Viva La Italia!

Hello, visitors from Kelly's Korner! For this week's Show Us Your Life - Favorite Vacation spot, I'm recycling an old post from our recent trip to Italy. We hit Florence, Rome, Sorrento, Capri, and Venice in our 10 days on the Italian peninsula. Absolutely the trip of a lifetime, so if you're considering it - just go! We now have lots of great hotel accommodations and restaurant suggestions, so let me know if you need them!

We are home! We had a great vacation and feel like we saw everything we wanted to in ten jammed-packed days. We went over there with hotel reservations in five different places and a Eurail Global Pass, and other than that we were just going to figure it out from there. I honestly believed that at some point we would get stuck somewhere or mess it up somehow, but we were impressed with our ability to navigate in a foreign land and gave each other frequent high-fives. Amazing Race, I believe we may be worthy of an audition. We had a couple of close calls with missing a flight and trains, but we always seemed to squeak it out. We did miss our train from Bologna to Venice, and along with four American soldiers stationed in Padua were forced to stowaway on another train. We didn't get away with it, unfortunately. Busted! Instead of kicking us out at the next stop we just had to pay more, so I was happy about that.

Our itinerary: Florence for two nights, Rome for two, Sorrento for two with day trips to the island of Capri and Pompeii, Venice for two nights, and a final night in Florence. Pack, unpack, pack...repeat.

Here are some pictures that summarize our trip pretty well without boring you (hopefully) with vacation photos...

We ate great food...

We drank Italian wine...

We climbed to the top of several domes, bell towers, piazzas on hills, etc...

Climbing down from the cupola at Il Duomo in Florence

We saw churches like you wouldn't believe...

We took in a little World War II history...

Ponte Vecchio, the only bridge left standing during WWII in Florence

We visited Vatican City...

We spent a lot of time riding the high-speed rails...







We took boat rides in both the Mediterranean and Adriatic....

Tower in St. Mark's Square, Venice

Capri


Mt. Vesuvius

We saw packs of wild dogs....

We saw most of Ancient Rome, including the Colosseum...

We saw a lot of dead people (to put it eloquently)...

a fossilized body at Pompeii, preserved by ash from the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in A.D. 79

(We also saw the tombs of Medici rulers, Gaileo, Michaelangelo, Raphael, various Doges in a church in Venice, etc...)

We spent a lot of time trying to figure out where the heck we were....

"You may have the universe if I may have Italy." --Giuseppe Verdi