Rome, Italy

Monday and Tuesday, 4 & 5 September 2006

On Monday, we made a whistestop tour of the city. The morning was spent at the Colosseum (left in ruins since that "Gladiator" movie; Russell Crowe has alot to answer for), the Forum, the Irish Embassy (to pay a minute's silence to Eoin Small, former first citizen of Rome), Circus Maximus, Piazza Navona, the Pantheon and finished up at the Spanish steps where we met Shane, who was also spending a few days in Rome.

The next day started early to beat the queues for the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican. The museum leading up to the Chapel has an array of sculptures from antiquity and a couple of thousand "Virgin and Child" paintings but we hurried past these so that we could get to the Sistine Chapel before it became convulsed in a tour-group feeding frenzy. Even by then, the Chapel was packed and it was difficult to get a good vantage point. The low murmour of the crowd there would rise to chatter, to be cut short by a shouted "silenzio" from the Chapel guards. Not the best conditions to savour the art but it was good to see Michelangelo's deft crayon-work.

We took the overnight train from Rome to Munich that night and shared our compartment with four chatty South Koreans with no English, which made for some interesting exchanges. Dara congratulated them on a well-organised World Cup 2002 and they responded by directing him to the toilet down the carriage (didn't think Ireland had played that badly!). The journey itself was pretty uncomfortable but probably a good foretaste of the Trans-Siberian leg of the trip.

To see more photos click here.