Rome

After spending time in Istanbul it was time to travel to Rome and other parts of Italy. There was a great excitement heading to Italy as my father side of the family was originally from the southern part of Italy in Arena , Calabria. I was also really exited to see the architecture and see the culture of Italy. I was not disappointed when we arrived in Rome things seemed to be larger than I had expected it to be, the buildings the fountains the piazzas. All had this grandiose feeling behind it. We could only afford to stay in a dorm room but this seem to work out fine. Rome is one of those cities best seen by foot, as everything is so closely located. I was amazed that around every corner there was another monument or another outlandishly extravagant church. On the first day we decided to just walk around the local area and we discovered a church close to the hostel that was one of the main pilgrimage churches in the catholic religion.  I remember as I had walked In the door I was totally shocked and taken back by its sheer size and scale of the church. The roof being 4-5 stories high was covered in gold. It literally left me speechless. I had never witnessed anything like this before. And that was one of many that we visited in the time we spent there. We visited the pantheon a massive church with a monstrous dome roof. It was almost impossible to get a decent photograph of this as it was so huge. The good thing was that the churches were free for you to visit. The churches on the inside were all truly covered with statues and huge paintings absolutely lavishly decorated.  We also visited the collosseum  and once again this was something truly remarkable, but I couldn’t help think when I was there about the people who would have died building and fighting in this truly remarkable building. We were going to go inside of the collesseum but we didn’t want to fight the huge crowd of people waiting to get in. You couldn’t visit Italy without trying pizza and on the first night we decided to go to the local pizza bar, they have the pizza made up in large slab style and you pay by the kilogram and then he takes it out the back and heats it up. We decided to visit the Vatican city and this is well worth a visit for anyone going to Rome it was absolutely amazing, in this post you can see the photographs taken inside the main area. It truly is difficult to put it into words as I think the pictures tell the story better. We also visited the Sistine Chapel situated in the Vatican and this was truly breath taking, no photographs could be taken inside as also no talking was the other rule, but people were certainly talking in there. It was the first time I have ever seen a masters work so we certainly sat in there for a while, we were advised to try and find a seat in there as the guards push people in the door and out pretty quickly. The amount of people in the Vatican and Sistine Chapel was staggering but I still found it quite manageable.