I didn't get to do this that often: take friends on a tour of the Vatican, such as a kid like me had access.
They were nice about letting us take the elevator to the roof, to check it out, and from there to ascend a sequence of staircases to the top of the main cupola. Was it like 800 lire? We're talking late 1960s, early 1970s here. We lived in the EUR, then Viale Parioli.
Something the tourists could do, ascend the dome. I thought the Roman Catholics were being pretty nice to let us do it. They were double nice for allowing us kids, unaccompanied (that's my recollection, ditto the museum, which I hear is far more crowded these days).
Picture yourself in the wall of the dome itself and walking in a narrow curved hallway that also curved vertically.
You are "trapped" (held, protected) inside the surface of a sphere (roughly) with the wall to your left (let us say) containing the vast insidedness of St. Peter's Cathedral, and with the wall to your right shielding you from the great outside, of sky, pigeons, Rome itself and out to the great cavern of heaven. Switch left and right if you like, by simply turning around.
The final staircase if I remember correctly was a tightly spiral and basically inside a column, architecturally, or at least it gave that impression.
Obviously this pathway to the top was no afterthought. Thank you Michelangelo.
