Rome / The Vatican

The Vatican is the capital of the world Catholic church, it is the world's smallest sovereign state (say fast repetativly).

This is me standing in the Vatican.The Vatican was proclaimed an independent state in 1929 by the dictator Mussolini.

Pope Benedict XVI is the head of the Vatican state and he lives in a palace next to St. Peter's Basilica (which means temple, although basilico means basil, so don't get confused).
St. Peter's Basilica is behind me in the previous photo.

There are 500 people living in the Vatican state and it has its own post office, bank, currency, legal system, radio station, shops and even a daily newspaper "l'Osservatore Romano".

St. Peter's basilica was built in the 15th century (1400s) on the site of an old church and was built where St. Peter was matyred (murdered for his Christian beliefs) in 64 AD.This is us standing with my dad's good friends, Izzy and Betty Kranz.
The Vatican has 1,700 rooms filled with everything from art treasures to statues valued at over 1,000,000 Euro each (1 Euro is 1.7 Aussie dollars). We walked through only 7 or 8 of the rooms.
The dome of St. Peter's basilica is the largest in the heart of Rome, it is 136 metres high and there are 537 steps to climb up if you want to go to the top. The dome itself was designed by Michelangelo, the famous renaissance sculptor. Most of the marble in the basilica was stolen from the Colosseum because a couple of idiots were told to steal it by god in a dream.
You can see the dome up the top in this picture of my cousin, Tess, outside St. Peter's.

Michelangelo thought he was not much of a painter and didn't like painting anyway, however, he had no choice but to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. It was Pope Julius II, who my dad was really named after, seriously this time, who threatened to declare war on Florence if Michelangelo did not paint the chapel. It took Michelangelo four years from 1508 untill 1512 to paint and in the end he had a swollen neck muscle from constently looking up when he painted and had a swollen neck for half his life (he did not lie on his back as Hollywood filmstars said he did). He painted 18 hours a day on scafolding, eating and sleeping on scafolding too.
This is my dad and I looking up at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.There were 33 paintings showing: Creation of the land and the sea, the sun and the moon, and light & the dark. In the painting where god creates the moon we realised god did not wear underpants and therefore had two moons in the painting.The back wall behind the alter is completely covered by another massive Michelangelo painting called "The Last Judgement" showing Christ splitting heaven and hell.

Unfortunately we did not get a photo of it.

After we left the Sistine chapel we went to enter St. Peter's basilica but were refused entry by a very unchristian man because we were wearing shorts. My dad said "Why would god be worried about what we're wearing when he doesn't wear anything at all?" We were denied entrance to the basilica and could not climb the famous stairs.

In our last week in Rome I was living in an apartment with my mum, dad, and cousin, Tess, and were given the opportunity to cook, we made prawn spaghetti and pannocotta with blackberries from recipes that were given to us by Diane Seed, our cooking teacher.

And we went on another Segway trip, our third, this time in the Borghese Gardens. We went around the gardens on the Segways and I am an advanced rider now.
This is my mum, Tess, and me on Segways in the Borghese Gardens.