My Italy Diary: Rome, Part 5

We decided to visit St. Peter’s and the Vatican today; even though we did a tour of each of these when we were here in 2005, we didn’t get as much time in St. Peter’s as we would have liked and who can resist revisiting the Sistine Chapel? We made our way toward Vatican City, but the line just to go through security was pretty daulting; we heard a rumor that the lines at lunch time were only a 20 minute wait, so we decided to see Castel Sant’ Angelo first and come back. It was closed. So, we grabbed a horribly expensive and rather poor meal near the Vatican (did we know better? Yes; did we do it anyway? Of course) and then after re-evaluating, we decided to revisit Palazzo doria Pamphili, which we enjoyed so much on our last visit. Afterwards we decided to head toward Piazza Navono and just visit what we discovered along the way; which is pretty much how this whole week has been. Having seen all the highlights in 2005, we feel free to start the day with a destination in mind and pop into anything along the way that looks interesting. We stopped at San Luigi dei Francesi which has 3 paintings by Caravaggio, and also made another quick pass through the Pantheon to remind us of it’s vastness and our relative smallness. Afterwards we went to Cul de Sac for a glass of wine (they have over 200 to choose from).