Not Like in the Movies

Well while a lot of Roman was like in the movies there was certainly one part thing that I expected to see and didn’t. For some reason I like the movie Euro Trip it is about some kids that upon graduating high school go to Europe and cause a lot of trouble. It is completely pointless and ridiculous but sometimes those are the best qualities for entertainment to have. The best parts of the movie have to do with English Soccer hooligans and some ridiculous situations at the Vatican. The latter being the part of the movie I expected to see scenery from. But alas it was all staged and BS. When RG and I went to the Vatican I kept waiting to see where we could go on the same tour from the movie. Well you can’t. And many of the places they went don’t even come close to matching up with the actual layout.

In the movie they went in through a side entrance to tour the Papal Apartments - caused a lot of ruckus then ended up falling out of a window overlooking St. Peter’s Square. The only thing is the window was actually part of the basilica and is part of a completely different building. As are several other parts of the story they wove together to create a ridiculous, though very funny, set of events. So of course I was under the impression that you could actually get to these places on the tour of the Vatican. You can’t. Also as I toured the Basilica and museums I kept looking for places from the movie and let myself be a little confused. Though I do know that most movies work because of the magic of editing I didn’t realize they would take quite as much liberty as they did. But I guess how many Americans travel enough to call them on it. On top of that how many of those that do travel would watch such a ridiculous movie and care to try and match up the places in the movie with the real places… Probably not many.

That all said it of course didn’t change my enjoyment of visiting the Vatican. St. Peter’s Basilica is by far the most amazing building I have every toured. I did not expect what I found there. As for the Vatican Museums, I simply didn’t have the patience to get the full affect. The amount of historically important works there is amazing. You cannot take it all in it is that simple. We did go on a day that they were doing the Papal Audiences but we decided not to spend the whole day in that line. Maybe next time. One other funny thing about the visit were all the tour leaders trying to entice us to pay 15 Euro each for them to lead us through the facilities. The 30 Euro would be on top of all the entry fees it simply paid for them to orate our visit. There were so many of these guides trying to get us to sign up we started answering them in Russian (mostly RG did this) and that seemed to get them off our case. I wonder if this would work with pan handlers in Minneapolis or Chicago.

Anyway as I mentioned before I was a little confused by my memory of the movie scenes of the Vatican and the real place. So when I got back to the States one of the first things I did was to rewatch the movie. Only then did I realize how ridiculous it was for me to take an impression from such a movie with me when I went to see the real place.