For our first day in Rome, we visited Vatican City. The Vatican is closed to tourism on Sundays, so today was pretty much our only opportunity to visit the Holy See. In the afternoon, we braved the rain to visit St. Peter’s Basilica. Unlike other cathedrals, which try to look big and impressive, we learned that St. Peter’s actually was designed to appear smaller than it is (which is ginormous). After the rain turned into a mere sprinkle, we walked to the Vatican Museum (also huge) where we spent about 3 hours, including at least half an hour in the Sistine Chapel.

In the late evening, we took a Rick Steves walking tour of Rome from the Pantheon to the Spanish Steps. We stopped along the way for various delicious treats including a coffee slushie, gelato, and sorbetto. Finally, we headed back to the hotel, tired and having accrued about 25,000 steps on the FitBit.

As a side note, once the cruise starts, updates to this blog are probably going to become very scarce. The cruise line charges exorbitant fees for accessing the Internet from the ship and I’m probably too cheap to pay for it.