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Published: February 25th 2007
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We’re back from Italy now. It was a really fun trip, but more of a traveling/sightseeing trip than a relaxing vacation because we were in cities for most of the trip and there was so much to see.
Lindsay and I were saying to each other on this trip that one of the most exciting things about Italy is that there are things there that are so famous that we’ve known about them since we were little kids. Things like the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the canals in Venice, the Roman Empire, spaghetti, lasagna, pizza, and of course the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, I mean Renaissance artists, Donatello, Raphael, Michelangelo, and Leonardo (turtle power!). The only problem with all these things being so famous is that people from all over the world are in Italy trying to see them as well, usually at the same time of day as us.
Rome had some really exciting things to see like the Colosseum, the Pantheon, and the Vatican, but it was the most crowded, especially at the Vatican. The Vatican Museum felt kind of like bumper cars in rush hour traffic, except without the cars or padding and with really expensive
looking things on the walls. The best thing about Rome, other than the sightseeing when the crowds thinned out a bit, was the narrow streets and cozy squares (piazzas). Rome felt very festive the whole time we were there because of all the places to have a bite to eat or a drink and because everyone seemed to be out having a good time.
Florence was one of our favorite cities because it was really pedestrian friendly. The Duomo cathedral was right next to our hotel and within a 5 or 10 minute walk we could get to the all of the major museums and the famous Ponte Vecchio, which was the only bridge in Florence not destroyed during WWII. The Uffizi Museum was also one of our favorite things to do because it had some interesting artwork from the 13th - 18th centuries and a great view over the river.
Pisa was the big surprise of the trip because we were expecting it to be kind of a tourist trap, but because most people do it as a day trip from Florence, it was really peaceful at night. We got lucky because there was a full moon
the night we were there and there was also a choir practicing in the cathedral next to the tower. We even had our best pizza in Pisa, at a little restaurant where we watched the cook shoveling pizzas in and out of the brick oven as fast as he could to keep up with what must have been half of Pisa there for a cheap dinner. We had booked tickets to climb the tower at 8:00 the next morning, and we ended up being the only ones there that early, so we had the whole tower to ourselves.
Cinque Terre, west of Pisa, was the outdoorsy highlight of the trip. It is on a short strip of coastline with 5 small villages that are connected by beautiful hiking trails and trains running back and forth so that you can take the easy way back. We learned on our last night in Italy that the houses are all painted different bright colors so that the fishermen in the villages could find their way home in the fog or at night.
Bologna is one of the food capitals of Italy (the home of lasagna and tortellini), but it was less
pleasant to walk around because of all the traffic and buses running through the city. The red brick buildings and arcades over almost all of the sidewalks downtown were kind of cool to see.
Venice was probably our favorite city we visited. We thought that maybe the canals and gondolas and stuff would be kind of cheesy, but it was actually really cool to see. We didn’t do a gondola ride because it was pretty expensive, but our little budget hotel room had a nice view of a canal and we got to free-ride on the accordions and singers when they went by in the gondolas. We even waved from our window to all of the groups that went by in the evenings and they seemed happy to have some fans.
Verona was a smallish city and we didn’t do too much there except check out the Roman Arena, which is used for opera performances on summer evenings. We also saw the fictional house of Juliet, which I kept calling Romeo & Juliet’s house, but Lindsay had to remind me that they didn’t actually live together. “Read Shakespeare more attentively” is on my list of things to do.
Finally, we had one afternoon in Milan before heading back to Portugal. We went to the downtown area which has a huge cathedral and a whole neighborhood filled with crazy designer shopping. We decided to bypass the $3,000 purses and instead found a fun (and free) street exhibition of aerial photographs from all over Italy.
The tally from the trip is 14 pasta or pizza dinners (and we never got tired of it), 3 Turkish döner kebab lunches, 12 kinds of wine, 3 kinds of beer, 8 gelato ice creams, 1 tiramisù desert, 1 extra large bag of assorted gummy bear type candies from the airport duty free store that somehow lasted the whole trip, 7 trains between cities, 3 shuttle trains, 2 subway systems, 2 Venetian ferries, and 20 or so admissions to everything from the Vatican Museum in Rome to the national park in Cinque Terre to the bathrooms near St. Mark’s square in Venice (a steal at just €1.)
- Jason
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