Rome 2025 - 08 - Vatican Museums (Part 1 of 2)

Right, pouring rain in Rome again. So we know the metro station's up here somewhere so we're just heading this rough direction. We've got plenty of time to get to the Vatican. That's San Giovanni in Laterano over there. That's the Pope's home church. That's Bishop of Rome. That is a drinking fountain. It's not great weather for a market. Oh, here's Fibatops, look. Secondhand clothes. You've just got to rake through it. Find something you like. Pope Gregory the, what's that, 13th? Fixed that gate up. But this is the Aurelian Walls. That's it. San Giovanni in Laterano. They have the stairs that Jesus went up in Pontius Pilate's house to get condemned in the Bishop's Palace thing on that right there. This is San Francesco di Assisi. Rome, Italy and the world. Back out through the Aurelian Wall because the metro station is just over there. Right, out the rain, into the metro. That's where we got off. You can get off at Octaviano or Cipro. The museum's halfway in between them apparently. Still raining. Here's a quality of their graffiti in Rome. Pope graffiti. They're going to make us go up these stairs. I think that's the wall of the Vatican up above at the top there. We go down that way. We're hoping we don't have to wait in that queue because we bought our tickets online before. That's the entrance down there. This is absolutely heaving with people. We did buy our tickets online so hopefully we can skip some of this queue. They're only letting two o'clock folk in and we're 2.30. Right, we got in past the gate so we'll go and see what we can find. This is a replica of Saint Peter's boat apparently. Or it was a boat that was found on the shores of Lake Tiberia. Because it's one of these funny, funny way of going up. Here we are within the Vatican in the museum. More boats. More boats and sharks. the Nile. There's a wee Egyptian there and there's a crocodile at his feet. Here's Anubis from 1st and 2nd century AD. This is just a hall of Egyptian statues. There's a bull god Apis. This one here's a sarcophagus with a mummified cat in it. That door through there isn't actually what it looks like. It's just the gap in the frame of the door is painted to look like it's an angle. There's a Greek athlete washing himself with his strigil, washing the oil off himself. This is Augustus of the Prima Porta. Found at his wife's house. Up just north of Rome. It's an approximation of what a statue of Augustus looked like because they did paint their statues. This is the Roman army getting the standard, the eagle back from the Parthians that when they beat Crassus in a battle they pinch the eagle. These are just various deities and river gods and Jupiter and folk like that. This is Athena. This is the Nile again. There's alligators, mongooses and stuff. Here's Fortuna from 400 BC. A copy of a Greek statue. It's very obviously Hadrian. See, guess who that one is over there. Beyond the black dress home. It always recognised Trajan as well. Who's this? Caratide. Which river is this? This is the Laocoon, the Trojan priest and his sons. This is animal sculpture in this room. Got a hedgehog that one. Various dogs. This is Mithras.