A little Italy

Sorry for the short interlude, readers! As most of you know, Sam and I are just back from a trip to Italy. A first time visit for both of us. We went for a wedding of a couple of wonderful friends, but enjoyed a week of touristing beforehand. If you don't want to hear my whole trip breakdown, you can skip to the pictures: here. If you don't want to look at 300 pictures, then you can see the shortcut highlights below. So many options! Well, really just the two.

Our first stop was in Rome. After a long plane ride and a stop in the Lisbon airport, during which my eye developed some sort of condition that made it both hypersensitive to light and impossible to wear contacts, we arrived in Rome and made it to our studio apartment. It was extremely tiny and over a loud bar, but also very well located. Our first day in Rome was something of a blur, in part from jetlag and in part because I legitimately couldn't see that well. I also looked like a tool wearing glasses with sunglasses over them. Nevertheless we made a pretty good dent in the city. Rome, as it turns out, is very walkable. We wandered the Colosseum, the Forum, and then made a long loop through winding streets and random ruins to the Pantheon. After a quick walk-by of the Trevi Fountain, we headed home to sleep.

Me and the Colosseum. You can't tell but I'm probably wearing two sets of glasses here. 

The second day, after a quick trip to a pharmacy (turns out Roman pharmacists all speak English and are perfectly willing to diagnose eye problems even if they still can't give you over the counter antibiotics), we did the Vatican museums. We met up with our friend Sara and after confusedly walking  about the entire length of Vatican City, we eventually found the correct entrance for our tickets. All in all, I have to say, the Sistine Chapel is very nice, but there are some equally lovely ceilings elsewhere in that place that aren't nearly as crowded.  After, the museums, we went to what was perhaps my favorite meal of the trip. Sara had a friend who was living in Rome and recommended the place. I honestly think it photographs better than any of the treasures of the Vatican. 

I had a faro fettuccine with pesto and zucchini blossoms. Sara (food on right) had a sort of eggplant cheese stack, and Sam (not really visible) had a delicious orichette with broccoli.  

After Rome, we headed to Florence. I think this might have been my favorite of the cities on our trip. It was even more walkable than Rome, and all the twisting streets were so beautiful. Plus there was just so much art. Not just the museums and plazas with statues, but random paintings on alleyways and wonderful galleries. I took a shine to a painting in a gallery by our apartment, but alas it was 1500 Euros. Slightly above my current art acquisition budget. There were also lovely gardens. I would recommend the Bobli Gardens to anyone looking to spend a lovely afternoon in Florence, walking the maze of shrubs and enjoying wonderful views of the city. If I had one negative thing to say about Florence, it would be the number of mosquitos. Although interestingly most of them seemed to be concentrated just in our apartment. Never open your window at dusk in Florence! This is the sage wisdom I offer to other travelers.

A cool piece of public art by the Ponte Vecchio

A Florentine street.

In Florence, we went to the Uffizi Gallery, best known for containing masterpieces like Botticelli's Birth of Venus and Leonardo da Vinci's Adoration of the Magi. There were also scads of other wonderful paintings and sculptures. We spent a couple of hours there and saw a good chunk of the offerings. Many beautiful works, but after a while your mind starts to glaze over and all the Virgin Mary's and depictions of the massacre of the innocents (question: why was mass baby murder such a favored painting subject?) all start to look the same. One thing I will say for the Uffizi Gallery is that it's the first art museum that I've noticed was equipped to help the visually impaired. Do blind people go to art museums? I never really thought about it, but I guess I could be wrong in assuming they don't.  In addition to having braille descriptions of the paintings, for the Birth of Venus, they actually had a full tactile representation of the painting, so you could feel what it looked like. I guess if I were blind, I would appreciate the effort, but since they only did that for the one painting, I'm not sure what I would do in the of the giant gallery. If they truly want to be progressive, they should let people feel the sculptures too.

A Florentine sunset

After Florence, we were off to Venice. We had just one afternoon in Venice, so we spent it mostly wandering around and getting lost in the labyrinthine streets. Which I guess is fair to see what we did in Rome and Florence as well, but in Venice it was a little different. Getting lost didn't really feel like being lost because we weren't really trying to get anywhere. We just wandered until we got tired, at which point we would sit and have a gelato or a coffee or a wine, depending on the time of day.

Selfie from the top of St. Mark's Basilica 

A bit of Basilica

Something about Venice sort of felt like a theme park to me at times. Perhaps it was the lack of cars or the signs directing you to attractions on every corner. That said, it is a beautiful city. We didn't feel the need to do much museum going because the streets and canals themselves are like art.

A Venetian sunset

Our final stop on the trip was in fact the original reason for the trip: two friends were getting married in a small resort town on the Adriatic, Sirolo. We had been looking forward to this for the whole trip, and it did not disappoint. The location of the wedding was beautiful, and it was fun to see some friends and to meet new ones. The reception was at the hotel where we stayed, a former monastery in the middle of a nature preserve on a mountain overlooking the ocean. Not too shabby.

View from the hotel on Monte Conner

The night before the wedding was my new favorite Italian tradition (now that I know about it): the wedding serenade. The night before the wedding, the groom has to go to the bride's window (in this case it was her cousin's hotel room, that looked out over a cute courtyard, but we were all willing to pretend). He yells at her window to come down and when she doesn't, he has to sing until she opens the window. The groom, who is not Italian and is in fact from Michigan, learned the song or at least read the lyrics off an iphone and was accompanied by a guitarist. The gyst of the song as far as I could tell was "come to the window, my love." After a couple of verses, when the bride was satisfied by the display of affection, she opened the window and threw down a rose. That was the signal that he could come up to the room and they make a show of kissing in the window. It was all very cute. My friend Sara got a video of it which I will have to share (if the groom will allow...). No image really since it was so dark, but the audio is still cute.

Snazzy for the wedding.

The wedding itself was wonderful. It was so nice to see two of the most kind-hearted people I know, so happy. There was also nigh unlimited food and beverage, which didn't hurt. We were at the wedding or reception for a total of about 12 hours. It started with a cocktail hour with a huge spread, followed up a four course lunch, then cake and fruit, and ended late into the night with limoncello.  In Italy, they don't half-ass weddings.

My favorite picture from the wedding. 

All in all it was a wonderful trip. It's hard adjusting to the indignity of drip coffee and no afternoon gelato breaks, but admittedly it is nice to see Dinah again and generally to be home.  Now I just have to get started planning my next vacation.

Not a bad place to visit.