Lunch and the Vatican Museum

After our appalling lunch on our first day in Rome, Eric and I decided to follow Rick Steves’ food advice as well and tried out a gorgeous restaurant on Via Degli Scipioni called L’isola della Pizza and were pleasantly surprised 🙂

The interior was really quite adorable…

And the food… absolutely amazing…Fresh pane (pane = Italian bread – something we just learnt! – and yes.. I know.. we’re sooooooooooooo uneducated ;))

Boscaiola (funghi e salsiccia) – mozzarella cheese, mushroom, and sausage pizza.  This was amazing.  Really tasty.  Not too cheesy, not too meaty, not at all soggy.. but somehow packed full of flavour out to the very edges of the pizza base!

Parpadelle al cinghiale – parpadelle with wild boar sauce.  This was incredible!  So little wild boar but so much meaty flavour.  Italian cooking must be very cheap indeed!  Apparently the owner goes wild boar hunting which is why the cinghiale is on their regular menu..

Caprese con bufala – tomato and buffalo mozzarella with rocket lettuce.  Caprese salad is the only salad where I will voluntarily eat raw tomatoes and wow… this was the best caprese salad I’ve ever eaten perhaps because the olive oil sauce combatted the sour tomatoes so well and because the buffalo mozzarella was the best I’ve ever tasted!!

Anyway, after lunch we moved onto the 2:30 pm online reservation Eric had made at the Vatican Museum.  It was great because we got to jump all the queues 🙂  So thank you very much, hun, for planning our trip so thoroughly!! xoxoxo

Now the Vatican Museum is crazy.  Unlike the Melbourne Museum or the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), it’s not only packed choc-o-block with visitors day in and day out, it’s got such an all-encompassing collection (including an Aboriginal display from the Kimberley Region in WA {this is quite old by the way.. and really should be updated}!!).  But best of all, it houses Michaelangelo’s amazing Sistine Chapel which is the Pope’s private chapel (when the tens of thousands of tourists aren’t flocking there each day).  Unfortunately, we weren’t allowed to take any photos – and strangely enough, my husband enforced that restriction on me (I could hear digital cameras going off every now and again and I so desperately wanted to partake in the illegal activity punishable by a hefty fine…)..

Anyway.. here are some miscellaneous photos from our visit…  I’m sure you are bound to recognise some of the art works.  For the exhibitions we weren’t interested in, I didn’t bother snapping anything.  But you’ll be able to tell from my weird array of photos that I’m currently obsessed with ceiling frescos – they are AMAZING!…Raphael’s phenomenal painting entitled The Transfiguration.

A portrait of Mary Magdalene by an artist whom I’m embarrassed to admit I can’t remember!… which I was strangely drawn to.  Do you think this is the effect the Mona Lisa will have on me??

Various sculptures of mythical gods…

The oh-so-famous Belvedere Torso.

And now for the frescos…This last photo was stolen from Eric’s collection of snapshots because mine just didn’t do it justice!

Anyway… that’s all I’ve got for now.  Going to start looking through my night shots from last night and I might attempt to post some of them soon (if they’re any good!)…