Craig's blog

Today is the final day of the Cantabile part of our trip.  It started with a 6 AM wakeup call and boarding the bus at 7 for the Vatican museum.  We arrived there about 8:00 and started our tour around 8:45. 

The tour of the Vatican was interesting.  The tour is through the Vatican museum.  The guide said that 5,000 people tour it in a day, but I would have guessed 5,000 people were on tour while we were.  It’s a huge place, but it was absolutely packed, shoulder to shoulder in some places.   There is no way a Fire Marshall in the US would allow something like that.  We had to move quickly because we had an abbreviated tour.  We headed toward the Sistine Chapel which is the highlight of the tour.  It was amazing to imagine Michelangelo craning his neck and holding his arm above his head for 5 years to paint the ceiling.  At the end, we visited a collection of the vehicles the pope has used over time.  Most of them were very ornate horse-drawn carriages, but they included the more recent “pope-mobiles” and the car that pope John-Paul was shot in.

After the Vatican tour we got some pre-lunch gelato and then wandered through town near the Vatican looking for a lunch spot where Diane & Jim would join us.  The girls enjoyed seeing the shop were bishops and cardinals come to buy their robes.

We had lunch with Diane & Jim and then walked through Rome toward the church where Cantabile was going to sing their final concert on the tour.  When we were almost there, Patty remembered that she had left her bag of purchases at our lunch restaurant, so Kelli and I walked back to get it.  Eventually we met up near the Pantheon at a gelateria that Diane likes called Frigidarium.  It turns out we liked it a lot too.  J

We then walked over and met up with the Cantabile group at the church and walked to dinner.  We weren’t very hungry, but had our final dinner with the group before heading over to the concert.

The concert was a gala with 4 choirs that Elena and another gentleman had put together.  Each choir performed by themselves and they also performed a number of pieces as a large group.  It was a fantastic concert in a beautiful, large church with good acoustics.  There was an all boys choir from Australia that was great to listen to by themselves, and when they were combined with Cantabile were brilliant as they brought the lower ranges to the otherwise amazing sound of Cantabile.

Several people played piano to accompany the singers, including Cassie.  They were playing a beautiful Bosendorfer piano which sounded awesome.  Cassie said it was a real treat to play it, and it was certainly a treat to listen to it.  It was a great end to the Cantabile part of the trip.  If you’d like to see a nice summary of the Cantabile tour from the Cantabile perspective, check out the blog about the trip here: cantabileyouthsingers.tumblr.com

We got back to the hotel around midnight.  The Cantabile group had to wake up at 6 AM to go to the airport, but we were able to sleep in (except for Jessie who had to wakeup with her roommate, Celia).