Winding up soon -- More Italy

Basilica of St. Peter at the Vatican

Back to Italy where we started the tour.


We spent an afternoon at the Vatican City. As is quite well-known, this is some kind of an independent tiny country, inside Rome, whose "raison d'etre" is to preserve the independance of the Roman Catholic church and its highest head the Pope (or something like that, I'm making some obvious deductions here). As expected, its tiny, a huge open area surrounded by some buildings. The main buildings )that I'm aware of) are the basilica of St. Peter and the Sistine Chapel. The chapel is where the new pope gets selected and all the tradition about the color of smoke and so on. More interesting about the chapel are the supposedly magnificient paintings on the ceiling, by Michelangelo. We didn't get to see them but they do look spectacular in some online photos (sites here and here and several more if you do a search). There is a neat story that Feynman (the physicist) wrote in his autobiography. The chapel is always filled with tourists and he wanted an opportunity to see the chapel in peace and quiet so he found out the opening time and came and waited and rushed inside the chapel the moment it opened.

The pillars surrounding the main open circular area of the Vatican
We did visit the basilica (or large church) of St. Peter which is the main public building. An important sculpture inside is the "Pieta" of Michelangelo, which shows Mary holding Jesus after his death. The "Pieta" is very famous but we wern't actually able to see it properly as we couldn't get close to it due to security. The guide had something interesting to say about it : "Pieta cannot be translated from the Italian easily. To understand it you must observe the expression on Mary as she holds the body of her son. There is no sadness, only acceptance". Here are some photos.

From inside, the skylights in the dome of the church

The church has an atmosphere of true religiosity and is quite moving. I found this feeling in the other churches we saw in Italy too, like at Florence. The grandeur is there, but beneath it is true religious feeling. The church at the Vatican is quiet, despite the large number of tourists, and there is a small area for prayer. Its a remarkable space. There are great artworks all around inside. The church was primarily designed and executed by Bernini (pronounced "Berneeeni"), a fact our Italian guide insisted that we remember.



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Pisa:










In the small town of Pisa, we only went to the Piazza of Miracles. This is indeed a most pleasant space. It is a large compound with three excellent buildings, the most famous of which is the Leaning tower. The other two buildings are also beautiful.




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Venice:







On a gondola



Given all the high expectations, Venice was a little bit of a disappointment. I think this was because Venice is not about any particular monument, but the feel of the place itself. For that you need walk or boat around the city and spend some time there and we didn't do that, we just visited San Marco square and the shore of the city and stayed for only a few hours.

Briefly, for those who don't know. Venice is an island, and one where there are no major roads. What makes Venice unique, is that here are minor streets but in place of the larger streets are canals and you have to go by boat from one place to another. I believe there are no automobiles at all in Venice. A bit of modern history: Venice is sinking inexorably and people are trying all sorts of things to understand why and stop it, but not making much progress it seems.

We went to Venice on a launch from the mainland. From the pier we visited the Murano glass showroom and San Marco Square and the church adjoining it and took a gondola ride. Some nice photos so I'll refer you to the Yahoo album : here. And this is a short movie taken during the launch ride to Venice. We took a nice movie during the Gondola ride too, but unfortunately its too heavy to upload.


The 'Piazza' of San Marco (St. Marks Square), the most prominent part of Venice, with an old church adjoining.


Detail of painting on the front of the church.


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Some notes on how I did the blogging: I finally did take a laptop with me on the trip in order to download the photos. Kind of overkill, but I didn't have any other way, at that moment, as I didn't have an extra storage card for the camera. I did download thrice, so it was really useful and we took lots more photos than we otherwise might have. The laptop was on the verge of battery exhaustion and I was crossing my fingers that it wouldn't crash while downloading. The wall sockets in Europe work with Indian style 2 pin appliances, but 3 pin appliances don't work, and we never found a charger at any of the hotels that did the trick.
I put the first few images on Flickr, but they have limited free upload, so after that started using the blogspot image upload which is not so cool, but they allow 300 MB which is very cool. We also put a lot of the photos in Yahoo albums which has unlimited storage. And I put the movie files on geocities. A big mish-mash :-)


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I'm off tomorrow to Timbaktu, so will be offline for the rest of the week. However the interesting news is that another trip has come up :-). My parents are going to a Chinmaya ashram in Himachal for a camp, and then to Vaishodevi and Amristar and back to Vizag. This is in early July. I will be joining them as the camp is getting over and travel with them to Vaishodevi and Amristar. This is my first real trip to North India and I'm (you got it!) excited ! I'm also stopping for a day or two in New Delhi to meet an old school friend.

Bye-bye.