Civitavecchia, Rome, Italy

Civitavecchia, Rome, Italy           Tuesday, March 31, 2015

What a day! Sunshine, 70 degrees! We are disembarking our ship, Zuiderdam. It is going to Palermo, Sicily for a two week dry dockage and renovation. Holland America is adding 23 more rooms on the tenth floor where Larry and I enjoyed working on our tan. It is a gorgeous ship and I can’t imagine what they will be doing to upgrade it.

We left the ship at 8:00 am once the captain gave us the signal that the ship was cleared. We caught a port shuttle into town and then took a bus to the train station for .80 euro each. From there we walked about a block to where we were spending the night, Hotel San Georgio, a four star Italian treasure right on the beach.

 

 

After dropping our bags, Larry and I boarded a train for 6 Euro each and rode to the Vatican stop where we wound our way through the about two blocks of busy streets to come to Vatican Square.

                                                        Boarding the train ....easy peasy!

 

OH MY! What a sight! We visited on the Tuesday before Easter with about two million other tourists.

 

The lines going into the Vatican were miles long and wound around the fenced in areas of chairs that were set up for the coming Easter Sunday service from the Pope.

 

 

We bypassed the opportunity to enjoy the wait, and went directly to the Vatican Museum, so thankful that we had purchased tickets to enter before leaving the US.

 

 

 

 The wait in line to purchase tickets was two hours. How do we know this? W met a couple who asked us about our tickets and they got in line to buy them. We saw them at the café for lunch two hours later….they had just gained entrance. Whoa!….we had already walked through most of the museum.

What an extraordinary collections of statues, busts, carpets, baths(yes tubs), paintings,  and artifacts in an exquisite building! It was overwhelming! The amount of tourists in the museum was overwhelming as well! We shuffled through and got a feel that the past Popes each had continually added an unbelievable amount of valuable art works to this humungous collection. 

 

You probably could spend two full days looking at this collection if you were really into art. It was unbelievable!

                                         The ceilings and walls were extravagantly decorated or painted.

This collection compares to that of the  Hermitage Palace in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Our favorite collection was the artifacts from Egypt.

Even a mummy...remarkable!

The Cistine Chaple was so awesome....just simply incredible.

Lunch outside in the sunshine was a welcome relief from being inside.

After a little lunch we took the metro for 1.50 Euro to the Trevi Fountain. Two years ago we visited it at night and had such good memories that we wanted to see it during the daylight. When we arrived we found it to be in renovation….sand blasting and scaffolding  were all going on amongst the crowd of people walking around it….Mama MIA!…..This was the last thing we expected to see!

 

From here we jumped back onto the Metro to the Termini train stations and took three escalators up to the tremendous Roma Train Station and walked to train track 27 to catch the Civitavecchia train. Around 5:30. We arrived back at the hotel to have a little dinner and fall into the bed around 9:00pm. We were happy to reflect on all the sights of Rome over dinner. What an experience! Our brains were in full overload from all the things we had seen in one day!

              The sight of the beach in Civitavecchia was a welcome from the city life in Rome.