Italy was an amazing 10 day trip. Looking back, I'm pretty impressed that we were able to fit so much in! The whole trip was filled with seeing artwork that I still am in disbelief that I actually saw in person, indulging myself with wonderful food, and just walking around the cities trying to soak up the atmosphere. All of the cities were pretty touristy - more so than Spain feels to me. We got pretty lucky with the weather and logistically everything worked out. I went with 3 other girls from my program who all go to school in Indiana. It was really nice to be able to spend an extended period of time with a smaller group to get to know them each individually - most of my time in Spain has been with bigger groups and for not as long. I ate so much good pizza and pasta, and was happy to see that every gelato place had sorbet (vegan) for me. I tried nutella - a chocolate hazelnut spread - for the first time in Italy... and absolutely love it. People here say that they use nutella like Americans use peanut butter; I got over the non-veganness of it and am now in love. Most restaurants would have an inexpensive house wine that was usually from around the area, so that was great to be able to try that. I definitely noticed a difference when I returned to drinking my 1-euro box wine last night!
The first city we went to was Milan, which is often referred to as the business-capital of Italy. As a city that shows current Italian culture, it was a great way to start the trip! As Rick Steves said, people typically visit Italy for its rich history... but people go to Milan for today's Italy. In that way, it reminded me a lot of Madrid. It was less touristy than the other cities, but still had a lot of great things to see. da Vinci's Last Supper is there (which I didn't get to see because its booked-up months in advance), but I went to the church that it is housed in, which was a wonderfully humble-looking romanesque church. We saw so many churches when we were there, but I was happy to find myself continually amazed by each of them. The romanesque churches are so much simpler than the Gothic ones that Spain tends to have, and it is a nice change to have a church that is smaller, better lit and full of frescoes. That's not to say that Italy doesn't have any gothic churches - those had beautiful facades of white, green and pink marble. We got to climb on top of the roof of Milan's Duomo (cathedral), which was amazing to see. There were hundreds of little spires, and it made me wish you could go on the top of every gothic building.
Molly and I on top of the Duomo in Milan... me with Rick Steves in hand
Also in Milan, we saw one of Michelangelo's "Pietá" sculptures. A pieta is a work of Mary holding crucified Christ in her arms, and Michelangelo had many of them. We ended up seeing a few of his, which was really neat to compare. The one in Milan was his final work - he died while working on it. Because of this, it was really neat to see how he went about sculpting. As I learned after seeing his work in several museums, he generally worked front to back from a piece of marble/stone. He supposedly believed that god put the figure in the slab of stone, and Michelangelo was simply releasing the figure. As I later saw in Florence, he has a series called The Prisoners, who look like people who are trapped in the stone and trying to break out. It was really cool being able to see so many of his works, more on them below.
After Milan, we took a beautiful train ride to Venice. Venice was so great and relaxing. It really is a city built on over 100 islands that were fortified long ago to make them habitable, and they actually use the canals for their transportation - basically instead of roads. It was so peaceful to not have cars! We rode their public transport boats down the main canal a few times, which takes you through a lot of history of the city with all of the palaces and market places built for trading. The grand St. Mark's Basilica lies where the grand canal meets the open lagoon. It was a beautiful church that had marked Byzantine influence, so that was really neat to see and compare with the others in Italy. Venice was filled with a lot of gelato (sorbet for me), crepes with nutella and bananas, and exploring back areas of the city. We splurged and took a gondola ride, which was completely worth it and one of my favorite moments of the trip. Our gondolier, Giamba, took us down several smaller canals that you can't get to on public transportation. He finished by singing to us, and I'm pretty sure I teared up because I was so happy to be there on the water with this man singing romantic songs to us in Italian.. haha.
The canal outside our hostel
Meandering down canals in the gondola
Next was Rome. Rome was crazy and filled with so many wonderful things to see. We were there for two and a half days. We got there late Monday night, and as our hostel was at the end of one of the metro lines, decided to stay there for the night to rest of up for a long day of sight-seeing on Tuesday. Tuesday we did old-time Rome things: we toured the Coliseum, walked through the Roman Forum and saw the Pantheon. I still can't believe we saw all of those things in person.
A dark picture, but me with the Roman Forum in the background
Alright I have to take a pause and post this now - I will finish up talking about Rome and Florence tomorrow! Love, Bonnie
sounds great! can't wait to hear about the rest of your trip =)
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