We reached the Vatican just a little bit after 8am. To our dismay, a very very long line had formed already and we were told it was a 3 hour wait. While we were trying to decide what we should do, we met this lady who was in charge of a tour group. She told us that if each of us payed her $20 extra than the regular admission, we could completely bypass the long line and the 3 hour wait. It really didn't take that much convincing! We paid, waited for some other people to join our group and soon we were passing everyone else in line. For a second, you felt like you were apart of the "cool" group.
Everyone in the tour group was given headsets and our tour guide spoke into a mic to explain some of the individual art pieces within the Vatican.
We walked along through a couple of courtyards.
Everyone was taking pictures madly since there were so many statues around. I tried to keep it simple by taking pictures of ones that stood out to me.
Cleopatra
Apollo: Protector of the artists
We were told by our tour guide, that if you spent at least 1 minute looking at every piece of art in the Vatican, it would take you 12 years to get all the way through!
You didn't see one bare ceiling there. Each one was covered with some painting or carving or decor of some kind.
Since there were so many people there, it was difficult sometimes to really take it all in.
I took a short video:
There were people there of all different ages, nationalities and religions. It was an interesting thing to all be brought together by this one specific place.
After a while, you start to get a little saturated by all the art you see. Things start blurring together a little bit. It was hard to not want to take a picture of absolutely everything, but I tried to take pics of things that I really liked. These are just a few out of the many:
Since there were so many people and so much art, I actually lost my tour group. Luckily we had all agreed to meet at the Sistine Chapel around 12:30pm.
