Our last stop on the trip was back in Rome for a day in Vatican City, after our drive from San Gimignano. We tried to get into the Vatican on our first day in Rome, but with hour+ long waits to just get into the walls, we decided to try again on our way back. Thankfully, we got very lucky and were able to walk RIGHT IN without any line at all (for the record this was mid-October, mid-day, on a Friday).

We were pleasantly surprised by how modern the Vatican Museum was, and quite disappointed by how little information there was available for visitors. You must pay to get in, which is understandable, however a map is not included in that fee. A map was quite expensive (at least the ones we found) but thankfully Rick Steves’ Rome 2013 guide was more than a capable guide for us, and a trusted travel companion by this point in our trip.

The Vatican Museum is huge. Had we more time and energy, and maybe interest in art, we certainly could have spent the day in there. I think I was expecting more religious relics to be housed in the museum, but it was mostly an art museum, with rooms and hallways just packed with statues and paintings and murals.  Below I’ve included just a small fraction, but you’ll get the picture.

Disclaimer: for one reason or another Kyle gave me camera-duty for the day, so we’ve got quite a lot of photos of art to share from the Vatican Museum. These may not be SFW…

Remind me offline to tell you about the fig leaves on the male parts. It’s a great story.

Prior to making it into the Sistine Chapel, the “main event” I’ll call it, there was the LONGEST map hallway. We spent a good 45 minutes in here. I left it at one point to find the bathroom and came back to Kyle only about 15 feet from where I had left him.

The stairs out of the museum were quite interesting, and then there was me back outside of the big doors we had to get in through (which were by this point closed and locked for the day). Since we completely missed a secret passageway from the Sistine Chapel to Saint Peter’s Basilica, we now had to walk all the way around the city to get there.

The line to get in was understandably ridiculous. So, we instead decided to just take a few photos of the outside as the sun set and we waited for dinnertime.  But then, something strange happened – the line went away! It was still moving into the basilica, so we hopped in.

We have at least 100 photos of the inside of St. Peter’s Basilica, below are just a handful. I really just wish the photos could do this justice, everything in here was so big, you couldn’t do much but stand in awe.

And with that, I conclude our posts from Italy! I might decide to share a few more travel-points soon with photos that didn’t fit, but for the most part that was our entire trip.

We loved traveling abroad so much we’ve already got another one on the calendar – and it’s soon! I’ve had more than a handful of friends (one of which we’re going to visit) warn us that travel is addicting, I think they’re right.