Rome, Day 2

Today we set out towards the Vatican. We'd found a nearby hostel (and got the address this time). Thusly prepared, we were able to find the hostel despite it having no signage at all. Unfortunately, it was completely booked, but they recommended us to another hostel (Pensione Ottaviano, on Ottaviano 6), which turned out to have room.
SC recognized the hostel atmoshphere and all was good. We left our extra stuff there and toured the Vatican. It was a lot of walking, but we saw some pretty cool stuff.
First there was St. Peter's Basicila. Very big inside, with some cool statues and paintings. And lots of people with keys. Holding keys, or giving keys to other people, and sometimes just keys without people. And there may have been some other things as well. There was the angels of wisdom and distraction, which I found quite amusing. Also, Death being swept under a rug (maybe that wasn't quite the symbolism there, but whatever). We saw Michelangelo's Pieta. Lots of people around, and unlike the others this one was behind a giant glass wall.
School groups - we saw lots of them, some possibly foreign (i.e. not Italian). We will have to ask the staff at the hostel whether that is a common thing or if we came at that time of the year.
From there we made our way to the Vatican museum. There was the map corridor, which was pretty cool. Lots and lots of maps painted on the walls. Also lots of statues. And a weird globe thing in the courtyard outside. And Roman bath tiles in the round room. Where there was a giant bowl thing. They don't know where they got it from. But they decided to put in the round room.
Also in the round room was a statue of Hera wearing a goatskin. That still had its hooves. So it was like she got this goat, deflated it, wrapped it around her neck, and tied its legs together. I guess if you're a godess, you can just skip the intermediate steps like that.
Statues of animals. That was before the round room. They were not very good at sculpting sea animals, we found. There was a kinda deformed dolphin and a seriously misinformed whale. But they were pretty good at birds and land animals. Lots of things eating deer-type animals. And little children (cherubs?) wrestling with geese. Okay, maybe there was just the one cherub wrestling a goose.
There was an Artemis with a row of breasts. Or maybe they were bull testicles. According to a nearby tour guide, there's no concensus about which it is. In either case, it's a very different image of Artemis than what I remember.
There was an Indo-Iranian god thing stabbing a bull, the blood of which would be the source of cereal and other food crops. And there were evil animals trying to prevent its blood from spilling onto the ground. According to the sign, this myth was brought back by soldiers returning from eastern campaigns.
Finally we made our way to the Rafael rooms. A Pope comissioned some artists to paint his house, but then he heard Rafael was going to be in town, so he scrapped all the previous work and Rafael spent the last 7 years of his life painting frescoes. The theme of one room was Christianity conquering paganism. On the ceiling was a very nicely composed image of a Roman marble statue toppled from its pedestal (and shattered in pieces on the groudn) and replaced by a full-color crucified Jesus, and the rest of the room showed images to that theme.
And then there was the room with the famous Plato and Aristotle frescoe. The one where Plato is pointing to heaven, symbolizing moral philosophy, and Aristotle is pointing to the earth, symbolizing natural philosophy. According to the audioguide, Rafael cast other contemporaries as Classical philosphers and put them into the painting, with much symbolism. I found out that the cracks were actually in the wall and not part of the original painting. I can't imagine the painting without the cracks, though. It look really nice with the cracks.
After the Rafael rooms we went through a whole series of modern paintings (which nobody seemed to be interested in at all, not even the audioguide) and into the Sistine Chapel. It turns out that creation image (the one everybody thinks of when Michelangelo and Sistine Chapel are mentioned in the same sentence) is actually not part of a giant ceiling-mural but rather a single framed image among several others. And it's not entirely clear why that one is so famous. It would be nice, though, to learn some of the significance of the other paintings (or at least what they're supposed to depict). The framing was done really nicely: there are architectural bits (i.e. columns and mouldings) painted in, and they blend perfectly with the actual physical architecture, so that it's hard to tell which is which. And again, it looks nice with the cracks.
After all that, we were really tired of walking and we had a nice lunch with fettucini al funghi porcini and a weak impression of pizza margherita. Also an artichoke. 37 euro.
From there, we confirmed that we had a room for the night (very cheap! came out to 20 euro) and set back out to see some of the other sights of Rome.
We walked by the castle, passed through Campo di Fiori and another important piazza, saw the Parthenon (which is apparently a basicila inside...funny how the Catholics incorporated the Roman buildings and mythology), a lot of really cute small shops that opened onto narrow cobblestone roads, and the Trevi Fountain (which is huge; nothing like the replica at the Venetian in Las Vegas).
In the big piazza (I forget the name) we saw a bunch of people practicing meditation, led by some monks with a translator.
We also saw cute buildings with cool roofs. And little buildings seemingly squished by taller buildings on either side. It was all very cute.
And we got better at crossing the street!
Finally we got back to the hostel. We've improved on our adherence to the local time zone, and if we don't fall asleep too soon we'll try getting some gelato (we passed several gelato shops between here and the metro station).