Holy Week: Rome and Florence!!

Last week, I had the privilege of going to Rome and Florence during Holy Week!  What an incredible experience.  I, along with my friends Julianna, Carrie, and Logan, explored Rome for three days and took a day trip to Florence. We saw so many amazing things!  It was definitely something that I will never forget!

Oh! And we had the BEST WEATHER EVER!!!  Beautiful sunshiney days with a cool breeze. So perfect.

Just so you are prepared, I took over 1,000 pictures.  Yes, OVER 1,000.  Ridiculous!  My poor camera needs a break.  Narrowing it down to 80ish was the best I could do!

While in Italy, I felt it was my duty to eat pizza, pasta, and gelato every single day.  Don't worry, I definitely accomplished it! (And now people are planning a beach weekend in a few days. 

Crazies! Don't they know I ate 5,000 calories a day for the last week??)

Anyways, here is our first meal.  We arrived Sunday night at about 11ish, and this little restaurant was right next to our hotel.

Chris's chicken alfredo:

Julianna's salad:

Logan's saucy pizza:

My delish mushroom and spinach ravioli: 

The next morning we woke up early and hopped on the metro for the first time.  We got to Vatican City at about 9ish and met up with our tour guide, Heinze!  Heinze took us through the Vatican Museums, the Sistine Chapel, and St. Peter's Basilica.

The entrance to the Vatican:

Inside the Vatican Courtyard! Fun fact: that is a gigantic green pine cone statue above my left shoulder.  I don't think Heinze covered this one...let's just go with "decoration".

Ok, so there is this silly "no pictures" rule in the Sistine Chapel...good thing I'm a rebel :)

So amazing! we just sat on a bench in the chapel for 15 minutes, just looking around.  So impressive!  My favorite part was the middle panel of God and man reaching out toward each other.  Heinze showed us that God was reaching out in a powerful way, while the human was reaching out weakly.  Heinze was very passionate, and I loved him :)

Next stop: St. Peter's Basilica!

St. Peter's is where Peter the apostle is buried (supposedly...there are contradicting reports, but he is apparently buried under the altar).  It is also the largest Christian church in the world.

Loved the ceiling:

The Pope has an awesome sense of humor...look what he makes the poor 20-something year old Papal guards wear:

Hilarious, you can't even see the giant red feathers sprouting out of his helmet.  So fashionable!

This is St. Peter's Square, probably one of my favorite places in Rome. We ended up here every day!

The outside of St. Peter's:

St. Angelo's Castle is right across the street from the square! 

View of the Vatican from down the street:

The river!! We sat on a ledge and just soaked up the sun and the sights for a while on Monday.

After chilling at the river, we headed to Plaza Navona, home to 3 famous fountains and a great atmosphere!

Baslica de St. Agostino:

The famous Giolitti, home of the best gelato in Rome according to our friend who lived in Italy, Google, and a cute old Italian man on the street:

YUMMMMMM!!

For dinner, we grabbed some pizza to go.  I got spinach, and it was the best spinach pizza everrrrr!!! My mom would've loved it.

 

Early Tuesday morning (really early...6:30am!), we caught a train to Florence.  Being the economically savvy (aka: poor) kids that we are, we decided against taking the shiny new train on the right (a 1.5 hour trip), and instead took the snazzy "Regional" train on the left (a 4 hour trip)...it was ok though.  There were basically 11 people on the entire train, and we nicknamed it The Reg.

We arrived in Florence at about 10:45am, and immediately stumbled upon The Duomo:

It was so gigantic, I didn't really get a great picture of the whole thing.  It was built in the late 1200's through the early 1400s, and the main designer was Brunelleschi.  It took so long to build because nobody could figure out how to build such a huge dome out of brick.  Even today, it is the largest brick dome in the world.  

The cool thing about Florence is that it is kind of little, and it is easy to just wander around and find everything you want to see.  Such a neat city!

This is St. John's Baptistry.  It was built in 1049!  I remember learning about the gold doors in an art history class in high school, so it was cool to see them in real life!

This is the bell tower next to the Duomo, we climbed to the top! (SO many stairs! We had to stop and take breaks a few times. Whew.)

Pretty Florence.

We then headed off in search of David, or Dave, as we liked to call him.  We finally found a ridiculously long line of people and began to wait with them.  It took a solid 1.5 hours in line to see the guy, but Dave was worth it.

