Places I Would Rather be on Monday Morning: Marveling at Tradition

Approaching Vatican City, Italia

Places I Would Rather be on Monday Morning: Tuscan Skyline

Firenze, Italia

Places I Would Rather be on Monday Morning: Wandering the Forum

Foro Romano, Roma, Italia

Places I Would Rather be on Monday Morning: Lost in Venice

Three wrong turns along a canal, Somewhere in Venezia, Italia

Places I Would Rather be on Monday Morning: Piazza Navona

Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi, Piazza Navona, Roma, Italia

Venezia, Italia (Mar 26-27)

Venice really is a city like no other. First of all it's an island. Second, it's sinking. And finally, I'm quite confident that you can't walk more than 100ft without changing roads. I've thought that other cities have been difficult to navigate but there were usually a few main roads I could use to get to where I wanted to go. In Venice the main roads are the canals and everything on land is just a maze of walking paths. I have never been happier that I brought a map with me. That being said, wandering around the city and sometimes getting very lost was a lot of fun.

Venice is full of tourists and therefore has more gift shops than I've seen since I went to Disney World. Venetian glass and masks are the hot ticket items and they are everywhere! I bought a couple pieces of glass and would have liked to have gotten a mask but I was worried it would get squished in my backpack so I decided to wait on the mask until I can make it to Carnevale or Mardi Gras Venice-style.

I spent a lot of time just exploring the city but I also went into over a dozen churches. I went to a few of the larger churches such as Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari and Santa Maria Formosa and S.S. Giovanni e Paolo. I also went to the Basillica di San Marco, one of the city's premier tourist attractions. The majority of the churches I visted were small (and free); some of them were so small they weren't named on my map. The small churches, and even the larger churches were similar to the ones in Florence, slightly more art but still tasteful. There were definitely more visible relics in Venice. I saw hands, feet, blood, even a tooth, of various saints all over the city. Personally I think such relics should put away but I will say that everything was very well preserved. San Marco had more gold in it than any church I've seen since I left Prague. The knave wasn't as big as some of the other churches I visited in Venice but it was definitely the most ornate. Just around the corner from San Marco is the Bridge of Sighs where prisoners were once led across a canal from the Palazzo Ducale to where they were executed. Unfortunately they were renovating the buildings around the bridge while I was there so my picture is cluttered with scaffolding. The church I remember the best was a relatively small one, I was looking for one of the bridges across the Canal Grande when I noticed it was hosting an exhibit on Vivaldi, who was born and raised in Venice. Having played "The Four Seasons" way back in high school orchestra I thought I'd check it out. Not only did the exhibit have information about his life, it also had probably three dozen violins, violas, clarinets, and an assortment of other string instruments - all dating back to the 1700s. There wasn't anything especially remarkable about the church but the exhibit was very neat.

After crisscrossing the city a couple of times I ended my day at the Piazza San Marco. I was on the opposite side of the city as the train station so I took a water bus on the Canal Grande back to the station. The Canal Grande is the major road of the city and definitely the easiest way to travel without getting turned around or lost. The riches families lived on the Canal so the houses visible from the water have ornate fascades facing the water. I took my waterbus to the station as the sun was setting which made for some very pretty skylines.

As with every city I've visited I had to leave so much of it unexplored. I am definitely completely enamored with the country of Italy and cannot wait to go back and explore some more. Everytime I go my list of places keeps getting longer and I have yet to actually cross any of them off since there is so much still to see and experience.

Minitrip: Sacile

Sacile is a small town north of Venice where my friend Andy lives. There's a direct train from Sacile to Venice and Andy was kind enough to let me stay with him so I didn't have to pay for one of the crazy expensive hostels in Venice. I took a train from Florence to Venice and then decided to go to Sacile and hang out there for the rest of the day since I was pretty tired from all of my adventures up until then.

