Stormy Travels: Vatican Museums, Sistine Chapel, and St. Peter's Basilica

Tour Tickets!

Today is the day I have been waiting for. First, we get to enter a new country and second, we get to take a guided tour of the Vatican Museums, Sistine Chapel, and St. Peter's Basilica! We booked the tour through the official website. It was called "Museums and Saint Peter's Basilica - Art and Faith". We chose this tour for two reasons, one it was an official tour operated by the Vatican Museums and two, it was the only tour available. The tour is described as the following:

An excursion through beauty from a Christian point of view for a Catechesis with Art. The Vatican Museums offer an opportunity to reveal the educational dimension of art according to an iconographic- pedagogic programme. "The Museum truly displays a continuous interweaving between Christianity and culture, between faith and art, between the divine and the human". (From the Address of His Holiness Benedict XVI to the Staff of the Vatican Museums, 23 November 2006).

We woke up at 7am and left the apartment at 8am (Monday June 3rd, 2019). Our tour was scheduled for 9 and we wanted to be early as we heard lines could be very long. When we arrived, we saw a line around the block and became worried as it was 8:30, but thankfully that was the line if you did not have tickets. With our tour tickets, we went straight in with no wait and were the first ones there for our tour. We almost thought we were going to be the only ones on it as no one else showed up till about 8:50 and the tickets said to arrive 20 minutes before the tour departure. Our tour group had about 25 people in it. The tour was given by a Missionary of Divine Revelation, also known as one of the green nuns of Rome. She was originally from Manchester in the UK and was a wonderful and funny guide who was also extremely knowledgable.

The tour started with a background on Sistine Chapel. She explained a lot of the religion behind the paintings before entering the chapel because the chapel is an area of silence. She also pointed out that one of the unofficial guides was providing a group with very wrong information about a statue nearby which was funny.

Some interesting things I learned were:

Michelangelo painted the roof using a method called fresco. Fresco is a technique where they paint into the plaster of the wall and they only have one chance to do it as they are making the painting a literal part of the wall.
In the painting The Creation of Adam, the distance between Adam's and God's fingers is 12 inches even though when looking up a the ceiling it looks like a tiny distance.
The ceiling can be broken into three sections: the beginning of the bible where God creates everything (1. The Separation of Light and Darkness, 2. The Creation of the Sun, Moon and Earth, 3. The Separation of Land and Water); the story of Adam and Eve (4. The Creation of Adam, 5. The Creation of Eve, 6. The Temptation and Expulsion); and the story of Gods love for man shown through Noah (7. The Sacrifice of Noah, 8. The Great Flood, 9. The Drunkenness of Noah)
The Last Judgement is controversial due to the nudity. The Pope's Master of Ceremonies Biagio da Cesena did not like the nudity which Michelangelo painted because that was how God saw man and the Greeks also painted heroes nude. Biagio da Cesena wanted the Frescos removed, but they were not, and in response, Michelangelo incorporated Biagio Da Cesena into the part depicting hell and gave him donkey ears. Supposedly he was infuriated by this, and went to the pope demanding it be removed, he responded with, "from purgatory maybe I could do something" and the painting remained.

I highly recommend anyone who has a chance to visit, VISIT! I learned so many things from this tour and really enjoyed the Christian point of view. Make sure to book an official tour if you get to go someday. I feel it a challenge to explain everything I learned because there was so much information, but we took many photos and I am going to just add all the photos below. Hopefully, a picture is worth a thousand words.

Also, there are no photos allowed in the Sistine Chapel, so I will attach some from the internet at the end as we followed the rules and didn't take any photos.

Getting into the Vatican Museums with out tour

St. Peters Basilica.

Our tour guide explaining the art and faith in the Sistine Chaple

Everything looks almost 3D but its painted

These are tapestries

Into the Gallery of Maps

The longest hall in the Vatican

Map of Rome

At the end of the Gallery of Maps

Heading to St. Peter's Basilica

Heading into St. Peter's Basilica

Inscription above jubilee door

This door is only opened every jubilee

Our amazing tour guide

The letters around the top are 2 meters tall. That's almost like a Hunter way up there.

More two meter tall letters

Swiss guards

I just had to send a postcard from the Vatican!

After the Vatican tour we headed to a really delicious pizza place

We took it to go and ate at the apartment before leaving

One was sausage and asparagus, one was ham and chickpea stuff, and the last one was mozzarella

We quickly headed to the airport to get on a flight to Barcelona. We booked a ZED on Vueling, a Spanish low-cost carrier based in Barcelona. This was the second ZED of our trip and Hunter had been checking loads (how many seats are available) a lot to make sure we got on! He booked us on the third from last flight of the night so we would have a few fallbacks in case something went wrong (always a smart move when non-revving) but we got on just fine, and the friendly gate agents gave us seats right away. The airplane was a lovely recently refurbished A320 and the experience was pretty much like any US carrier. We got a row to ourselves and I slept most the flight while Hunter planned out our time in Barcelona using the Lonely Planet guide from his iPad. We turned over the harbor into Barcelona and landed at the new T1 El Prat Intl. The airport was beautiful and modern, we were able to quickly make our way downstairs and find a metro into town. Hunter had used his interline discount to book us at a trendy modern hotel right in downtown Barcelona, and we were both excited to see if the deal he had gotten us was as good as it looked!

The hotel, as it turned out, was VERY modern.... the room numbers are built into floor lighting and the whole place feels like a mix between a techno club and a spaceship. While some parts were a bit weird, the shower was amazing and there was a beautiful rooftop deck with stunning citywide views. It was a nice vantage point from which to plan our adventures as you could see virtually every major site, including the Sagrada Familia. I was excited to be going to it tomorrow. Hunter had done some research and while online tickets were sold out it seemed like if we showed up early we would have no problem getting in. With our plan in place, we set early alarms to be sure to get there with plenty of time in the morning. But more on how that plan worked out later!