Sunday Posts

My day two in Rome was , predictably , spent in Vatican . In sharp contrast to the squalor and graffiti of the backstreets of Rome , Vatican is a neat , fabulously wealthy , glittering affair . It is expensive too - a total of 22 Euros just for the museums - but it is all worth it being able to spend a few minutes inside The Sistine Chapel ( above , the photo I took before being told not to use my camera). But , while I, like many others , went to Vatican to see Sistine Chapel in person , the real show is in the St Peters Square . Being accustomed the Hindu holy places , which are bare and serene, the St Peters Square was very different from what I was expecting : This was , in my perception , more about power than piety . This looked every bit as imperial as the Roman ruins I saw yesterday . I was almost thinking of the idea of one unending empire , that of Cesare and Augustus , carried o...

One thing I realized about Italy , within the first 24 hours , that time is a relative concept here . It didn 't matter to the clerk at the ticket counter at the airport : The train to Termini in three minutes and I was trying to get a ticket, but he needed to take two calls on my mobile and made me wait . It didn 't matter at the Ticket Collector at the gate of the Termini station, who wanted to do a deal with a waiting cabbie and tried to sell me a cab ride of less than 500 meters for 20 Euros , because it was nearly midnight . But the hotel manager didn 't think it was too late to send me temporarily , for one night, to another place because they sold the pre - booked room to someone for that night. Night is still young , he said . The other thing about Rome is the conversation is mostly about the past . Indeed , Italy 's future seems a bit Bunga - Bunga with Berlusconi a...