It was a beautiful sunny day so I spent a couple hours walking around the town. One of the travel websites I use called Sacile "Little Venice" because of the canals that crisscross its centro. One of the things the site didn't mention is that you can see the Dolomite mountains from the streets. The centro is made up of shops surrounding a central piazza. The town church is also referred to as a Duomo but it doesn't quite compare to the size of the Duomo in Florence. It was beautifully situated right next to one of the canals though. I found a footbridge where I could see the canal, town, and mountains and tried to get a picture to due the view justice. Unfortunately I got about half dozen people's TV antennas in the shot which definitely compromises the picture.

If I wasn't obligated to go back to Uni. Sussex and then RPI, I probably would have set up camp right there in Sacile. I even found a couple of places for sale or rent. It was such a beautiful town and everyone I met was really friendly. It was exactly what I was expecting for a small Italian town.

Firenze, Italia (Mar 24-25)

My favorite way to travel in Europe is quickly becoming by train. The train ride from Rome to Florence was very different scenery than my trip through the Alps to Milan. Instead of giant mountains there were tall hills with manors or villages at the tops. The low lands were devoted to agriculture. The only bad thing was the grey weather that followed me all the way from Rome to Florence.

One thing that gray, rain weather is good for is museums. Therefore I went to the Galleria dell' Accademia and the Galleria degli Uffizi on my first day in Florence. I honestly spent more time waiting in line than it took to see all of the art in the museums. The Accademia is famous for Michelangelo's Statue of David. Although there is little else in the gallery worth noting, the David was intense. Somehow all of the pictures in my textbooks never quite conveyed how tall the statue really is. The statue is very beautiful and totally worth the 6.5 euros I paid to see it. In the Uffizi, I saw Botticelli's "Birth of Venus" and "Spring." I almost missed both paintings because the entrance to the room with the paintings is through the back of another room. I'm really glad that I backtracked and found the entrance since those two paintings were the main reason I stood in line for as long as I did. I didn't recognize any of the other works in the gallery but staying in the gallery kept me out of the rain so I was happy to check out all of the rooms. By the time I ran out of paintings to look at, it had stopped raining so I ventured out and decided to climb up to the Piazzale Michelangelo which is, more or less, a parking lot at the top of a hill that looks out over the city of Florence. The climb up the stairs to the piazza was much harder than I was expecting. Stairs weren't steep but there were a lot of them. Luckily enough people walk up to this spot that there were plenty of benches surrounding the parking lot. Even though the sky was still fairly misty from the afternoon showers, you could still see the expansive city and the Tuscan mountains beyond it. Many of the buildings had red tile roofs and the misty mountains in the background created what is considered to be a classic Italian backdrop.

Since I did the museums on the first day, I did churches on the second day. Florence, like every other major Italian city, has a ton of churches. It turns out that the Duomo in Florence is the Duomo with the third largest knave in the world. The Duomo and several other well-known churches in the city have exteriors of green and white marble. I haven't seen that combination any where else that I've traveled. I visited close to a dozen churches over the course of the day ranging from the gigantic Duomo to the tiny hole-in-the-wall church that Dante and his family attended. Overall, I've found the church is Italy to be more beautiful and better decorated/organized than the churches I've seen anywhere else. I really liked checking out some of the smaller churches, it was a little like stepping back in time. I went up to a monastery next to the Piazza Michelangelo and heard the end of Vespers. From inside a large mostly empty marble church the echos of the chants were flat out eerie. I didn't make it to St. Croce which is where Michelangelo, Galileo, and Machiavelli are supposed to be entombed. I also missed the Palazzo Piti which is where the Medici's lived. However, I'm definitely planning on returning to Italy so I'll have another chance to see them.

One of the high points of visiting Florence was seeing my friends from JMU. We met by chance in Dublin and have kept in touch with facebook and email. They're studying in Florence so they were able to show me their favorite pizza and gelato places. Pizza and gelato are essential when traveling on a student's budget and these places had some of the best I had tried so far. The pizza in Florence was at least twice as thick as the super-thin pizza I had in Milan but it was still very light, nothing like the gummy crusts you sometimes get in the States. I wish I could have spent more time hanging out with everyone but they had papers to finish and I had a train ticket to Venice. A couple of them are planning on coming to the UK later this year some hopefully we'll get to meet up again.

