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Monday, August 20, 2018

Easter Sunday at the Vatican

Ah, Easter Sunday at the Vatican. A truly once in a lifetime experience. Everything we read about Easter Mass at the Vatican talked about the importance of getting tickets and getting there hours ahead of Mass, but we didn't follow those suggestions and instead did our own thing-- I am so happy we did!
Can you see the Pope??




We ended up doing standing room only rather than seats and arriving at St. Peter's just as Mass was starting and it was every bit as special to us as it would've been had we gotten there super early. It was incredible to be able to see the Pope in person and to be able to celebrate a Mass. We are Catholic so this was obviously cool for us, but I've heard from other people who are not Catholic that it was still a really neat experience for them too. The only thing that was difficult about standing room only is that waiting in line to receive the Eucharist got a little hairy because there were SO. MANY. PEOPLE. Regardless of the crowds, this was by far one of the highlights of the trip to Italy. 


We had to wait in line with all of these people to receive the Eucharist. Luckily many of them chose not to receive, so it wasn't quite as bad as it looks (but still a little chaotic!)

They had giant TV screens for us to watch Mass on in the standing room only section, but we were close enough to be able to see without the TV's. Obviously the TV's had zoomed in views though, so we watched part of the Mass on TV.





After Mass we walked to the Colosseum, which took us roughly an hour to walk to but it was a beautiful day and Rome is such a pretty city to walk through that we decided to go for it. On our walk there we walked by the Piazza Venezia, or "The Wedding Cake" building. It was huge and so pretty! 
Here you can see some of the "Wedding Cake" with the Colosseum in the background. 

We also walked by some random ancient ruins and then the Forum, which were super cool to see. 

When we finally got to the Colosseum the line was wrapped all the way around the outside-- and that place is huge so I'm sure you can imagine how long the line was! We wished we could've gone inside, but we knew we wouldn't have time that day. We plan to make our way back to Rome one day to do some of the things we missed out on. We took a taxi back to the Vatican to try to climb the Cupola but it was closed for Easter weekend. We decided to add that to the list of things to try again when we come back. 

Do you see that line? It was literally wrapped around the entire Colosseum-- crazy!

We grabbed some square pizza from a place called Pizza Zizza about a 10 minute walk from St. Peter's Basilica-- it was cheap and delicious, a win/win! They cut the pizza with scissors rather than a pizza cutter which was fun to see. 

We walked back to the Marriott Grand Flora, grabbed our bags, headed to Roma Termini, and hopped on an Italo train to Florence. While we were in Italy we traveled on both Italo trains and TrenItalia and had a MUCH better experience on Italo. Italo is more expensive, but the cars are much nicer, we were able to travel at a higher speed, and was much less crowded than TrenItalia. It is definitely worth a little extra money to use the Italo trains if possible. 

Thanks for following along with our Italy trip! If you missed our earlier posts you find them here:

And if you're curious about how we manage to travel as often as we do on a budget, Dev explains it in a few posts here:


6 comments :

  1. What an incredible time to be there!! Looked amazing! xo, Biana- BlovedBoston

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  2. The current Pope is definitely a cool dude as far as Pope's go and I would love to see VC one day but not from a religious view point just as a citizen of the world

    Mollyx

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  3. The Vatican is a must if you are in Rome. Well done for getting to the Mass. I'm sure you will return to see more of Rome one day.

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  4. Super cool trip. My fave pope. :) #ThisMainLineLifeLinky

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