Location: Vatican City, Italy

S: Today we woke up to the tremors of a 6.6 magnitude earthquake that hit central Italy. Don’t worry parentals! All we got was some shaky shelves and a sense of confusion regarding our personal state of nausea, before realizing that we were, in fact, not sick. Today’s adventure led us over to the Vatican for a day of stair climbing and sightseeing. We happily found out that on the last Sunday of every month you can enter the Vatican for free! This meant though that we were likely to run into a long line-up, so we boogied over there early.

M: This is probably one of our earliest mornings of the trip, and boy did it feel like it. We met up with Tobi, Matt and John and got in line with our eyes still half open. But it was worth it! Free entry and a short line up later, we were headed for the dome. I didn’t even give Savanna the option of taking the elevator, it was time for stairs! We came out of the stairs inside the dome and looked down on the end of a mass. It was beautiful to see the details of the inside of the dome from this higher perspective. I thought this was all we were going to get to see, but it turns out there are even more stairs going to the very top with an outside viewpoint. A few hundred more stairs and we arrived at what was the highlight (S: GET IT?!) of my day – the view of the city from the highest point of the Vatican. The sky was blue, the air was fresh and the sun was warm. We looked out and tried to find different sites we visited yesterday, like the Pantheon and the Colosseum. From here, we could also see a few of the hills in Rome. Sadly though, we only knew the name of one. Even Tobi with his seemingly endless wealth of Roman knowledge could only think of Palatine Hill. I could have stayed up here for a good chunk of the day, but there was so much more to see. We headed back down, stopping for surprisingly reasonably priced refreshments on the roof of St. Peter’s Basilica.

We grabbed some audio guides for the inside of the basilica and agreed to meet back up in an hour. There is so much to gawk at that an hour was not nearly enough time. We ended up spending extra time in here because every single thing you look at is steeped in history and symbolic. I found the visit to the Vatican to be very moving because we were in the heart of something that holds so much meaning for so many people and has had an enormous impact on the world. I have to say, the second time around the Vatican is equally impressive. And apparently the Pope spoke at noon but we didn’t know! I guess I’ll have to go back a third time and see if I can catch him.

S: After the Vatican we grabbed some lunch and gelato, and all hit a wall mid afternoon. Stairs. Our tiredness had caught up with us so we decided to come back to the hostel and take a quick siesta. We booked a few trains and hostels and took care of administration duties, napped and took showers and felt refreshed for an evening of fun!

M: We went to a classy little wine bar for a few drinks and dinner. John even put on his dress shorts! The food was delicious but small. So what did we do? Of course we found a little Irish bar and ordered some fried food while playing 21. There were no proposals involved this time, although Matt did have to sing and we all had to dance. We miraculously won the game, and with that we called it a night and parted ways.

S&M