Roma, Italia (March 20-23)

The major inspiration for my trip to Rome was to watch my friend Andy run in the Rome Marathon. I had read about marathons in magazines and newspapers and seen clips on the news but you really can't appreciate how much a a crowd over 14,000 runners and support crew creates until you're trying to negotiate a city in the midst of it. We arrived in Rome a couple days before the marathon and it seemed like everywhere we went we met people who were running or knew someone running the marathon.

My first day in Rome the weather reminded me more of the weather I was used to in England than the sunny, warm weather I was expecting in Italy. Luckily that day was spent checking into hostels and creating a rough plan for the next couple days. Ironically, my first day in Rome was also the day of my first meal at a proper Indian food restaurant.

The next day we planned to go to Vatican City. The weather was still cool, but sunny. The hostel we stayed at had a breakfast room with a terrace. The view from the breakfast terrace in the sunlight reminded me of something from a movie. Yes, I was probably a little swept up with being in Italy but it was still very pretty. Vatican City was crawling with people. We set off for the Vatican Museum and were greeted with a massive que. Thankfully the line moved quickly and we were in the museum in less than half the time than a "tour guide" had predicted. We only did the art portion of the museum and that took nearly three hours. Mixed in with all of the gothic religious art, we saw Raphael's School of Athens, the Sistine Chapel, as well as Eygptian, Assyrian, Roman, and Greek exhibits. The real School of Athens was very cool, especially after seeing a sketch of it in Milan. The Sistine chapel was not what I was expecting. All of the walls and ceiling are covered with frescos. The famous frescos make make a very small percentage of all of those visible. I had to search for some of the familiar fractions of complete frescos. The high concentration of people jammed in the small chapel took away from the art because of all of the jostling and shhing by curators.

After we finished as much of the museum as we could handle, Andy and I headed for the marathon expo so he could register and get his bib number. After seeing all of the sponsor and vendor tents at the expo, even I felt like I should be running. They also had a pasta dinner going on which we visited before checking out the Colosseum. The building was already closed but I got some good pictures of it and the surrounding ruins at sunset. We wandered around the city a little bit before turning in early for the marathon the next day.

Sunday morning I met Andy at the Colosseum at 7:30am. The streets and the metro were packed on the way to the Colosseum. All of the runners and cheer squads we had met of the last two days were congregating for the beginning of the race. While Andy got to run along a prearranged racecourse, I got to battle through slow moving crowds and try to navigate a city that suddenly had many of its major street blocked off. Thankfully the metro, though congested, was still working normally so that proved to be one of the better ways to get around. I crisscrossed across the city several times and only managed to actually see Andy running once although I'm sure that he ran past me several time with me realizing it. I did get to see several sites along the racecourse like the Trevi Fountain and the Spanish Steps which was pretty handy. Andy did a great job finishing the marathon in 4 hours and 12 minutes. I was really proud of him. After the race Andy was really sore so he took some time to rest and I went back to Vatican City.

On my second trip to Vatican City, I went to St. Peter's Square and Basilica. The Pope was on tour in Africa so I didn't see him in his window but I did see the window. The St. Peter's complex huge and crowded. St. Peter's Basilica was gigantic. It has the largest knave in the world which is only part of what makes it awe inspiring. The floors and walls had intricate patterns of marble and while there were many decorations, it didn't feel cluttered like many of the other major religious buildings I've visited. However, as the center of the Roman Catholic Church, I'd expect St. Peter's Basilica to look incredible. I couldn't get close to the high alter because that area of the Basilica was reserved for those attending mass. I couldn't stay for mass because I was due to meet Andy for dinner. From where I was, about halfway back from the alter, the rest of the cavity looked just as beautiful of the area that I could see up close.

