It's so bizarre to see how the ancient cultures interacted with each other! Throughout Rome we have seen bits of Egypt and Greece. There are several Egyptian obelisks around the city. There are Roman or Greek statues containing sphinxes and pharaohs. And there's this huge transition period that occurred when the Christians took over. Almost everything in Rome has been converted to churches. The obelisks all have metal caps on the top with crosses even though you can still see the Egyptian hieroglyphs up the sides of them. There are temples to Greek gods, built using the old architectural styles, that have been converted to churches. Christian frescos and biblical figures are all over the formerly pagan temples - it's funny.
We saw the Vatican Museum and the Sistine Chapel today. The entire place was covered from floor to ceiling with paintings and sculptures. I can't believe that out of all of that, the only thing people think of when you say "Sistine Chapel" is that one painting of the dude touching the other dude's finger. The chapel was HUGE! It was completely covered with paintings. That one scene was just a tiny piece of the whole picture!
There was an enormous collection of statues on the way to the Sistine Chapel. One section had very lifelike sculptures of animals. Another section contained busts of famous emperors. And throughout the walk were giant stone bathtubs, Roman gods, and other interesting things. Amazing stuff. The amount of highly-skilled man-hours that went into this museum is astounding! From the building itself to the floor-to-ceiling painting, to the vast collection of sculptures - the Vatican Museum's density of awesomeness-per-square-meter was very, very high!
Anyway, you can read more about this day on Andrea's blog as well. I think we're gonna start switching off days blogging. Or something.
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