Nov 17th, 2011 at 6:00PM:
When taking travel photos, we spend a lot of time looking for the right background. Whether it's capturing a candid portrait or framing the perfect landscape, it's not always easy to convey a beautiful scene in a photograph. Flickr user John Overmeyer used a humble puddle of rain to elevate this night shot of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. Of course, flawless composition, lighting, and luck ...Click on a label to read posts from that part of the world.
Vatican posts
Photo of the day - St. Peter's and a puddle
Nov 17th, 2011 at 6:00PM:
When taking travel photos, we spend a lot of time looking for the right background. Whether it's capturing a candid portrait or framing the perfect landscape, it's not always easy to convey a beautiful scene in a photograph. Flickr user John Overmeyer used a humble puddle of rain to elevate this night shot of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. Of course, flawless composition, lighting, and luck ...Book review: Quiet Corners of Rome
May 24th, 2011 at 10:30AM: Travel guidebooks conceive of the world as a series of obvious, important monuments. This is particularly true of a brash and magnificent city like Rome. Your typical traveler could be forgiven for simplifying this complex historic capital down to a giant marble stadium, a series of famous steps and giant chapel mural. But writer David Downie reminds us there's a lot more to Rome than its ...Rome - 3 days in Italy
Mar 16th, 2011 at 2:30PM:
With the bustle of a large European metropolis and the detritus of a monumental past, Rome delights with a frenetic pace and antiquities lurking innocuously around each bend in the road. Here, history has been built on top of history for thousands of years. Seeing bankers in candy red Alfa Romeos zipping by millenia old ruins frames the endurance of this old city. Each sediment in time is ...Schengen and the disappearance of European passport stamps
Mar 1st, 2011 at 10:00AM:
Creative new use for border crossing posts at German/Austrian border.
In the late 1980s, an American spending a summer traveling across Europe with a Eurailpass would see his or her passport stamped possibly dozens of times. With a few exceptions, every time a border was crossed, an immigration agent would pop his or her head into a train compartment, look at everyone's passports, in most ...Rome's Vatican Museums host rare Aboriginal art exhibition
Dec 31st, 2010 at 2:00PM: No one can ever accuse the Vatican of acting impulsively. In 1925, over 300 artworks and relics were sent to Rome by Aboriginal Australians, for a papal show. Since that time, the items have been squirreled away, despite being one of the world's finest collections of Aboriginal art and artifacts, according to a recent New York Times article.
Fortunately, these treasures are now on public ...The tombs of Rome--where art meets death
Sep 15th, 2010 at 10:30AM:
If you're going to your eternal rest in the Eternal City, you should go in style.
Sure, you can't take it with you, but you can show off what you had, and with all the competition in this place you have to do something special to make an impression. Rome is filled with grandiose monuments to the dead. First there are the giant tombs and temples of the Roman emperors. They were worshiped as ...GadlingTV's Travel Talk - Vatican, Vespas & Rome's Nightlife
Aug 2nd, 2010 at 11:00AM:
GadlingTV's Travel Talk, episode 25 – Click above to watch video after the jump
For the final installment in our series on Rome, we've saved the best for last & are satisfying our thirst for adventure. Watch as we tour the Vatican, rent Vespas, and check out Rome's impromptu night life.
On the couch, we'll dissect the differences between the Vatican & the Holy See, and ...Take a virtual tour of the Sistine Chapel
Apr 3rd, 2010 at 3:30PM: Seeing the Vatican's Sistine Chapel is a hassle. It's constantly mobbed, you're not allowed to take pictures (unlike the sneaky photographer on the right) and you have to walk through a maze of rooms to reach it. But the minute you gaze up at the beauty of this Michelangelo masterpiece, all the pains of getting there evaporate. Now there's a totally new way to view this stunning masterwork without ...Talking Travel: David Farley, Author of An Irreverent Curiosity
Jul 13th, 2009 at 11:00AM: Striking a balance between being informative and being entertaining is one of the most difficult aspects of non-fiction writing. And when it comes to travel writing, it becomes even more challenging. The author needs to educate readers about people and places while also keeping them engaged in his own personal story. Thankfully, travel writer David Farley has done just that and managed to go the ...Is it really possible to avoid the tourist trap?
Oct 27th, 2007 at 4:05PM: I went to Rome last weekend, and truth is I didn't like it. Yes, everyone I've told this to said that I'm crazy -- "how could you not like Rome!?" is what they snapped back at me. This is why:
All I heard around me was English, Spanish and French -- where were all the Italians!?
The Colosseum blew my mind -- but outside it there was a 10 piece Brazilian band getting people to samba, a ...The end of the world comes to the Vatican
Oct 22nd, 2007 at 11:30AM: Don't worry; despite what the above photo implies, you won't need to bring protection from plagues or rains of fire at the Vatican's "Apocalypse" exhibition. Msnbc is calling the exhibit -- a collection of works ranging from the 4th to the 20th centuries -- "unusually bright:" "while 'The Apocalypse' usually evokes Doomsday visions, remarkably few monsters and sword-bearing angels populate the ...Holy Water Seized by Airport Security
Sep 5th, 2007 at 8:39AM: Even holy water must be in a 3-ounce container sealed in a 1-quart plastic bag. Catholic pilgrims on the recently inaugurated Mistral Air found this rule out the hard way, when vials of holy water collected at Lourdes were taken by airport security. The company's president admitted that international regulations have to be respected.
However, unlike other airlines we've written about recently, ...Nearer My God to Thee: Catholic Pilgrims Get Their Own Airline
Aug 23rd, 2007 at 9:34AM: Does the Pope have to remove his shoes every time he goes through airport security, like the rest of us do? Because that can get old. Especially if you travel a lot, like Catholic pilgrims, who've apparently been traveling enough to warrant their own charter airline, "Mistral Air." (The choice of "mistral" as the airline's name is an interesting one: although it's etymologically tied to ...