Happy campers in line to see Dave!  

FYI: the blog is about to get a little PG-13, so consider yourselves warned.

I took two illegal pictures of Dave!  He is a monster!  I had no idea he was 17 feet tall, so that was a surprise.

We also saw a room full of hundreds of busts and over 40 giant statues!  The museum also included 6 big statues that Michelangelo had started carving, but hadn't finished.  It was neat to see his art in progress!

A few pictures around Firenze (the Italian name for Florence).

A sweet little piazza.

Michelangelo's tomb in the Santa Croce Church!

The church had so many tombs!  Each rectangle is a marker of one...we could just walk on them like it was no big deal...so crazy.

The Arno River!

My favorite part of Florence has to be the Ponte Vecchio (old bridge).  It has little shops built all along it, held up by little stilts!  The little shops used to be for butchers, but now they house expensive jewelry shops.  It was fun to look around at all of the fanciness :)

At about 7pm, it started raining...hard.  I hadn't brought an umbrella, so Julianna and I made a run for it to the train station.

We took The Reg back to Roma and quickly went to bed, we were exhausted after a beautiful day in Firenze!

Wednesday morning, we went to Trevi Fountain! 

This is one of my favorite places in Roma, by far.  We arrived at about 9 am, and there was just a handful of people there.  I am so greatful for this!  We got to hang out and take pictures and just soak it all in without a lot of other people there with us.  We visited the fountain again on Friday  morning, along with about 200 other people and guards who loved blowing their whistles at tourists.  I'm glad we got to see the Trevi in perfect weather and peaceful quiet on 

Wednesday :)

Tossing in a coin!

After visiting the fountain, we made our way to the Pontifical North American College to see if we could get tickets to Pope Benedict's audience at 10:30.  Luckily, Sister Maria was the coolest, most helpful woman EVER and hooked us up with tickets to the audience! We got to see the Pope, yall!

Papa B (as we affectionately call him) cruisin by in the Pope Mobile.  He actually drove right in front of me, but my camera sometimes turns off randomly, and it decided to do so right when he was waving at us :(

Papa B!

Papa B welcomed everyone, prayed, blessed us and our families, blessed rosaries, and individually recognized each group who had come to the audience.  He did so in over 10 languages!!  It was so fun to hear him speak in a language, like German, recognize the Germans who traveled to Rome, and then all of the German's would cheer and wave their flag.  This went on for about 10 different regions.  The best part was when he started speaking in Spanish.  He hadn't said 5 words before everyone was cheering, clapping, and waving flags from Spain, Chile, Mexico, and Argentina.  We Spanish speakers def represented, and Papa B was so smiley and happy the whole time he spoke in Spanish :) 

After the audience, we ate lunch on the Spanish Steps!

My interesting pizza :)

Then we headed back to the North American College, where Sister Maria once again hooked us up.  She gave us tickets to the Chrismal Mass at St. Peter's Basilica.  I loved this woman, she was absolutely hilarious and so sweet to us!

Our last stop of the day was the Pantheon, one of the oldest remaining buildings from ancient Rome.  It was half-covered in scaffolding, as was almost everything else we saw in Rome.  Apparently that is normal?  

Thursday morning we got up and waited in line for the Chrismal Mass.  We had pretty good seats, and we got to see Papa B again!

Helloooo Papa!

The mass was in Latin, and they sang almost all of it!  It was such an interesting experience, I'm so glad I was able to go!

Outside of St. Peter's:

For lunch, I had 4 cheese Gnocchi, which is like pasta except the noodles are made of potato, I think.  It was yummy.

The Colosseum!  

The colosseum is next door to the Roman Forum.

Such perfect weather!  Check out that sky!  

Ancient ruins:

 

Some sights around Roma:

Needless to say, I loved Roma!  And Florence!  I had an amazing time and saw things I never imagined I would see in real life!  I feel so blessed to be having these experiences.

My next mission is to take my family to Rome and Florence, I kept thinking how much they would love it the whole time I was there!

These next two weeks are filled with classes, projects, homework, sitting by the river, and hanging out with my roomie in the bunk bed before she goes home on the 23rd!  Then it's off to Paris from the 22nd-25th, my birthday on the 26th, and flying home on May 1st!!!!

I apologize if it took you 5 hours, 3 bathroom breaks, and a siesta to read all of this.  I just didn't want to leave anything out!

Besitos,

julie