Visit to the Vatican!

For today's academic adventure, we visited the Vatican Museums. Because popes and the Catholic Church have been acquiring artwork for centuries, the complex is extremely large and covers a couple millennia of history. Today, the museum, with its 54 galleries, are visited by millions each year. Though some of the galleries were closed, such as the one holding Augustus of Prima Porta (sorry, Steven), we were able to spend hours roaming through the different rooms. After spending over two weeks here and learning about different aspects of Roman history, I was excited that I was able to recognize a lot of the artwork. For example, when walking through the Hall of Constantine, I recognized that one of the frescoes depicted the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, as I learned about during Alexis' presentation. Here is a picture I took of the fresco, featuring the soldiers of Maxentius drowning in the Tiber River:

Fresco in the Hall of Constantine.

The collection of the artwork inside is huge, but most of it is unlabeled and crowded together. This made it hard to understand what we were looking at a lot of the time. Even so, almost all of the pieces were very impressive and I enjoyed having the opportunity to look at them. Others in the group felt the same:

Elisabeth was really impressed by the statues. Alexis, not so much.

One of the more exciting parts of the day was our visit to the Sistine Chapel. I was really looking forward to seeing Michelangelo's paintings on the ceiling. Though the work itself was really impressive, the chapel was extremely crowded with tourists and museum workers yelling for everyone to be silent, which only added to the noise and confusion of the room. 

Alexis and I were not impressed by the guards yelling "SILENZIO!" every 30 seconds.

Overall, I thought today was a pretty interesting day, but I feel like I would have had a better experience if there hadn't been so many people inside the building. That just made it more difficult to see things closely.