As you know if you came here after the Turkey blog, it's close to midnight when we arrive at the Rome airport after our week in Turkey. It's still a little muggy, and there's a long wait (perhaps 45 minutes) for cabs, and a certain measure of terror involved in the cab ride. Roman driving routes are the most bizarre and circling I've ever seen, but I think that's just the layout, and not the cab drivers trying to cheat us in our rather obvious ignorance. We all collapse at our respective hotels and agree to meet the next day just prior to our afternoon tour of the Vatican.

The next day Sean comes to our hotel and the nice people at the front desk call us a cab, which takes only a couple of minutes to arrive (this will in fact be true throughout our stay). It's not difficult to find the meeting place described on our tour voucher, so we're a little early. Sean and Alan wander off and find sandwiches, which they have time to eat before our guide appears, right on schedule. Her name is Laura, and she's badly sunburned, but she's very good. Our group of 20 (I know this because she counts us frequently throughout the day, and I feel as if by day's end I really ought to be able to count to 20 in Italian) heads merrily off.

Unfortunately, it seems in my scheduling I have chosen the single worst day of the year for us to visit the Vatican. The buildings are always closed on Sundays, and Monday was a holiday; today, Tuesday, is the first open day in three, and the peak of tourist season, and also really freaking hot—not that we weren't forewarned about that last part. It turns out that the Vatican museums do not have air conditioning, about which we were not forewarned, though I probably could have looked it up somewhere. Laura hopes they will get AC soon. The soggy heat is bad for the frescoes.

The crowds are horrible—claustrophobically packed in and hot and not altogether unaromatic. But under any conditions, these museums are worth seeing, and Laura turns out to be very knowledgeable and clear. We begin in the pinecone courtyard, named for its huge bronze pinecone (probably filched from a Roman bath), from which we can see the Belvedere Palace, where Leonardo da Vinci lived for a while, and where the Gregorian calendar was invented. Near some explanatory billboards, we get information on the background of what we'll be seeing and of the artists whose work is displayed. The biggest of the names, of course, is Michelangelo, and we learn that at first he tried to refuse the commission to paint the Sistine chapel's ceiling, but the Pope was insistent, as popes could be--and then once he thought he was free the next insistent pope asked him to do the main wall behind the altar, the famous painting of the last judgment. The billboard bears a copy of one of Michelangelo's sketches showing himself at work, standing with a brush stretched over his head. Somehow I had always pictured him working lying on his back on the scaffolding, and this new image is really disturbingly uncomfortable. My favorite story here involves the panel (I'm certain that isn't the proper word) telling the story of Jonah and the whale. As whales have always been rather scarce in Italy, and Wikipedia did not yet  exist, apparently Michelangelo used as his model the largest fish he could  find; in consequence, we find in the Sistine  Chapel an exquisitely rendered image of Jonah and the Trout. We also learn that a papal secretary who particularly irritated Michelangelo now has his face on the judge of the underworld, who also sports donkey's  ears and who has a snake biting him in a very uncomfortable place. This secretary objected to, among other things, the number of nudes, and in fact after Michelangelo's death clothes were painted onto many of the figures; not all of them have been removable at later cleanings.

Finally leaving the brutal sun, though not the heat, we head into the first of the halls we'll be exploring, which contains goodies looted from the Roman Forum--marbles, wine stands, lovely theater masks. Right in front of the wine stand, a sweet little girl named Sophie abruptly vomits orange juice, lightly spattering my foot. Figuring she's overheated, I offer the woman with her (who turns out not to be her mother, though we never do find out who she is) one of my "cooling wipes," then use another to wipe down my face a bit before I get to seriously scrubbing my foot with it, trying not to be obvious enough to make Sophie feel bad. Kid barf on the foot is a significant distraction from the beauties of ancient art and architecture, but gradually I get back with the program as best I can. (Later, Sophie and her guardian get back with it too, and she seems to be fully recovered in that resilient kid manner.) In another courtyard are amazing statues--the Belvedere Apollo, whose face was probably the model for Michelangelo's David; a stature representing the Tigris River, in which the river god bears an urn from which water flows, and within which one can make out the face of a tiger; a Lacoön who for centuries bore a mis-sculpted replacement arm, until the actual original was spotted at, more or less, a flea market.

The Hall of Muses has a beautiful  ancient mosaic on the floor, and the vast sarcophagi--though not the bodies--of Constantine's mother, Helena, and his daughter, whose name eludes me. There is a particularly fabulous statue of Diana, not as the huntress but as the goddess of fertility. Apparently bulls' testicles were brought to her as offerings from women hoping to conceive, and this statue shows her draped with them. (I'd have thought they were eggs, but bulls' testicles certainly makes a better story).

By this point the heat and crowds and sheer quantity of Stuff have me losing track of which hall is when, but I can tell you that we encounter some amazing trompe l'oeil ceilings and a whole lot of tapestries. The tapestry of the resurrection features  a Jesus with the creepy follow-you-around eyes. Laura tells us that the technique for this was created by Leonardo. Alan and Sean and I, having very recently encountered this same technique in a Hagia Sophia mosaic, glance at one another a little doubtfully.

Alan is especially taken with the hall of maps, full--as one might suspect--of maps, surprisingly accurate  and detailed sixteenth-century  representations of the world.

