I started off my Sunday with a trip to the Palazzo Doria Pamphilij. This is a museum that consists of the home and art collection of the Doria Pamphilij family, and a few of them still live in parts of it. They came to prominence in the 1600s, when a Pamphilij was named Pope Innocent X. Since in those days the pope was also the king of Rome, the Pamphilij acquired a bunch of wealth and influence that they've managed to hold on to, because Europe doesn't have the philanthropic tradition that America does (we have Carnegie Hall and Carnegie Mellon and the Carnegie Foundation, and they have aristocratic families with priceless art collections). The villa is sumptuously decorated, like a miniature Versailles, and the art collection includes pieces by Titian, Caravaggio, Raphael, Velazquez, Bernini, Brueghel, and a bunch of other old Italian masters. However, the best part of the museum is the free audio guide. It's narrated by a member of the Pamphilij family, and includes interesting notes, like the time he and his sister got in trouble for scratching the terra cotta floor by roller skating on it.
After that, I went to get my fried artichoke in the Jewish Ghetto. This was the first time this trip I was ripped off. The artichoke was €5, but the restaurant charged €2 for water (acceptable), €2 for bread (this is what the place in Venice charged for cover, and the Jewish ghetto in Rome doesn't have a view of San Giorgio Maggiore to justify such an expense), and €2 for service (in Venice, I was charged a maximum of 10% of the total for what I ordered, and I never ordered €20 worth of food). For those keeping track at home, that's €11 for a €5 artichoke. A quick check of other restaurants in the Jewish ghetto showed a similar result would have happened had I picked another place to go. If stereotypes are based on a grain of truth, then the Jews got theirs from that whole area. I would suggest skipping it.
Afterwards, I went to Trastevere and wandered around a bit. Trastevere is across the Tiber (Tevere) from where I was staying, and was a slightly odd mix of interesting bars and restaurants with souvenir shops, street vendors, and slightly sketchy stuff like sex shops or casinos with 10 slot machines only. One of the stores was selling marble fruit bowls for what seemed a reasonable price, so I got one. I'm sure there's a drinking game that can be played with it, and it seems pretty sturdy. I ate dinner at one of the restaurants, watched the end of Mexico/Netherlands, and went back to the hostel to sleep. A month of touring is finally starting to catch up to me.
Today, I had my ticket to go see the Vatican Museum. This enabled me to skip the massive line to buy tickets. On my way into the Vatican, I was also informed that there would be lines for the Sistine Chapel and St. Peter's Basilica at least that long, and that I could skip them if I was on a tour group. So I paid my €20 to get a tour, and this marked the second time I was ripped off. There are no lines for either the Sistine Chapel or St. Peter's (I probably should have figured that one out given that St. Peter's could swallow any other church whole and stil have room for another one after that). I wound up leaving the tour halfway through, because the guide wanted to go straight to the Sistine Chapel and skip the Raphael Rooms, which are almost as good as the Sistine Chapel, and contain his famous School of Athens fresco. You would have to be a bigger idiot than I was today to miss these, and I wasted €20. The Sistine Chapel itself was breathtaking though, but I don't have any pictures of it. Unlike anywhere else in the Vatican, snapping pictures is forbidden, and if they catch you, you will be forced to delete them. Why they care about that and not St. Peter's, or Raphael, or their massive statue collection is a mystery. Why the poverty part of the priestly vows goes out the window once you are a cardinal or pope is a mystery too (the Vatican Museums were once the Papal Palace, and they do top Versailles as the most opulent royal residence in Europe, because even the Sun King couldn't afford to hire masters like Raphael, Michelangelo, and Bernini to come decorate his house, or take the choicest ancient statues back to his kilometers-long house without paying). But regardless of the massive hypocrisy behind the creation of such a place, it's still a must-see. Just don't expect it to strengthen your faith. Heck, even Michelangelo himself located the devil in his fresco of the Last Judgment on the wall in such a position that it would be right over the Pope's throne (this is more an indictment on the Pope at the time, but that's far from the only detail Michelangelo threw in to piss off the Vatican. Everybody has seen the central panel of the ceiling fresco, with God inside of a shape that is exactly the shape of a brain. No comment on how he knew what a brain cut in half looked like with the church's ban on autopsies at the time, or the philosophical implications of putting God inside a human brain). The size and scope of the museums took me half a day, and I didn't enter until 12:30 (my tickets were timed for 1:30, so I guess I paid €20 for early access, less of a ripoff than the artichoke fiasco).
And with that, my tour of Europe is at an end. I'll post all the Rome pictures at home with good wi-fi, I have one more beer review, and I'll probably write a best-of post on my ridiculous travel day tomorrow.
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