The Vatican...

I wrote about these nuns sitting beside me in a café just outside the Vatican in an earlier post.  I wanted to get a pic of them at the table because they were so amusing, but that seemed rude.  Instead, I got this shot of three of them when they all got up to select a dessert.

 

 

St. Peter's Square

St. Peter's Cathedral.  If you look closely, you can see the line waiting to enter at the base of the cathedral.  The line extends out of the frame and ended way up behind where I was standing to take this picture...a 2 hour wait, and the line for the museum was even longer.

A portion of the columned promenade around St. Peter's Square.

 

I took this from the steps of the cathedral using my zoom.  This is a close-up of a few of the statues on top of the promenade.

The Vatican guard.  Not easy to keep a straight face in that uniform, but they seemed very, very serious.

 

 

The beautiful spiral staircase inside the Vatican museum.

This is my tour group examining one of the Emperor Nero's tubs. The woman holding the scarf-draped baton is our guide, Antonella.  The gray-haired gentleman standing beside her is Ajit from India.  He was so sweet to me...he held my hand every time we went up or down stairs and always made sure I could get a good spot for any pictures I wanted to take.  He was like a kind and gentle grandfather. 

This is a statue of a fertility goddess...I believe it speaks for itself!

This is the ceiling of the map room in the museum.  It was even more impressive than the map collection.

This is on the ceiling of another gallery.  Believe it or not, this is one-dimensional; a painting using perspective and shadowing to give the illusion of the depth of sculpture.

This is one panel representing about 1/3 of one of the huge tapestries on display in the tapestry hall of the museum.  It's hard to tell the enormity of the size in the photo, but this one portion would probably cover 2 queen-sized beds easily.

 

 

These are the "holy doors" on the front of St. Peter's Cathedral.  They are only opened every 25 years.

This is inside the cathedral looking towards Bellini's canopy over the altar.

To give some perspective to the height, I took this standing at the bottom of one of the canopy's columns.  It is 98ft high from base to tip.

 

 

I took this shot of the interior of the dome using the zoom function on my camera.  Sometimes using the zoom creates pictures that turn out fuzzy, but this one wasn't too bad.