Cinque Terra and Venice

So for our last day in Florence, we headed out to Cinque Terra. It was exactly how I imagined the coast of Italy to look like. It was breathtakingly beautiful. It's made up of 5 little towns along the coast that are connected by a railroad track and some little paths. They used to be completely isolated so they are pretty small. They still have their own vineyards in their backyards, and it's really quaint. 

Here are some of the highlights:

On the Via del Amore. The girls and boys from neighboring towns
used to use this path to meet up, so they named it the walk of love :)

the water was the perfect turquoise blue

the view from the restaurant where we ate lunch

Lunch! I had the best pasta mmmm

The cat enjoyed the anchovies....haha just kidding they were
actually really good. But we did treat the cat to the bones 

The towns were so picturesque it didn't feel real, I can't believe people actually get to live there!

One of the streets

After swimming in the Mediterranean, we made our way back down the cliff to the train station. Unfortunately, me and my Dad took a little too long taking pictures, so we had to flat out run because we could see the train coming. And....the strap fell off of my camera while I was sprinting so now the pictures look like this :( I'm going to get it fixed hopefully.

 This is actually a picture of the canal right outside our hotel room
window in Venice, somebody jumped in (which is illegal) and
they were being super loud and woke us up. Obviously the
picture didn't turn out, but you can kind of see him standing on
the boat on the left

For our last two days in Italy, we headed to Venice. There wasn't too much to do touristy-wise, but it was really nice to just walk around. It's pretty crazy because there are no cars or bikes or any kind of transportation except boats. Everyone either walks or drives a boat to get around. So since my camera died I don't have too many pictures, just ones from other people's cameras. Here's a couple:

A typical canal. People just have boats tied up next to their doors
instead of cars. For some reason I just think that's really cool

So pretty!

This is us walking in front of the only grass we saw. Since it's a network
of tiny islands, almost every square inch is either a building or paving stones

A famous tower, reminded me of the Tour Rose in Lyon

A gondola! We didn't get to ride in one cause it's ridiculously expensive,
but I think if I came back on my honeymoon or something it might be worth it.
But I loved watching people glide by in them.

One of the 5 bridges that cross the Grand Canal. Other than these 5,
you have to take a boat-taxi to get across it

So after wandering around the city and we climbed up to the top of the giant tower in the Piazza San Marco. The view was amazing:

I don't have any pictures from the Basilica or the Doge's Palace because they were forbidden, but they were definitely my favorite. The basilica's ceilings were covered with gold mosaics--every inch. Beautiful. It must have taken forever. It was also interesting because it's a much more Greek Orthodox style. The Doge's Palace was also really cool--I had never known that Venice's Republic lasted more than a thousand years. You don't learn about things like that in history classes, everyone just talks about Greece and Rome and then nothing until the Enlightenment. But Venice was very democratic and lasted for quite a while. The architecture and art inside were beautiful too.

Well that's it for my grand adventure abroad. It's kind of sad that's it's over, but it's definitely nice to be home! Stay tuned for future (but maybe not-so-grand) adventures :)

Vatican City/Florence

Our last day in Rome we went to the Vatican. It's an autonomous city-state with huge stone walls around it in the middle of Rome, and it's, of course, the center of the Catholic Church. We took a 5 hour tour of the Vatican with a tour guide and I'm so glad we did, because it would have been miserable navigating through all those crowds. Plus we got to skip the line and she knew so much about the art, it was really nice to have her explain the history behind things. 

Some of my favorites:

Ancient Romans cremated their dead and then put their ashes in these.
The busts were placed on top, so that's why there are so many that survived.

The lighting in the new wing was gorgeous

I loved the ancient statues

This is the original Laocoön, cleaned and fixed up by Michelangelo,
they found the original arm only a few years ago, so that's why
it isn't as white as the rest

A picture of the statue with Michelangelo's arms added

The Belvedere torso. It inspired Michelangelo's Adam
on the Sistine Chapel ceiling

Raphael's School of Athen's-I was sooo excited when I saw this

There was also a modern art wing of gifts to the Pope, but
I thought they were all kind of weird

Sistine Chapel! I wasn't supposed to take a picture but...

St Peter's. It is huge!!

Michelangelo's Pieta. Beautiful.

Swiss Guard

We also climbed up to the dome of St Peter's and looked out over the city. The pictures didn't really turn out but it was pretty cool. 

The next day we headed to Florence.

The view from our awesome hotel room

The Duomo!

Ok so I just have to rave about Michelangelo again. He was soooo talented! I like Raphael's painting style better, but his sculptures are amazing. The David and Prisoners are so beautiful. The pictures definitely don't do them justice. David's face even changed depending on the angle. From the front he looks confident, but from the angle of this picture he looks a little apprehensive. We weren't supposed to take pictures, but I snuck one anyways :) I seriously could have sat there and looked at them for hours. And I'm not even an artist! I just read a really good book about Michelangelo (it's called the Agony and the Ecstasy if you want to read it) and I have even more respect for him than I did before. He was so talented and worked so hard.

