I will be in Rome on a Sunday and am going to try to see the Pope bless the crowd at 12noon. where is the best place to stand in order to make sure I see him. thanks.

You can stand anywhere in the center of the Piazza. His window is very high above the Piazza so everyone will be able to see him. Don't expect a great view.

Don't expect a great view is an understatement. My friend, Heather, from San Diego, dragged me off to the Vatican to see the Pope in 1998. Frankly, I would have rather seen the interior of Prada on the Via Condotti, but that is another story. People went into a frenzy when the Pope appeared (he looks like a little gnome in a white Worth gown). An American woman standing in front of me was jumping up and down, poking me with her umbrella. You'd have thought the BVM had descended from the clouds and was dispensing H Stern jewelry amongst the masses. You know what Vatican needs? A bar so some of us can get a martini. Blimey. You don't need to go to the Vatican on Sunday to get the Pope's blessing, by the way. If you buy holy relics from the Vatican giftshop outside of the Sistine chapel, they will have them blessed, by the Pope, for you and you can pick them up the next day.

The Pope does the Sunday blessing from the apartment windows which will be on the right hand side if you are facing St. Peter's. Since it is approximately four stories high (or the equivilant) and he seems to be sitting lately when he does the blessing you will need binoculars to really see him.

Years agi we stopped in a gift shop near St. Peter's to buy a rosary for a friend; the clerk told us whenever the Pope blesses the crowds, the blessing extends to everything in the area, shop contents and all. We always wondered about that.

While it's true that the Pope is far away and appears very small from the square, I thought it was well worthwhile. I'm not a Catholic (except by marriage, LOL), but I found it very interesting to see the person who holds sway for such a large number of disparate people and cultures all over the world. It was also interesting to watch the crowd, who, as other posters have mentioned, are in an absolute frenzy. There are people holding signs from all over the world. An interesting experience, IMO.

We bought rosaries for our nephews and took them with us into the crowd so that they would be blessed by the Pope. In the same store were rosaries that had already been blessed by the Pope (I assumed that the already-blessed ones had gotten closer to the Pope than just sitting on the store shelf, so I'm not sure of the claim that everything surrounding the square gets blessed, too - the store clearly had the pre-blessed rosaries in a different display area).

ThinGorjus - in addition to a bar with martinis at St. Peters, my husband and I have often commented that mass would be more enjoyable if they had a little espresso cart outside church and we could enter with our lattes!