Tour of Italy

After my week in Thessaloniki, my friend Heather and I flew from Thessaloniki to Athens, Athens to Rome, and finally Rome to Venice…to begin our tour of Italy! And somehow, I was too excited once I was in Italy to be too tired! I couldn’t believe I was in Italy, and to be honest, I’m still not sure that I believe that I was in England, Switzerland, Greece, OR Italy! As soon as Heather and I got off the bus on the main island, right next to the Grand Canal, we were SO excited! It was beautiful! This is what we saw:

We started being all tourist-y and American…being loud and taking pictures. We set to work following the instructions from our hostel about how to get there. We had to take the water bus, walk across the Rialto, and along all these small alleys to find it. It was exhausting, especially while dragging luggage, but we made it, and then set out to find Heather’s friend Julie. We spent a few hours looking for her and trying to call her, and could NOT find her! I think that is when the exhaustion hit me! Eventually, we found her at the hostel, and then went right to bed. We got a good night’s sleep so we could have a full day the next day. And we sure did! How we did most of our sightseeing, especially in Venice, was just wandering around, picking a way, and walking around until we hit a dead end. Then we took the water bus to Murano, the island famous for its glass. We wandered around the island and shopped for glass jewelry, which made great gifts for my mom and sister for Christmas. We took the typical pictures of us on the Rialto, and also saw many beautiful parts of Venice:

At this time of year, it is the rainy season in Italy, and Venice gets flooded by the aqua alta. Two weeks before we arrived in Venice, the city was the most flooded it had been in a couple decades. But we lucked out and only ran into a couple problems. When the tide came in in the morning, we walked through San Marco Piazza, and the plaza was covered with a foot of water. It was really neat to see though because they set up these foot bridges so everyone doesn’t have to walk through the water. Then, when we got off the water bus dock on Murano, we walked right into six inches of water, luckily, Heather and I bought rain boots to wear as soon as we arrived in Venice! Below is a view of San Marco at high tide, and below that is low tide:

The next morning we took the train to Florence, and began our tour of the next city. My favorite things in Florence were seeing El Duomo, which is the largest church I’ve ever been in. Here is a picture of its beautiful façade:

I also liked seeing the Ponte Vecchio. After Venice, being in Florence was a kind of a shock…because they have roads, cars and mopeds there! The Ponte Vecchio was very pretty.

That night we climbed up to the Piazza del Michaelangelo and had a beautiful view over Florence:

We went into a couple museums, but my favorite thing to see was the Statue of David. It is very tall, and much more impressive and graceful than any copies or pictures show it to be. In Florence, we also got to meet up with another friend from Stonehill studying there, in between his finals. He actually tracked us down, checking every major tourist attraction, because I gave him the wrong numbers for my mobile phone. Sorry again about that Brendan!

From Florence, we took a train to Pisa, just for a couple hours so we could see the Leaning Tower of Pisa. It was only an hour away, and we figured, we were there, we might as well go! We were told the tower was right near the train station, but it was not, we had to walk through the town in order to get there. But that way we saw they city as well as the tower! And of course we took the typical pictures of us pushing up the tower.

Our final destination in Italy was Rome, and I think besides the beauty of Venice, this was my favorite city, because there was so much to see! We got there late on Tuesday night, and met Heather and Julie’s friend Mallory. On our first day in Rome we decided to go to Vatican City. We took the metro there, and as soon as we got off, people started trying to sell us tickets to see the Pope and have a tour guide take us through the Vatican museum and the Sistine Chapel. At first we refused, but eventually we realized that we didn’t know where to go or what to do, and decided that it would be worth it to take advantage of it. I was pretty excited about getting to see the Pope, but I was the only one out of the four of us who is Catholic. Pope Benedict spoke first in Italian, then Spanish, then French, and finally he was beginning to speak in English when we had to leave to go meet our tour group.

Here I am in front of St. Peter's Basilica:

The tour turned out to be really entertaining and informative. Our tour guide, Stan, looked kind of like George Clooney, and was totally a ladies man. He was speaking in Italian to all the women in the museum that we passed. He was also very knowledgable, and I learned more about Michaelangelo’s fresco on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel than I would have on my own.

That afternoon we walked around Rome, saw the Trevi Fountain (and threw in coins!) and the Spanish steps.

That night we at a restaurant that quickly became my favorite in Italy. While, I was traveling I wanted to fulfill that image in my mind I had of sitting outside and sipping a cappuccino or getting a light lunch. Well, that didn’t exactly happen since it is the winter, but at night many places have heat lamps so that customers can sit outside comfortably even in the cooler weather. So at this restaurant we finally found a cute little place where we could sit outside and have a nice traditional dinner. I had the yummiest bacon and broccoli ravioli. Each night for dinner we would sit down and eat, and we always found some reasonably priced places. We would eat bread with olive oil, share a bottle of wine, and eat lots and lots of pasta. While in Italy we had spaghetti with Bolognese sauce (they don’t really have meatballs that I saw!), lasagna, tortellini, risotto, and gnocchi. We were looking for fettucine alfredo, but we learned that the Italians think alfredo on fettucine. Apparently Olive Garden has it wrong!

On my final day in Italy we saw the ruins: the Coloseum, Roman Forum, and Circus Maximus. I thought this was really cool because I took Latin in high school and I learned about all the things that I was seeing. In high school, I even had to give a mock guided tour of ancient Rome, and now it was like I was on my own tour!

The next day, I was finally heading home…after a completely exhausting two weeks and absolutely fantastic two and a half months! I was really wishing that it had been longer and that I had been able to do more. But I also realized that it was a good thing I wasn’t going to be spending any more money, and Christmas was right around the corner so I was anxious to get home safe to my family for the holiday. Getting home safe was a legitimate concern of mine because there was a snow storm in Boston! To turn the longest day of my life into a short story: I woke up in Rome at 4:30 in the morning, took a taxi to the airport, flew to London, my flight to Boston was delayed about 6 hours, so I spent the day in Heathrow airport. I finally boarded the plane and found my seat in between two little boys (their parents sat in front of them) and a dad holding his baby daughter (his wife and son sat in front of them). Just as we were preparing to take off, the little boy next to me got a bloody nose, so I helped him stop it. Then the baby girl fell asleep with her head in my lap. When I was trying to sleep, my new friend Adam next to me was coughing up a lung. Eight and a half hours, 2 and ¾ movies, and 4 glasses of water later, we were above Boston, and thanks to the storm experiencing turbulence that made my stomach drop. After circling the city twice we began to depart, and had a fairly smooth landing. Then we had to wait 45 minutes on the plane before we were able to get to the gate and depart! It was the longest 45 minutes ever! Next we had to wait at least a half hour for the luggage from our flight to get to baggage claim. By the time I stepped outside, it was after 2 A.M. I then took a van service home (since my family couldn’t come to the airport because of the snow), and my sister, who had been dozing on the couch and my parents, not really sleeping either, greeted me. Not going to lie, we all cried tears of relief and exhaustion.