My last day in Rome, Andy and I were meant to go to the Colosseum and the ruins of Palantino Hill and the Roman Forum. However, Andy was still very sore from the race so I went on my own. The Colosseum seemed even bigger from the inside than it did from the outside. Enough of the structure remains that you could get a rough feel of what it may have been little to attend "games" at the venue some 2000 years ago. The ruins were another story. There area was once full of marble buildings but over the centuries the temples, palaces, and other buildings have been broken, disassembled, and mixed together to the point that, without a guide or a decent map, the crumbling walls don't mean very much. I spent the rest of the day wandering around the city searching out some of the sights I had missed like the Pantheon, and several fountains. It was the perfect day to walk around the city; sunny and warm with a light breeze. I spent all day walking around and taking pictures, wrapping out the day and my time in Rome by taking some night pictures of the Colosseum. Next Stop: Florence.

Bella Italia

I just finished a week of traveling around Italy. I absolutely loved it. I visited Rome, Florence, and Venice, with a minitrip to Sacile. In addition to visiting these beautiful cities, I was able to see some friends of mine that I hadn't seen in a long time. The weather wasn't perfect but didn't matter. Although I admit that when the weather in England was nicer than the weather when I landed in Rome, I wasn't the happiest camper in the world. That initial hesitation disappeared as soon as I finished the hour journey from the airport to the actual city of Rome. The rest of the week was great, going from one adventure to the next. I'll go into more detail in future posts about each city. I'm already looking forward to going back to Italy and continuing to explore the country.

Milano, Italia (Dec 30 - Jan 1)

The train ride from Geneve to Milano was another absolutely beautiful ride. We traveled along Lake Geneve for quite a while. Sandwiched between the lake, the Alps, and assorted vineyards. The vineyards faded away and were replaced by larger mountains. By this time the tracks were far enough away from the mountains that we could see the transition of dense trees to snowy peaks on each mountain. Not long after that I fell asleep and when I woke up we were back in the thick of the mountains, with the slopes rising up on either side of us. Most of these slopes were tree-covered but occasionally the trees gave way to a village which probably only appeared after the railway was built. The villages were very cramped and crowded on the mountain-side but the church was always clearly visible. As we approach Milan we passed a beautiful lake surrounded by mountains. There was a castle of a manor situated on the other side of the lake that I think I recognized from one of the pictures my dad showed me from his business trips to Milan but I can't be certain.

Even though it was a pleasant train ride to Milan, I was definitely relieved when we arrived at our final destination. Our next challenge was finding the bus stop to take us to the hotel. Quite accidentally the first bus we found was the Malpensa Express which we would board in a couple days to go to the airport. The bus we needed was on the other side of the station. As we approached the bus stop we got our first taste of Italian public transport. The bus we wanted had pulled away from the bus stop and was sitting at a stop sign. In Brighton that would mean you were out of luck until the next bus came. However in Milan we were able to walk up at the stop sign and the driver opened the door and allowed us to get on. Our final place of lodging was Hotel 22 Marzo which, thankfully, gave clear directions from the train station to its front door.

We were greeted by a friendly staff and a recently refurbished downstairs. Unfortunately our room hadn't been refurbished but the bed was pretty comfortable and the shower was hot which is all I cared about at that point. It was still too early for dinner when we arrived so we walked around the area for a while before going to a Chinese/Italian restaurant. The menu consisted of pizzas, Italian antipasto, and Chinese antipasto. I opted for a pizza and then tiramisu. The pizza was great. The tiramisu - not so much. Leanna had some sort of ice cream with candied nuts on it which I got to try and that was delicious.

