a dozen eyes turn to stare at us while we try to sweep the glass shards into a pile with our feet until a employee finally comes over to clean it up.

Vases and man laying down found buried beneath ash

a person found crouched, maybe praying.

In the end Pompeii was okay, but I rather have gone to the Archeological Museum in Naples. My favorite part of Pompeii trip was the ride to and from on the bus, watching the country side of Italy than the hustle and bustle of Rome.

Dinner we ate on top of a hotel terrace, where I had pasta with prawns which was very yummy. 

Hot Doggy

Journey to Europe: Day four The Vatican

Itinerary

•      9:45 Vatican Museum Tour
•      3:00 Lunch
•    8:30 Dinner

Started the day off by taking the Metro for the first time from a little square up the street from our hotel to the outer wall of the Vatican for our tour group. The Metro in Rome is fairly easy to navigate with ticket machines that you could select your preferred language and two train lines the A and B lines. We took the B line to get to where we needed to be. On our tour, again we were given one-way radios to listen to our guide while going through the crowds at the Museum. 25,000 people during the high seasons, the Summer months. 

The Vatican has beautiful statues, frescos, mosaics, paintings, and more; by famous artist and not so recognizable artist. Every room you have to look up at the ceiling to see the ornate crownings and frescos that are painted on the ceiling. We got to see the "Stanza della Segnatura" by Raphael (done in 1508-1511) and of course Michelangelo's Frescos of the Last Judgement and the beginning of man in the Sistine Chapel for the pope's private masses. There was no pictures or talking allowed in the Chapel, otherwise you had a security guard breathing down your neck and barking at you. There was so many warnings and signs before entering the chapel that you could not take pictures and yet there was still very rude people with cameras taking pictures. Surprisingly the Sistine Chapel is smaller than I thought it would be, then again chapels in general are on the small side.

Beautiful Ceilings

There was a long hallway just dedicated to tapestries, which were nice, but not as fun, so Alec and I narrated what was going on in the tapestries, which some had some quite funny facial expressions.
All the Art in the Vatican Museum are gifts from the artists or something requested by the Vatican from the artist, none of the paintings were actually bought.

The tour ended in St. Peter's Basilica, which we went

Ceiling paintings

Funny facial expression tapestry

Pretty tessera mosaic with Peacocks.   

to the day before on a different tour, but it was nice to take pictures of things we had missed or things that weren't there the day before. There was chairs set up all around, for a mass that wasn't there and it was closed off, so glad that I got pictures of the alter the day before. 

"Stanza della Segnatura" by Raphael (done in 1508-1511)

St. Peter's Dome

After the tour, it was already one in the afternoon, but my Dad and I set off to do a once-in-a-lifetime thing, and climb to the top of the St. Peter's Dome, while Alec and Mom stayed back and went shopping for post cards at the souvenir shop. Dad and I decided that we would pay the extra euro to get the elevator to the top, instead of climbing the stairs. Thing was...the elevator only went to the basin of the dome, from there up you had to climb extremely narrow and odd angle stairs. Man, talk about a work out! It was worth it in the end to see all of Rome and the Vatican at the top of St. Peter's because St. Peter's by law is the tallest building in all of Rome; Also for bragging rights and to take pictures for those of us that would not have been able to make the venture. 

The Vatican from the top of St. Peter's

Crazy stair case of doom

By the time Dad and I made it to the bottom it was nearly three and we were all grouchy for lunch. (especially Mom) went just outside of the Vatican to a little restaurant and had a margarita pizza.
After lunch we took the metro back to our hotel and got some gelato walking from the metro station to the hotel and put up our feet for awhile until dinner.

Edit: When walking to the metro after lunch, we found a GameStop store and found a charger for Alec's 3-D DS portable gaming system. Alec was thrilled that it charged his 3D DS and got his souvenir from Europe.

Before dinner and after we rested we set out to find the Spanish Steps, this time we were serious and knew where the go. It was about a mile or two away from where our hotel was, but it was terribly crowded with all the other tourist sitting on the steps and wasn't as pretty to look at with the crowds of people all over them. So we set out to find a restaurant over there, where we sat next to a very cute young couple from Holland (not Holland, Michigan, but the actual country of Holland) They were on vacation with a few friends that were not present and have a young son who was at home and a baby on the way. They have done a lot of traveling, but were sad to say that after this baby there would not be much more traveling.

That evening, on our way back from dinner the moon was almost full and lit up the night sky and mom and I sang "That's Amore" by Dean Martin.

Obelisk of Virgin Mary with the moon