Priest Spends 10 Months Building Lego Vatican Replica
A Catholic priest has unveiled a large-scale replica of the Vatican that he spent 10 months building out of Lego. The structure contains half a million individual Lego blocks and is on display at a science museum in Philadelphia called the Franklin Institute.
Father Bob Simon created the model of St Peter’s Basilica to combine his love of his faith and Lego, a toy that he has enjoyed playing with since he was seven years old. All told, the model stands at 14 feet by 6 feet and weighs an impressive 100 pounds. The priest had to use book covers and Google Earth for references and to get as much detail as possible.
“I think there’s about half a million pieces in it,” Father Simon explained. “I’m not sure. I think there are about 44,000 cobblestones of the square, 6,000 round bricks that make up the colonnade and under the little cobblestones, there’s 12,000 2×2 tiles that are under there. I knew if I was going to build the Vatican, it had to be big!“
“There was one photo in particular, it was a cover, a book jacket of a book I had that had a great picture of the facade,” he said. “I used that for doing the facade and I used Google Earth, as well.”
