\u201cSsssh! Ladies and gentlemen, quiet please.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Periodically in Italian and then in English, the guards would ask the gathered crowd to be quiet. It was a chapel, after all. It was one of the reasons we came.<\/p>\n
\u201cI would like to see the Sistine Chapel,\u201d I announced to Trudy a year ago. \u201cThey have a new LED lighting system.\u201d And now, here we were.<\/p>\n
After our visit to St. Paul\u2019s and a short nap on a narrow patch of grass under some trees in the shade near a fountain where we filled our water bottles, we walked around the walls of the Vatican to the museum entrance. And at the time reserved for us on the tickets purchased months ago by the fair and industrious Trudy, we walked in to see the many wonders. And to go to the Sistine Chapel.<\/p>\n
What can you do in a place like that? What can you do but find a place to sit on the benches along the walls and look up.<\/p>\n
We sat. We looked up. We stared and tried to absorb the enormity of the frescoes<\/a>. The stories they tell. The colors. The sybils. The prophets. The bright eyes. The taughtly articulated Renaissance bodies. Night being separated from day. Flood waters covering the Earth. The stunning finality of the last judgement.<\/p>\n As other people filed into and out of the chapel, we sat there on the benches. For a long time. Silent. In awe.<\/p>\n It was quite a thing.<\/p>\n When Rafael, who was working on a commission in another part of the Vatican came and saw those frescos as they were being laid down, he returned to the Stanze della Segnatura and added a likeness of Michelangelo to his School of Athens<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u00a0 Yes. It was quite a thing.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/jumpingfish.smugmug.com\/ItalySwitzerland-2015\/Misc\/i-r5vRsG6\/0\/M\/DSC_0509-M.jpg\")
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