The next day was New Year's Eve and we started the day off early by walking to the Piazza del Duomo to see the Duomo di Milano. I had heard the term "duomo" tossed around and was expecting an average cathedral. Little did I know that this Duomo is the third largest church in the world. The guy that built it was trying to appeal to the Virgin Mary to give him a son. I hope he got his son because this church is insane. First of all it's huuuge. No other way to say it. The exterior walls are covered with carvings of saints, martyrs, gargoyles, etc. in addition to all of the arches and spires. It's almost too much to look at. The inside is just as ornate with probably a dozen alters, in addition to the main alter, dedicated to different saints. There was also an almost life-sized nativity scene. There were even armed guards at the entrances checking people's bags as they went in. In conclusion, the Duomo di Milano is not an average cathedral.

The only other church we went into was the Santa Maria della Grazie. Da Vinci's "The Last Supper" is in the refectory next to the church so we went to investigate. I was expecting a large ornate church but the building was actually fairly small and simple. We went into the church first and walked right into a beautiful courtyard. Again it was small, simple, and very pretty, with a few trees and a fish pond. In one of the rooms off of the courtyard someone was hosting an exhibit of angel paintings. All of the paintings had the angels in bright jewel tones instead of white. I thought they were fairly pretty. I really like the inside of the church. It was probably the simplest church we went into. The interior was mostly flat stone with very few decorations. There were a few alters to saints including St. Catherine of Alexandria, my confirmation name saint. My favorite part of this church was the Nativity. Unlike many of the other Nativity scenes we saw on out trip, this one portrayed a street scene instead of just the collection around the manger. It had the inn and the stable, and had figures of people coming to the stable to see what had happened instead of just standing around. It looked like it had belonged to the church for a very long time and was obviously well-cared for. Not long after we entered the church the Priest shooed us out for the midday service. Leanna and I thought we would try to check out "The Last Supper" while we were there and battled our way to the ticket desk. When we got to the desk the girl informed us that there were no tickets available to see the mural for the next TWO WEEKS. I couldn't believe it. Dan Brown and his novel have caused amateur art detectives to flood the exhibit trying to find a missing clue. It was rather infuriating. As we walked back towards the Duomo we decided that gelato was the only appropriate consolation for missing "The Last Supper" by two weeks. Excellent decision. I got some sort of berry flavors that was absolutely delicious.

Our next destination was the pinecoteca Ambrosiana, a library that also has a small museum in it. The museum had the most aggressive guides I've ever seen. They insisted that we go through the rooms in the correct order and one even stopped me for not looking at a painting for long enough (a fruit still-life of all things). The highlights of the museum were several of Da Vinci's papers and his "Portrait of a Musician," Napoleon's gloves from the Battle of Waterloo, and a wall-sized sketch of Rapheal's "School of Athens." My high school global teacher, Mr. Frahm, had a poster of the "School of Athens" in his classroom and it's been one of my favortite works of art ever since so I really enjoyed seeing the sketch. When we had finished the exhibits and were leaving we kept glancing around waiting for one of the guides to come after us and tell us we had done something wrong but in the end we left without being confronted.

We encountered another outdoor market for our collection in a piazza adjacent to the Piazza de Duomo. This market was not specific to Christmas and had done away with any residual festive wares. It did have several cookie vendors so we sampled some authentic Italian cookies, and a canoli for me, while we looked at the miscellaneous gadgets and gizmos available for purchase and then started toward the Castello Sforzesco, a castle that sits in a direct line with the Duomo.

Compared to the Duomo the Castello wasn't very impressive. It was large and square and had a cool fountain in front of it and a large park behind it so it wasn't a total bust. We decided to skip the museums that are housed within the castle and just walked around the grounds. The exterior of the castle was made of entirely of red brick with lots of angles so I had some fun trying different camera angles. When we got the the back of the castle we found a "snow park" - ramps with something like astroterf so little kids could ski down them. There was also a lodge with a bar and grill food and hot drinks for the parents. Just past the snow park was a legitimate park that stretched quite a ways back to the Arc of Peace, which looks very similar to the Arcs we saw in Paris. Although "Arcs" in general are not a unique idea in Europe. We found a poster saying that there would be fireworks for New Years by the pseudosnow park so we decided to return to the hotel, grab some dinner and then return of the fireworks.

