Our Wakes: 2016

As we were preparing Terus for the winter, we started to visit Rome when the weather was good. Rome is a city rich in antique buildings built during ancient Roman times. But Rome is also the city were the Vatican is located. The Vatican is the center of the catholic religion. We startedour tours of Rome by visiting the Vatican. St Peter’s place is well-known but seeing it, it is really impressive. Inside the basilica of St Peter’s we could admire numerous masterpieces but the one that we liked the most was Michelangelo's Pieta. Even if I have seen it twice before, I still find it unique in its beauty.  There are always a lot of people in the Basilica, but you never have the impression that it is overcrowded. We also visited the Vatican Museum. Every day, thousands of visitors enter the place and I highly recommend that you buy your tickets in advance to avoid having to queue for hours to get into the museum. Once inside the museum, you will find a lot of marvelous statues and other religious artifacts.  Unfortunately, we were very disappointed by the Sistine Chapel because of the huge crowd there and the guards very aggressively having to shout constantly “no photos and we request silence!” Luckily the paintings of the chapel  are very impressive and certainly a must see in Rome. After the chapel we walked along long corridors where of lot of artifacts are on display. Unbelievable the number of artifacts the Vatican has! Luckily, this part is easier to visit and taking photos is allowed. Another day, we returned to the Vatican to visit the tombs of the popes located in the basement of the Basilica. The recent tombs are not as sophisticated as the older ones. In the middle, you have the tomb of St Peter, the first Christian pope, but this one can only be seen from a certain distance. We also visited other places in Rome that are well known worldwide. We visited  the Pantheon, the Trevi fountain, Plaza Spagna with the Trinity church as well as the Victor Emmanuelle II monument  with the flame of the unknown soldier. None of those places will be described in this site but I recommend that you click on the hyperlinks if you want more details. If you want to visit a quiet place, we recommend Ostia Antica that can be reached easily by subway. The city of Ostia Antica was once very crowded as it was the harbor of Rome. In the middle you have a large Roman road with  the ruins of shops on each side. More towards the center of the city, you have the theatre, the temples, the latrines  and the thermes (hot baths). If you continue further and go to the side, you come into the residential area where rich people had houses with beautiful wall paintings and ceramic floors. Some people even say that Ostia Antica  is a  better place to visit than Pompeii because it is much less crowded.  Even  if we have already visited many places in Rome, we still have a long list of other places to see, such as the Coliseum, The Roman Forum, Villa Borgese and Tiberine island etc… but we are saving those places for 2017.