Vatican

On my second day in Rome i woke up early as I had a reservation for the Vatican museum at 8 am. I left the hostel and had a quick standing espresso outside of the train station. I walked down the stairs and boarded the train and was greeted by a bunch of other kids going to the Vatican for Jubilee celebration. I walked up to the Vatican Museum and was fortunate enough to be able to skip the line as I had already bought a ticket. The museum was super cool, there were so many artifacts from around the world that just “somehow” ended up in the Vatican. My favourite part was definitely the Sistine chapel. I think I spent half an hour in there, just looking at every detail on the ceiling and every wall. After the museum, I walked around the block to Saint Peter’s Basilica, but there was a line that was about two hours long to get in. As I had a reservation to climb the tower I was a bit worried so I ran to the front of the line and saw that there was a separate entrance for people who had already booked tickets. The only problem was I needed to push my way through 1000 people standing in line to get to the separate entrance. A European family came up to me and asked me if I knew where the online ticket entrance was. After I told them we made an agreement that we would stick together and fight our way through the giant crowd. It took five minutes of shoving through people just to get to the separate entrance. The Basilica was astoundingly, beautiful and so much bigger than I had thought it would be. There was a service going on for Jubilee and music was playing when I came up into it. I didn’t stay for long as it was so busy and decided to climb the tower a bit early. The climb was very narrow and steep with lots of people, it honestly made me feel a bit claustrophobic at times, but the view at the top was absolutely stunning.

At this point, I was kind of tired of the giant groups all around the Vatican so decided to leave. Upon exiting, I realized that there was a full on parade going both directions of the street that leads into Saint Peter‘s basilica with huge groups, singing and dancing on their way there and on their way back. Being here for Jubilee has been very interesting and I feel grateful to be able to see the joy that people had when they finally get to see the Vatican. It is not often I get to see people making once in a lifetime pilgrimages and it really made my day in the Vatican quite joyful.

I stopped at a little pasta place for some carbonara for lunch and walked across town, stopping at Basilica’s along the way. I took the train back to the hostel and did a free walking tour. I met a guy from Finland, and after the tour was over, we went to go get apperol spritz’s outside of the pantheon and then went to get some pasta and beer. It was an amazing day in Rome and my experience at the Vatican was very moving and it made me very happy to see all the Catholics that get to realize their dreams of seeing the Vatican.