Our last day in Rome, how sad!

We had a bit of a lazy day today, Ewen slept in and i had a talk to my family on skype. we wrote out a few post cards and wandered around the campsite.
we had lunch at the bar at the hostel and then sat outside our cabin reading for a few hours.
at 3pm we got the shuttle bus to the Vatican and went to St Peters Basilica & Square. i was under the impression we were going to the Popes gardens and there would be lovely green grass, sadly it was all concrete but still very nice. we got some gelato before going in (now a dietary staple for us).
We had to line up to get inside but the line was nothing compared to the Colosseum, we entertained ourselves doing a few pope poses and Ewen talked loudly about people pushing in making the pope cross. This nun pushed in front of us, actually we saw quite a few nuns pushing in, they were pretty eager to get inside.
Before going inside they put your bags through a scanner and you have to walk through a metal detector, you have to dress conservatively and they were turning away a lot of people who had shoulders or knees exposed.
The first section we went into was filled with coffins i suppose, apparantly they really do have the remains of the popes in them! it was a bit of a shock for me, dozens of nuns and other religious people kneeling in front of various coffins praying. one in particular, the display dedicated to John Paul the second, had lots of people kneeling in front of it, praying and many were crying, people threw flowers in, one lady even threw in an entire bouquet of roses, people were writing letters and throwing those in too. Ewen took a sneaky photo of some of the display.


Here is one the guards in their funky uniforms

The church here was incredible, the dome is 120m high and the walls and roof were ornately decorated. It is in this church that the Pietà is housed, it is behind glass because apparently a crazy Australian Geologist attacked it with a hammer a few years ago.

The church was a pretty serious place to be in, with lots of nuns wandering around and people making the cross on themselves, people kneeling in front of alters praying, i'm not sure me and Ewen should have been in there. I kept making jokes about the popes looking like Santa in their red and white hats and jackets and Ewen kept making jokes about the statues looking like batman.


this photo is looking out over the square. on Wednesdays this is where the pope does his thing.

posing as a statue

After leaving here we went shopping for some pope-a-ners. But most things were a bit out of our price range, we ended up getting a little calender filled with pictures of the pope and then got some more gelato.

a street outside the Vatican.