We woke up around 4:30 am to catch our 6:45 train to Rome, and although we were sad to leave Venice, we were looking forward to our next adventure. Upon arriving at Hotel Felice, we discovered some interesting language barriers between us and the hotel staff (who, according to their website, are multilingual). Marco, the one who seemed to be in charge, spoke some very broken English mixed with a lot of Italian (and sounded just like Super Mario). After a fun game of bilingual charades, we made it to our room only to discover we had one double bed and three people...back downstairs for another round!

Once we settled in, we got ready to head out to Vatican City to see the Sistine Chapel and St. Peter's Basilica. We had a very hard time navigating the area we were staying in and had to stop and ask for directions. We rode the bus to Vatican City but didn't know how to get in! The walls around the Vatican are daunting, much higher than I thought, and quite intimidating. We had to approach a guard at the entrance to the Vatican Museum to ask how to get in, turns out, you have to pay to get into the museum and then walk through the museum to get to the chapel. The Vatican Museum was incredible, there were dozens of rooms with just statues and busts, and then rooms of tapestries, old maps, ancient artifacts, and gorgeous details. Honestly, the rooms themselves were as beautiful as the art in them. Getting to the Sistine Chapel was very complicated, we had to go up and down stairs and through hallways that seemed more like a construction site than a museum. When we finally reached the Sistine Chapel, it was pretty anticlimatic. The room was kept dark to preserve the ceiling and we weren't supposed to take pictures...oops! It was pretty hot and crowded in there so after all the hype, we only spent a few minutes in the actual Sistine Chapel! It was getting late by the time we left Vatican City so we had dinner at a restaurant nearby (with a waiter that looked like Luke Wilson) and headed back to the hotel to get ready for tomorrow!

The next day we scheduled a night-bus tour of the city through our hotel, and tried to get directions to the Catacombs. We had to stop several times to ask for directions again (Rome was very complicated to get around!) and we made it to the bus that was supposed to take us out there. It was in a really secluded area but we didn't know what to expect so we accidentally got off at the wrong stop and had to wait for the next bus to take us. We finally made it to the Catacombs of St. Callisto (Calixtus) and took a guided tour which explained the history of the catacombs. They were built at the end of the second century in response to over crowding and a shortage of land for burials, and a place for executed Christians to be buried secretly. There were four stories to the catacombs that we visited, and we were able to go down to the second story, I am not sure how far down we were, but I think the tombs go down as far as 65 feet or so. Interestingly, the oldest tombs are closest to the surface and the farther down you go, the more recent (10th century or so) they are. It was a little scary going that far underground, it was really dark and damp feeling, but a nice break from the heat! The tombs (called loculi) were built into the walls and kind of stacked on top of eachother. Families would built a chamber where everyone's tomb could be placed together and often there were religious frescos painted on the walls. I was able to get a photo of one of the frescos but you were technically not supposed to take pictures there either... We didn't see any bones or any sarcophagi because the remains from the second story had been moved to another level for sanitary reasons (we were told). We saw a room where Popes had been buried (but had been moved) and the tomb where St. Cecilia was buried. Although the thought of where we were is scary, it is pretty cool that we saw something so ancient that people from the 2nd century were buried there! We headed back to get ready for our night tour, which, ended up being a little useless, we couldn't get good pictures out of the bus windows and by the time we got to most places, it was dark out. We did stop by the Trevi Fountain though, and it was incredible! It is so huge you can hear the water pouring out over the statues before you can see it. There were soo many people standing around by the fountain it was a little scary and tough to get a good picture- but really beautiful! We made a wish in the fountain- throwing one coin means you'll return to Rome, throwing two is good luck for marriage, and three coins is for divorce! We only threw two... That evening we went to dinner at a seafood pasta restaurant near our hotel and Nickie and I ordered Scampi Fettucini...which came out with the entire body of the shrimp- eww!! So, we barely ate, had some dessert, and went to bed early again!

The next day, our last in Rome, we took a 'hop-on hop-off' tour with a double decker bus. The tour was great because we had a perfect view of the city and didn't have to mess with the confusing public transportation! We stopped at the Colloseum and took a guided tour where we learned the history of what took place inside. We also saw the Roman Forum, which is the largest space of Ancient Roman remains in the city. We drove by the place where Julius Caesar was stabbed on the Ides of March, now it is just a small area of ruins in the middle of an intersection. We also saw where the Chariot Races used to take place. We saw so much on the tour, it is hard to remember the names of everything but the pictures are worth a thousand words anyway! We headed back towards the hotel, had some pizza for dinner, and got ready to depart for Milan the next day. After a crazy three days in Rome, we were ready for a vacation in Milan and Nice!

-Amber