On the way back toward the hotel we found a couple of good-looking restaurants that were closed. We found one just around the corner from our hotel that had its hours posted. The sign indicated that the restaurant would open in about an hour so we decided to chill out in our room and then go for dinner when it opened. When we came down from our room we made two discoveries. First, it had started to snow, and second, the restaurant was not open probably due to the holiday. We decided to just go back to the Chinese/Italian place again since we had passed it on the way and seen that it was open. Apparently that little hybrid restaurant was one of the few restaurants open because it was very full and they were having a hard time coping. Leanna and I both ordered off the antipasto menu but we probably should had ordered pizza. I had risotto Milano (rissoso with saffron), spaghetti carbonera, and apple cake. The risotta was pretty good, the carbonera was not so good, and the apple cake was exactly what I was expecting. I was a little disappointed with my antipasto experience after hearing about all of my dad's delicious antipasto meals. I'll have to try again sometime when I'm in Italy and it's not a holiday.

It was still snowing when we left for the fireworks and in places where the city was quiet it was very pretty. When we got to the Piazza de Duomo we ran into a crowd of people including a lot of teenaged boys armed with firecrackers which they set off periodically with no regard to where they went. After traveling for 14 days I had even less patience for this than I normally would have had and was very happy to reach the castle. The fireworks were being set off in a section of the park called the piazza del cannone, and the event had attracted a crowd. We had arrived early and secured a spot in the lodge in an attempt to stay slightly warmer than we would be in the open air. We watched the beginning of the midnight show and then started walking back to our hotel so we wouldn't get caught in the crowd. What we saw of the show was very good and as we walked back we could see more fireworks being set off in different parts of the city. When we entered our hotel room I turned on TV and found the Italian New Years Eve special. Minus the replays of the Times Square ball dropping, it was extactly the same as the post-midnight show you would see in the States.

The next morning was our last day in Italy and the last day of our trip. We checked out of the hotel and the innkeeper surprised us which a bottle of red wine, which I was lucky enough to bring home with me, and let us store our bags in the breakfast corner so we wouldn't have to carry them around the city all day. Our innkeeper was really friendly to us, which goes to show that trying a little to be friendly and humble goes along way while traveling.

After leaving the hotel, we went to the Milan fashion district. None of the stores were open but the didn't matter because we probably couldn't have afforded anything anyways. We were quite content to look in the windows and discuss what we liked and what we thought was just plain weird. As we made our way out of the shopping district, we ran into several bands that appeared to be finishing a parade or some other type of demonstration. We could hear the music but never saw where it was coming from. The vast majority of the shops around city center were closed and I'm sure the trend would have continued if we kept walking further out. We did find an Italian restaurant/pizzeria that was open. Their "famous" pizza really wasn't any different from the pizza we had had from the Chinese restaurant except it cost more. But, in the end, it was a good lunch and a "free" reststop.

We spent a good chunk of the rest of the afternoon walking down side streets around the city center. We didn't find anything breath-taking but it was still an experience to walk on quiet, cobbled streeted in the 21st century. The streets in old European cities just have a different feel to them than those in American cities. It was also a good way to unwind after two weeks of hardcore traveling and before heading to the airport. When we finally ran out of easily accessible streets, we bought one last gelato (chocolate chip, yum!) and headed back to the hotel to collect our bags. We ended up leaving for the airport a little early and subsequently spent a little more time waiting in lobbies than orinially planned but it was okay. As I sat at my gate in the Milan Malpensa airport, I found it impossible to wrap my head around everything that I had seen and experienced over the previous 15 days. I read through the journal I had been keeping and was even more blown away. However my travels weren't over yet. I was returning to England for roughly 12 hours and then boarding another plane for Detroit, MI in order to spend the last week of the holidays with my family in Michigan.