Michelangelo's David

Florence at sunset

The famous bridge in Florence

We got some fresh fruit at a fruit stand, it was sooo good

Next up the last couple days of Italy: Cinque Terra and Venice

Italia Part 2: Pompeii (!!)

First off, I cannot believe I actually got to go to Pompeii. I went through a phase in like 5th grade where I was obsessed with Greek and Roman mythology, mummies and Pompeii. I just thought it was the coolest thing. Seeing it in real life was not disappointing. It's amazing how well preserved it is, and it's an entire city that they've excavated. It took us all day to walk around it. I just wish that they left the art where they found it instead of taking it to the Naples Museum, cause we didn't make it over there. But it was still pretty awesome.

The train ride there was...interesting. (Naples is just a little ghetto, at least the part I saw). It was a jam-packed graffiti'd train car full of a pickpocket gang of teenagers. Half of them stood at the front being obnoxious and loud while their quiet friends stood in the back unobtrusively, with all of us smashed in between. My family definitely didn't like "metro-surfing" with smelly strangers while protecting their bags for a good half hour but it just reminded me of Paris haha. Oh the things I've learned on study abroad...

But Pompeii itself was pretty amazing. I never realized how technologically advanced the Romans were. The Middle Ages really were the "dark" ages. They lost so much. The roads are a good examples. The residents of Pompeii would clean the streets every night by diverting water down them. In case pedestrians were caught outside, they had raised sidewalks and stepping stones so that they could cross without getting wet. 3 stones meant a major road, 2 a two-way street, and 1 a one-way street. The raised sidewalks also had "cat's eyes" (white stones that reflected light) imbedded so that people could see where they were going in the moonlight.

Stepping stones. The streets are paved like this all over the city

Cat's eye

They also had pedestrian-only areas, like the Forum. They placed these "buck-teeth" barriers at the end of the roads to prevent chariots from going into those places. And they even had pedestrian-only signs in Latin.

"Beaver-teeth"

Pedestrian-only sign

I think it's safe to say that they were literate, since the graffiti is in Latin too. You can tell why graffiti is an Italian word--it is everywhere! Even on their ruins.

The good thing about the ruins is that you can see how they built stuff. Like these columns-they used red bricks, and then covered them with a veneer of marble dust to make it look like marble. Genius. 

Maybe this is a nerd moment, but I thought this was SO COOL: The archaeologists made plaster casts of the roots growing in the gardens and vineyards, figured out the exact variety of plants that were there and replanted some of them. So when you walk through them, you are seeing it exactly as it was right before the eruption buried it. They even make wine out of the same vineyards the Pompeiians did.

I was really excited to see the bathhouse, and it didn't disappoint. They had separate sides for men and women, a courtyard to exercise in, hot and cold baths, and even lockers!

Roman lockers

 The roof of the bathhouse was textured so that water stuck to the walls and didn't drip down on the people. Roman architecture is amazing!!

There are also a ton of stray dogs in Pompeii. They are all used to humans, are fed, spayed and neutered and vaccinated by the city and allowed to sleep inside in the shade whenever they feel like it. Just like in ancient Pompeii (There's a famous mosaic that says Beware of the Dog in Latin). Italians sure love their dogs! (And there's a similar program for cats at one of the ruins in Rome.)

Beware of the dog mosaic

This is a Pompeii cafe. It turns out Romans didn't really like to cook for themselves so they would go out for "fast food" instead. The holes in the marble counters were for soup pots.

This is the cistern that fed water to the aqueducts all over the city. Brigit and Ethan climbed into it and ended up poking their heads out of a sewer grate haha. Don't worry, it hasn't been used for 2000 years.

This was a bakery. Does the oven look familiar? It's almost exactly like a modern pizza oven.

Here's my parents in front of the surgeon's house. They found gynecological instruments here including forceps when they excavated. My dad got super excited when we read that haha. The guy that lived here did the same exact thing my dad does, only 2000 years earlier.

 The frescos on the walls were also really cool. Because Pompeii was buried for so long, some of them are really well preserved. This one is from a country villa a little outside the city.

This table was owned by the first man to stab Julius Caesar when Brutus betrayed him. And it's just sitting in the guy's living room. Still. Crazy.

These are some of the bodies they found when excavating. They are in the vineyard furthest from Vesuvius, but couldn't make it past the wall before they were buried. It's called the Garden of the Fugitives. Pretty sad, a bunch of them are children.

The amphitheater was probably one of my favorites. It could seat 20,000 people, and unlike the Colosseum, you can still see the seats. They have started holding modern concerts there.

To sum it up.... the Romans were pretty amazing. I had a good reason to be obsessed with them as a kid haha. So if you are ever in Italy, definitely go to Pompeii. It's worth it.

Next up: Vatican City!