Dancing At Lunacy

Well this got off to a bad start. I had blisters on my feet from where I’d been dancing in the wrong shoes last night. Also a badly bruised knee from when I’d fallen over dancing in the wrong shoes. And a massive hangover, having drunk enough to decide that dancing in those shoes was a good idea in the first place!

But we were booked onto the Rome on Your Own trip, plus had tickets booked in advance for a guided tour of the Vatican museums, which included the Sistine Chapel.

The journey takes about an hour and a half, but is very traffic dependent – Rome’s congestion is pretty bad. It’s a breathtakingly stunning city, but the Tiber is a bit smelly. The bus dropped us at the Palais de Justice, and we set off to wander during the morning. Found a little cafe which did shakkerata coffee – 2 for €5. We had strolled through a beautiful open Plazzo, including a cooling off step inside St Agnes church. There seem to be a lot of beggars around, sadly I had no coins to give the chap sitting on the church steps.

We weren’t aiming to get to the Coliseum, and the Trevi Fountain was closed for repairs, so we just ambled. Through an open air market, full of lovely fresh veg, including courgettes with their flowers attached. We checked a few menus of places for lunch, and eventually settled on a pizza place which was doing pizzas with the courgette flowers I’d admired earlier. We grabbed a taxi to the Vatican, agreeing a price of €8 in advance.

Sadly, we should have said “Vatican Museum”, as the entrance to it is waaaaaay round the corner, and it was a hot day for walking. No matter, our magic ticket bypassed all the massive queues, and we were soon admiring the gift shop offerings while waiting for our tour to commence at 2.

The tour itself was interesting, but at 2 hours long, we were getting a bit anxious about catching the bus back. So we passed up on the opportunity to see inside St Peters Baslica. If you wanted to really save time, you could book the guided tour (€16 each), but then either slip away from the tour guide, or just make your own way into the museum.

I was maybe not as overwhelmed as I expected to be by the Sistine ceiling. It’s an odd place – still a holy place so everyone is warned to have shoulders covered, no hats, no photos and no talking. And despite all this, there are many people breaking these rules. But by that point I think I was suffering form Vatican fatigue, having seen many beautiful statues, pictures, tapestries, sculptures, engravings, tromp l’oieul ceilings, Raphael murals…..

There were plenty of taxis in the square outside, but at first they wanted to charge €20 to go back to the bus stop. We negotiated them down to 10. Had time for an ice cream before getting on the bus – amarena flavour, €5 for 2. The journey home was long, and the bus was having gear issues – at one point I thought we’d have to get out an push!

The Dream was sailing at 7 pm this evening, and the view was straight out of teh brochure – heading off into the sunset, G&T in hand. However, this meant we were later for dinner, so we didn’t get our usual table. The staff looked after us well, though.

Michael Jackson tribute show in the evening – very moving beginning with a song called “Gone too soon”. My favourite seat at the end of an aisle up on deck 9 allowed me to nip out in between numbers to admire the sun sinking into the sea. Later, I admired the big golden moon, and the milky pathway it made on the water’s surface.

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