The Labyrinth

The Vatican Museums weren’t my favorite. I like museums, and I love art and history, but everything was off. We started the morning with an epic, out of character meltdown from Elo. She was so tired from our late arrival and last day of school excitement and too much sugar the day before. It was sad. She recovered completely after breakfast and we took a cab to the museum entrance. I used the taxi app Free Now for the first time and will use it again for sure.

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So we arrive and discover no one remembered Isaac’s device I’d downloaded his audio guide onto. We figured something out and then Eloise had to go to the bathroom 10 minutes after we’d asked if anyone needed the bathroom. And because of COVID no one will let you go backwards, or maybe that’s how the museum is anyway.

So we start seeing old stuff and it’s cool, but if it gets too crowded the guards change the flow of traffic and force a bunch of people down and offshoot to loop around different unending wings. This is the main problem. The museum is colossal, and I loved some of the things we saw, but we spent so much time plodding though pottery shards and sarcophaguses that the kids and I started to feel like we were stuck in a maze. I hate cornfield mazes and I got that same feeling of interminable pointlessness.

Ok but here’s what was AMAZING—I actually gasped audibly several times and the guard laughed at me—THE MAP GALLERY! Frescoes of different parts of Italy down an entire corridor with paintings of biblical scenes that happened in those geographical areas on the ceiling above! STUNNING. The maps! The colors! The detailed ships! Amazing.

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Here’s what else I liked—the Sistine Chapel lived up to all its celebrity. Isaac and I shared earbuds and that was way better than having separate devices. He’d look over at me with big eyes during shocking revelations and we could point to the panel under discussion. I didn’t know Michelangelo had painted the ceiling standing up, or that he did the ceiling during the Renaissance and the alter wall years later as the period changed.

I didn’t know that the creation panel was unusual for its depiction of God as a loving creator, and I loved hearing people’s reactions to the judgement panel. Most shocking was that the droopy flayed skin sack dangling over the damned was a self portrait as Michelangelo questioned his life as he got older. Wow.

We tried to beeline to lunch after that but instead had to wind our way through more and more and more rooms. When we emerged into the sunlight we didn’t even care that our cafe sandwiches were dry and uninspired. It was so nice to sit.

This sounds kind of whiny and that’s because there was a lot of whining. But lunch marked a turning point in the day and the rest of it was fantastic!