The Raphael rooms are of course impressive. The first, dedicated to Constantine and the triumph of Christianity, was painted mostly by his students, and the difference is visible when one enters the next room. This one includes the famous School of Athens painting, which is delightful anyway, but especially so if one happens to be fond of philosophy. We spot the self-portrait of Raphael in the crowd, glancing out into the room as if he's checking to see whether we admire his work properly. Apparently Plato bears Leonardo's face, and Heraclitus has Michelangelo's.  Heraclitus also wearing boots--our guide says that Michelangelo almost never took his off, which is a pretty unpleasant thought given the sweat-inducing character of Roman weather.

We pass through the Borgia apartments. Inexplicably, the Borgias were not universally beloved, and some of the frescoes have faces, modeled on various members of the family, that have been blacked out by later popes. We make pretty quick work of the modern galleries, Laura having declared decisively and not unreasonably that nobody comes to Rome to look at modern art, but a few things do bear mention. One is the exuberant new Matisse room, with its massive red and yellow images, and another is a Francis Bacon pope, which is notable not just because I really like Francis Bacon, but also because his paintings of popes are not exactly works of flattery, and so I'm surprised to see one here.

And then it's on to the Sistine chapel itself. It is indicative of the state of the day that what we notice first is not that we are in a place so beautiful it's ridiculous, but that it's air conditioned. The second thing to register is that despite the sign telling people not to take photos, people are everywhere taking photos--including with flash, which seems rude (these are frescoes, people. They don't like flash). Sean gestures with his camera and a question face to one of the guards, who shrugs an expressive Italian shrug, and so we have lots and lots of photos of the Sistine chapel--without flash, of course. I make sure Alan gets a shot of Jonah and the trout. Of course the chapel looks just like all the pictures you've seen of it, but, well, better. The floor is a gorgeous marble mosaic. I feel bad for the people who made the floor, because there we all are under a huge Michelangelo painting, so who's looking down? We get about 20 minutes in the chapel. The ceiling is incredible. The Last Judgment is incredible. The restored colors are gorgeous; here and there a little block has been left uncleaned just for contrast.

Then it's outside again, past the Swiss guards who watch over the papal palace and whose dress is truly, truly strange, even by guard standards (and there are some pretty weird guard outfits around the world). This is where our tour ends; our guide tells us that we can go into St. Peter's Basilca on our own if we'd like. She points out the doors that are currently closed--in fact, walled off on the inside--that are opened only during Jubilee years, every 25 years. Walking through all four sets of these doors is a plenary indulgence. Alan and I have a discussion about whether the characters in the Kevin Smith movie Dogma should just have waited for a Jubilee year and gone to Rome instead of to New Jersey.

This reminds me: once you're actually in Rome, though there are still a fair number of tackily dressed people, there's a whole lot less of that whole Jersey Shore  thing, which is a big relief to all of us.

Of course we would indeed like to go into the basilica, so we do. The first thing we encounter is Michelangelo's Pieta, which even behind glass--installed after Mary's  face was broken by a man with no sense of art--is amazing. Less lovely is the grave of John Paul II. Laura has told us that he was buried here after his beatification a year ago, and that only saints can be buried in St. Peter's. I force down the professorial urge to point out the difference between beatification and canonization, though I can't help remarking on it to Alan and Sean, who already knew and perhaps didn't care overwhelmingly.

At the heart of the basilica, which was finished in 1627, is the huge Bernini chapel, which forms a nice background to the Bernini we'll see later in the trip. A nun standing before it, who is probably contemplating devoutly in a nunly fashion, is interrupted by a tourist who taps her shoulder to ask brightly, "could you take my picture?" (See Turkey blog for my feelings about people who need to be in all of their own pictures.) I notice that the confessionals, of which there are a great many (perhaps something about being in Rome prompts misbehavior?), all seem to be the property of particular orders. The Jesuits have a lot of them. I seem to have been too tired to take good notes on all the sculptures in the basilica, but we did enjoy them, and Alan got lots of pictures. He says that the basilica looks different in person than in the video game he plays in which it appears, so if you're playing Assassin's Creed, apparently you shouldn't assume that sites are represented accurately.

Between the heat, the travel, and the walking around, we're fairly tired. We buy some overpriced water, which we will learn a few days later was a silly mistake (you'll see why), and look at souvenirs but don't find anything desirable. We retire briefly to Sean's hotel, the Waldorf-Astoria. It's the only hotel we've ever seen with a pillow menu--several different kinds of pillows that one can order, in case one's present pillow is unsatisfactory. Sean sort of feels as if he should try specialty pillows even though he's content with what he has.

Somewhat recovered, we head to dinner--fairly early, since I haven't eaten today and the boys had only those small sandwiches. Sean's research on Frommer's has turned up a recommendation for the Hosteria die Bastioni right outside the Vatican walls, so we head there. We are seated outside. Up to this point, I haven't been too sure about Rome, my primary impression of which is that it's hot and crowded, though that impression has been considerably tempered by the art. But this meal decisively lets me know that it's good to be here. We have the house red wine, inexpensive yet yummy, and really fantastic dinners. I get the house specialty pasta, which is in a creamy tomato-orange sauce. The orange is subtle and perfect. This is the best pasta I've ever had. Sean and Alan are equally delighted with their meals. We have dessert--Sean tries to get creme caramel, but they're out, so he has gelato, and Alan has tiramisu, and I have fresh strawberries sprinkled with lemon sugar. An accordion player strolls by. The day cools off. Life is good.