The Vatican Museum

January 4, 2014

First full day of our tour :: first stop .. Vatican Museum and St Peter’s Basilica. What an amazing experience this was!! I never thought in a million years, that I would ever visit the Vatican, or sit silently in absolute awe and wonderment of the Sistine Chapel – it truly is breathtaking! , or walk where millions before me have walked, inside the “sumptuous, marble-caked Basilica of St Peter’s”

Entrance to the museum, which consists of 54 galleries (we only saw a few) ..

St Peter’s dome against the clear blue sky ..

We walked through a section of the building and came out onto this square .. ahead is the Braccio Nuovo Gallery .. .

Opposite the Braccio Nuovo is the Cortile della Pigna, which is named after a bronze pine cone from an ancient fountain ..

Chiaramonti Museum .. Roman statues and Roman copies of Greek original statues ..

Cortile Ottagonale .. (Vatican courtyard)

We had to wait in this gallery for the security guard to open the gate to the Spiral Staircase. “Apoxyomenos – Greek meaning to clean oneself. Ancient Greek athletes used to scrape off the oils used to anoint the body before competitions with sand and a sort of spoon called the strigil. The statue was made around the year 50 AD and is a copy in marble of the bronze masterpiece by Lysippus in 320BC”

All systems go …

“This staircase leading down from the museums, designed in 1932 by Giuseppe Momo, is in the form of a double helix, consisting of two spirals, one to walk up and one to walk down”

At the top …

View from the top ..

Gregorian Etruscan Museum consists of different rooms containing fragments of large bronze statues, bronze parts of furnishings, and bronzes and silver; cremation urns from 4th and 5th century BC; collections of vases dating around 500 BC excavated from tombs; Iron Age treasures from the 9 – 8 century BC .. .. ..

Bronzes ..

Cremation urns ..