Le cose ultime

The final things...
We had our final exam for Urbanism yesterday-actually a couple of days, but the review was yesterday. It was pretty evil; we had to come up with a proposal for basically an empty space in a neighborhood and fill it up, then have perspectives and plans and stuff nicely presented on paper, but we had a little over 24 hours to do this, and it was on the heels of our studio project. It resulted in me staying up the longest I have since freshman year, which was not fun. I also managed to sleep through about half of the review, so I barely showed up in time for mine. Angelo, another arkie, had to come and bang on my door to get me!
But I did eventually wake up and the project and review did eventually finish, and then I headed out to St. Peter's to climb the dome. The lines were not bad, but since they allow people up in waves it took quite a while before we started to climb the stairs. It was 7€ for admission if you took the elevator and then climbed 300 stairs, or 4€ if you climbed 551 stairs to the top, so that's of course what I did. I ended up in a group with 2 guys from Spain and Sweden, both of whom spoke english and were interesting, so we talked as we hiked up the stairs. It was pretty cool because first you hiked up to a point above the cornice around the dome, where you could look down and see inside St. Peter's- the top of the baldicchino, the different transcepts, and the throne of St. Peter. Then you actually started climbing between the shells of the two domes, and the walls were at what was probably an 80% angle towards the top, so you actually had to bend to walk as well! We ended up at the top, took pictures of the square from above, saw the backs of the statues on the facade, and then stopped on the roof before heading down. Being on the roof was pretty sweet as well!
Last night was movies, packing, and gelato. We walked out past St. Peter's to get gelato, and I realized that I'm looking foward to heading out now, but once the next school year starts I'll be wishing I had some cool destination to walk to. Saying "I walked past the main building!" doesn't have quite the same ring as "I walked past St. Peter's to get gelato!".
I'm headed out today to sketch, pack, and see the borghese museum before we have one final dinner together and probably do a "one night, all monuments" tour as our "cosa ultima".