St. Peter’s Basilica dome and canopy
St. Peter’s Basilica was well worth the ½ hour wait to get in (the wait was this short only because we came early), for Michelangelo’s heartbreaking Pieta, the amazing dome and alter canopy, as well as the massive scale of it all. Later in the day we went to the Vatican Museum. The Vatican has been collecting stuff for 2000 years and it’s all here, room after room of jaw-dropping collections of Roman sculpture and much more. Our guide helped us sort through it all and focused on some key pieces, then led us to the Sistine Chapel. She left us there since it was forbidden to talk in order to preserve the brilliance of the newly cleaned frescos from impurities in human breath. There in the center was the famous Creation of Adam, surrounded by so much more, and on the front wall the later and more pessimistic Last Judgment. After spending some time with this huge and complex work, our eyes and minds were saturated, so we left, but that meant walking through dozens more galleries and three gift shops. Whew!