WEDNESDAY 
CITTÀ DEL VATICANO

By reserving a ticket online for the Vatican Museums I avoided this long line at the entrance. It wraps around the corner and a long way along the wall.
Inside the walls of Vatican City. It is a separate independent state apart from Italy, so technically I visited two countries on my trip.
The Vatican Museums are a good visit. Lots of old stuff. Yeah, like I hadn't seen enough old stuff already on this trip.
The first area is on the tour is the Egyptian section. This is a sandstone stele (whatever a stele is) depicting Queen Hatshepsut and her nephew, the future Thutmose III.
Hieroglyphics. If I'm not mistaken this is a story about a boy wizard and his adventures in school.
Egyptians sure had nice coffins. I mean they are nicer than the simple boxes we use. They even painted the insides.
She's been dead for over 2500 years. Just think of all the things she has missed in the past couple of millennia. The Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution, the music of Justin Bieber.
This one is more wrapped up. What they did was to disembowel the body and put the organs in jars. Then the body was filled with pitch, dried, wrapped in linen and placed in a wooden coffin which went inside a stone coffin and placed inside a tomb.
This is Rutentuten, the six-time champion of the annual Alexandria Standing Completely Rigid Competition.
Next come statues of animal incarnations of gods. This is Anubis, a jackal. Or possibly Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Boy.
The lioness goddess Sekhmet.
Bes is the patron of pregnant women. Looks more like a guy sitting on a toilet.
It's a bird, it's a plane. No, it's a bird. A weird looking bird.
A set of 2nd and 3rd century funerary relief busts from Palmyra.
Clay letter and legal documents from southern Iraq. They are over three thousand years old. Is a contract still valid that long?
This is how close my B&B was to the Vatican. From a window in the museum this is a view of the Piazza Risorgimento which is right outside the front door of the building where A Touch of Rome is. If not for that building in the immediate foreground you could probably see it.
Anyway, back to the tour. We now move from the Egyptians to the Greeks and Romans. In this octagonal courtyard are several statues.
Arno, the river god. Just chillin'.
And this is Apollo, son of Zeus.
I suspect this fellow has had a nose job.
Laocoön, high priest of Troy. So here's his story. The Greeks rolled up to the city wall with their big ol' Trojan horse and Laocoön tried to warn the people not to let it in. But the gods wanted the Greeks to win, so they sent snakes to crush him and his two sons, which is what we see here. I don't know what the gods had against his boys. Seems kind of unfair to have them taken out too.
I know these are really old, but they look like the kind of things people put in their gardens.
Not this though. I don't know if I've ever seen a large lobster statue.
Everywhere you look there is art.
The Belvedere Torso is famous for some reason. Look it up. Michelangelo liked it though.
I'm thinking of doing my bedroom ceiling like this.
It's a big purple bowl that once decorated Nero's palace. It was carved from a single block of Egyptian purple porphyry marble.
The unused sarcophagus of emperor Constantine's mother, Helena.

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