Journal 5

The castel San Angelo was probably the most painful solo excursion to go to. I went with a big group to the castel. It was an incredibly hot day that day as well, which would become more relevant later in the story. When we finally entered the main part of the castel, I was excited because the castel was featured in the movie Angels in Demons. I wanted to see how accurate the internal part of the castel was depicted in the movie. Instantly I realized it wasn’t accurate at all since were going up ramps and stairs, while in the movie the characters were going down when they entered.

It was dark and cool inside the castel, which I very much appreciated. I couldn’t take very good pictures inside though but I wasn’t too bothered by that. We finally reached what I thought was the top and found open space with people walking around. We weren’t really sure what to do, until we found a museum in a room off to the side. We went in and saw what I think may have been renaissance paintings of different saints. One saint in particular kept reappearing. I cannot remember his name but he was often depicted with either arrows going through him or having the wounds of arrows shown on his body.

Another part of the museum had non-saint paintings. They were still religious often depicting a mother and child probably Mary and Jesus. We then found some stairs leading up to another open space. There we found the wooden remains of a catapult. There were more stairs that led to the surrounding balcony of the castel. We looked at the city from yet another amazing view. The breeze up there was quite nice. We walked around the castel and found yet again another set of stair, which led to a mini museum.

At this point I was getting tired and of course God threw more stairs at us to go through. Theses were very narrow though and spiraled up. When we came out I knew we were at the very top. We looked around and saw the city horizon again. The sun was shining brightly on the roof where we were. As we took pictures, we realized we were missing people. A group of people went to find the missing people and the rest stayed up there. That was a really big mistake. After five minutes of waiting it got really hot up there. There was no shade on that side of the building, and I could feel me skin tanning even more. Eventually we found everyone and finally headed down.

We reached a café that apparently is in the castel. There was nice cool shade supplied from the covering greenery. I got a juice to drink because I ran out of water. Guerry and me thought we lost the group and almost left the place before turning back. We found the rest of the group and made our way out of there. The castel had so much to see it’s hard to choose one thing to see. It was a hot and long day but I’m glad I went,