Hooray!!! We checked out of our awful hotel in Venice this morning! Just a quick bit of information about the hotel: the bathrooms are SO small that the toilet is right next to the "shower" space, separated only by a shower curtain. Therefore, if you sit on the toilet, your feet are actually in the "shower". It was a SPECIAL hotel! So we left Venice and drove toward Assisi, but again we stopped along the way to check out another town. This time, our intermediate destination was Ravenna. Ravenna was a charming place! We visited the Basilica of San Vitale, [View Full Entry]

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Ah, Venice! This has got to be the most beautiful city I have seen on this trip - if not the most beautiful city I've ever seen PERIOD! I absolutely LOVED my day in Venice! We rode our bus from the hotel to a port. Since Venice is actually a series of about 120 islands connected together by bridges, the only way to get there was by boat. We got on our boat just as a bunch of people were arriving to start some sort of demonstration. That was an interesting sight! As we rode on the boat, I took [View Full Entry]

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This morning, the bus dropped us off again in the city center of Florence for some more free time for exploration. The only thing I hadn't seen yet that was on my list was the Ponte Vecchio - a bridge spanning the river which is famous for its scenic views and its expensive jewelry shops. I walked over there with a couple of the ladies from the group who wanted to see it too. We took some pictures and did some window shopping (nothing I could afford, of course!). After this, we walked up the street to the Piazza della [View Full Entry]

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On June 10, we started our adventure in Florence (or Firenze, as it is known in Italy). We first visited the gallery of the Academy, where we saw many wonderful works of art - but none more impressive than the original of Michaelangelo's David. This piece is incredibly beautiful and HUGE! I never realized from the many pictures I've seen of this piece how large it actually is. We also saw his "prisoners", unfinished sculptures of men who are still imprisoned in the marble. After seeing these pieces along with the sculptures we saw in Rome, there is no denying [View Full Entry]

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This morning, we checked out of our hotel in Sorrento and made the relatively quick bus ride to the ruins of the ancient city of Pompeii in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius. Our guide for the Pompeii tour was the wife of Mariano, our guide from the previous day! It was amazing to see how well preserved these ruins actually are. Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 A.D., destroying the city, killing tens of thousands of people, and burying the entire thing under ash and rock (but not lava). That is why archeologists were able to uncover the city in such [View Full Entry]

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We had to be up bright and early to pack up the bus and leave Rome. We took a nice drive (about 3 hours) down to Naples (or Napoli, to the Italians). We really only saw the city as we drove through to the port, since it was not our main destination. At the port, we boarded a hydrofoil boat and went approximately 45 minutes across the water to the tiny island of Capri. In Capri, we took a small caravan of taxis up the narrow and winding roads to the top of the mountain. This ride was somewhat scary, [View Full Entry]

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Hi to all. I have gone a few days without internet access, so I am trying to "catch up" with what's been going on here. On Thursday, we finished up our initial time in Rome. We started the day by picking up our guide Gloria (same guide from the Vatican Museums) and traveling to the Colosseum. First, outside of the Colosseum, we looked at Constantine's Arch. Then, she took us through the Colosseum, and I was struck by how amazing it is that people could build such a structure so long before the tools of modern technology were around to [View Full Entry]

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Buona sera (Good evening)! Our first full day in Italy was really busy, but extremely memorable! Our day was spent at the Vatican, home of the Roman Catholic Church and its leader - Pope Benedict XVI. We had to get up very early (6:00 am) so we could arrive in St. Peter's Square by 8:00 to get good seats for the pope's weekly General Audience, which is open to the public. I couldn't believe what good seats we got! We were in the front section, and had a very good view of the proceedings. When the pope was driven around [View Full Entry]

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Hello, all! Well, it is 9:40 pm in Rome, Italy (3:40 pm in Florida). We left Miami at 9:45 last night, after waiting on the runway for an hour for some unknown delay. We flew into London this morning at about 11:00 am, and I tested my international cell phone by calling mom. It worked fine. We finally got into Rome this evening at about 5:00 pm. We had to drive around the city a good way to get to our hotel. It is a beautiful, though busy and crowded city. All of the cars seem much smaller than ours. There [View Full Entry]

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