We were hoping to go to Orvieto today, but it was still very cloudy when we woke up so decided to wait until tomorrow. Even though we were worried about the crowds, we decided to go over to the Vatican Museum today. After breakfast in the apartment we headed down Corso Vittorio Emanuele looking in all the store windows along the way. We stopped for a cappuccino and tea before crossing the Tiber and finding the nice pedestrian-only Borgo Pio. We found Restorante I Tre Pupozzi just as it was starting to rain hard and went inside to split an Insalata Capricci and a cacio de peppi pasta with beer and wine and a lemon torta for desert.
The rain had stopped again as we headed towards the Vatican around 2:00 PM where we passed four tour buses dropping off their passengers on the way to the main entrance. We were falsely lulled into thinking things would be okay since we just walked in the front entrance and picked up our tickets and walked up the big curving ramp into the museum without seeing too many people. We started out following Rick Steves' tour of the Vatican Museum and made it through the first four or five rooms before the crowds just kind of overtook us and there was no more stopping to look at things -- it was just following the people in front of you so you didn't get pushed down and walked on by the people behind you. All along the way you could see people raise their arms above the crowds taking pictures of random things, not aiming or knowing what they were taking pictures of but having to have pictures to show their friends back home! The crowds finally pushed us through the Raphael Rooms where we had to go up and down stairs to finally end up in the Sistine Chapel. We had thought the Sistine Chapel was crowded when we first visited in 1999, but this time it was just amazingly horrible. The entire chapel was packed with people standing shoulder to shoulder and the roar from all those voices in that small enclosed space was incredible. No one was moving and no one was even looking up at the ceiling, they were just standing there talking. The guards had to make continuous announcements on their loud speaker asking people to please be quiet and to please stop taking pictures. Luckily Rick Steves book showed us a shortcut directly to St. Peter's Basilica saving us the 30 minute long march back through the museum.
The shortcut out of the Vatican Museum funneled us directly into St. Peter's Basilica without having to go through the metal detectors or security. There were allot of people in the church, but it is SO HUGE that we could at least move around easily and breath. Large areas inside the church were roped off and chairs were being set up inside these areas making us think something was going to happen in the near future. After walking around the church seeing Michelangelo's Pieta, the dome, the main altar, etc. we headed out into St. Peter's Square where even more chairs were being set up. We noticed that there was a line of people extending all the way around the square (which is gigantic) and we wondered if they were just waiting to go through security to go into the church or if they were waiting to attend some kind of special ceremony (the papal audience is usually Wednesday morning).
We definately needed our gelato and wine at our usual place at Largo di Torre Argentina where we bought a beautiful apple tart for desert since we had decided to eat a "picnic" dinner at the apartment again.
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