Religious Rome

By now I feel like we must have visited every church in Rome. This morning we knocked off the king of them all - St Peter's Basilica. I know I have been using terms of scale a lot recently, but this really is a monster - covering 23,000 suqare miles with a capacity for over 60,000 people. We came nice and early in the morning, so it was very quiet. However, we think the 60,000 people were in the Vatican Museum with us.

Like St Peter's, the museum is very large, covering an eclectic range of art and sculpture from ancient Egypt through to the Renaissance. Obviously most famous for the Sistine Chapel (Michelangelo's ceiling and altar-wall, but also with work by Botticelli and Perugino) it also boasts the finest works by Raphael (his Transfiguration and the Rafaella Stanza - rooms decorated by him), the famous ancient Laocoon sculpture (there's a copy in the Auckland War Memorial Museum) and a hoard of others (Giotto, Masolino, Fra Filippo Lippi, Caravaggio, Titian and Carracci). Phew!

To recover, we took a nice long stroll alongside the River Tiber to some lesser-known, but excellent, sites in the Trastevere quarter. Here we admired the mosaics in the Basilica di Santa Maria in Trastevere, sat by the remains of the Boario Forum (Vesta's Temple, the Arch of Janus and the Tempio della Fortuna Virile) and put our hands into the mouthpiece of the famous La Bocca della Verità statue - it chomps your hand off if you lie!

Last stop for the day was the Jewish Museum, which recounted the history of persecution by the Catholic Church, and otherwise contained some lovely items recovered from the Jewish ghetto. We also got to look inside a couple of synagogues, which made a nice change for me.

Hmmm - what flavour gelati shall we have tonight?