Tiff & Hunter: Italy Day 1: The Vatican and The Pantheon

Today is day 3 of being home. Life has been a little crazy here (more on that later) so it has taken me a while to get around to posting. However, only being slightly adjusted back to my time zone is working in the blog's favor this morning - my day can't really start for another hour so I'll spend these wee hours of the morning playing a little catch up.

I can't even begin to describe how incredible everything was last week. We. Loved. Every. Minute. Hopefully sharing some of the pictures we took will help give a sense of just how amazing it was.

I finally told Hunter where we were going as we were getting ready to land in Detroit. We had a short connection time and had to pick something up in the airport before we could board so I wanted to make sure we had plenty of time. Needless to say, he was pretty stoked. I was too and I knew where we had been going all along! It felt so good to finally talk to Hunter about everything I had been planning and all that we were going to do.

We had some slight hiccups in finding the place we were staying - our driver from the airport didn't have a working phone apparently, didn't speak hardly any English, and what we were expecting to be a bed and breakfast ended up being just a bed (which still worked out perfectly well). After getting into the apartment and settled we headed out to explore. First stop: gelato. This would be the first of many.

Our first tour was of the Vatican that afternoon. We had a little time to kill so we took the scenic route walking there. Here is a good view of St. Peter's Basilica and the Tiber River.

According to our map, this building is so heavy that it is borderline to falling in on itself. Our map of Rome was excellent and gave us all sorts of fun and helpful information. There are random buildings like this everywhere you go in Rome. What happened to wanting to build awesome buildings like this? Our modern buildings just aren't anywhere near as awe inspiring.

Welcome to St. Peter's Square!

Hunter wanted to document places his Frisbee has gone. He is even starting a whole facebook photo album and plans to add to it in the future. I'm still not sure how I feel about it, but here is one of the first photos you will find in that album.

Pretty water fountain.

View of St. Peter's Basilica from inside the Vatican.

Pine Cone Square inside the Vatican. It has a real name I just can't remember it at the moment and our tour guide referred to it as pine cone square, which seemed fitting. While we were in this square learning all about what we were going to see once inside the Sistine Chapel (which you can't take pictures of - so you'll just have to take my work that it's incredible), a girl in one of the tours ahead of us passed out. She collapsed right to the hard ground with a resounding thump. Moral of the story: drink a lot of water. It's quite surprising how little we had to go to the bathroom when taking into consideration how much we drank. Needless to say, there was a fair amount of sweating involved.

I just loved seeing so many buildings like this! This style of architecture really amazes me.

Inside the Vatican Museums everything is covered in frescoes like this. Almost all the ceilings and walls - every square inch - have incredible paintings covering them.

There are also a lot of sculptures everywhere you look.

I wasn't kidding when I said the walls and ceilings are covered.

Inside St. Peter's Basilica it is every bit as beautiful. I cannot even begin to fathom how places like this were constructed without our modern tools. It. Is. Incredible.

Swiss guards stand throughout the Vatican. They are easily identifiable by their uniforms.....

Close up of the outside of St. Peter's.

Next stop: The Pantheon.

Here is a good view of the ceiling from the inside. It is a huuuuge dome.

No Roman building would be complete without the classic pillars.

In some cases gigantic pillars.

This was the view we had as we enjoyed the first of many heaping plates of pasta. It doesn't get much better than this. It is seriously almost unreal.