St Peter's Basilica - the grandest and biggest cathedral in the world!

After our tour of the Musei Vaticani, we were taken into St Peter's through the special VIP guides entrance, thereby bypassing the ridiculous line up - yeah!

Michelangelo's Pieta - now behind bullet proof glass to stop future attacks by crazy people...

The dome is 42m wide, just a little shorter than the Pantheon's - that was a little cheeky from Michelangelo who, when asked by the church to design the dome, didn't want the dome to be wider than than the Pantheon's (which was from Pagan origins).

All the 'paintings' (above) in the cathedral are actually in the Vatican Museum - what you see here are actually replicas made of mosaics!!! Each tile is 1cm square - imagine the work involved in recreating these masterpieces by hand with tiles - including matching up the tile & paint colours.... one of the Popes decided that the paintings would deteriorate if they were left exposed so he had them all relocated into the museum so they could be preserved and had these replaced with mosaics which would last pretty much forever... wow!

What a great tour! This is a shot with our guide, Grazia.