St Peter's Basilica

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St Peter's Basilica	St Peter's Basilica
St Peter's Basilica	St Peter's Basilica
St Peter's Basilica	St Peter's Basilica
St Peter's Basilica	St Peter's Basilica
St Peter's Basilica	St Peter's Basilica
St Peter's Basilica

On the second day, Saturday, we had intended to visit Vatican City to see the Cistine Chapel, the Vatican Museum and St Peter's Basilica. However, although we were there by 9:00am the queues for the Cistine Chapel and Vatican Museum were several hours long, this may have been because they close at Saturday lunchtime and don't reopen until Monday so it perhaps wouldn't be as busy at other times.

Not fancying spending half of our day queueing by a busy road in the baking heat only to be kicked out when they closed the attractions we decided to go straight to St Peter's.

There was a queue for the Basilica but it was under an hour and standing in the amazing St Peter's Square it didn't seem to bad.  Once through the airport style security scanners we were prevented from going in as Claire's shoulders were not covered and the dress code rules are strictly adhered to. Once we remembered that we had our waterproofs with us Claire was able to cover up and we were allowed in.

We took the lift into the Dome, Claire went right up to the top but I only made it to the gallery inside, I don't like heights and was worried that I'd get so far and not be able to turn back.  Looking down on all the people in the Basilica from the gallery really gave you an idea of how large the place was. We met up again and had a wander about inside the Basilica, I'm not sure why, maybe I'd expected too much but it seemed a little disappointing.

We had lunch at a nice little restaurant in a nearby side street and then returned to look properly round the square, it really is impressive, everything's on such a large scale it's hard to grasp and very difficult to see from the photographs.