Death by Art

Good Morning!

Nathan and I just finished breakfast on our second day here in Rome and are loving it! It's pretty amazing here, we'll just be wakling around and you turn a corner and BOOM! a ruin or HUGE statue or something. It's really interesting because the buildings are all the same height (about five stories tall) so you can't really see anything until you're right up on it, but there sure is lots to see.

I'm proud to say we've already mastered the subway system which is nice and clean and fast...but a little crowded in the evenings.

Yesterday we tackled the Vatican City which was quite an accomplishment but so incredibly worth it. You walk four miles if you do the whole course of the museum (which we did). It was overwhelming because literally every square inch was covered in art. there were the statues and art on the walls, and then the floors were mosaics that were thousands of years old culled from villas all over Italy and then the ceiling covered in frescos and these special flower carvings (I forget what they were made of) I loved the statues. It was funny, there is this big long hall after you exit the Egypt and Mesopotamia section (where we saw Amunhotep's sarcophagus and Nebachadnezzer's cylinder) anyway, this big long hall FULL of huge statues and busts just sitting on shelves (I touched a couple) and you're thinking, "WOW this is amazing" And then after about 500 yd.s of that you turn a corner into another huge hall with the mosaic floors and gilt ceilings with alcoves each holding a statue and you realize, "oh, that place where I just was...that was where they kept the reject statues, these are the ones that are a big deal!" Until you go into the next part of the museum and statues get even bigger and more famous, and so it goes, and so it goes.

There is much more to say about the vatican museum and st. Peter's basilica, but we've got some ruins waiting for us, so I'll have to fill you all in later.

Ciao!