Wow, Italy. From the very first day we set out to explore Rome, we were overwhelmed. You can hardly turn a single street there without seeing something that makes you stop and stare and want to take a picture (hence: 1,600 of them in a week). There is always a beautiful old cathedral to look at, or a statue, or an ornate marble fountain. Even just the side streets with their cobblestone roads and endless rows of close-built three story buildings looked straight out of a classical painting. After a few days Chloe and I came to the same bittersweet realization: no amount of pictures we took could possible replicate the experience of actually being there, of seeing the actual scale and detail of everything. A lot of times we'd take a few photos and then just sit there, trying to just absorb as much as we could. I'm honestly not sure how the people living there don't go mad just running around trying to fully appreciate stuff.
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| This dome in the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore is absolutely colossal and every inch of it contains an extremely detailed painting. And this is only one dome in a cathedral in a country with approximately six billion cathedrals. |
I could go on but again, even a photo is inadequate to capture everything, so instead I'll just try to catalog everything we were able to see and do while we were there. On the first full day we went directly to the Colosseum for a tour (stopping a couple times along the way for some absolutely fantastic pizza). Funny story, actually: the tour guide we had booked actually ditched us at the Colosseum and never showed up to the way point we had been provided. We were there for about an hour trying to contact them and they never answered the phone, and though we both searched the entire area thoroughly we never saw another person from that company. The website we booked the tour through even tried to contact the tour company itself with no success until long after the tour was scheduled to start. We ended up joining with another company called Grayline (I Love Rome) and were given a fantastic tour of the Colosseum as well as Palatine Hill and the Roman Forum. Standing in the Colosseum itself and seeing what remained of the walls still rising remarkably far up into the sky was the first of a number of breathtaking moments on our trip.
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| My amazing wife and I sporting our single blue earphone and short range radios that all the locals wear |
After our tour, we also visited the Altare della Patria, Trajan's Column, saw the outside of the Pantheon and stopped by Trevi Fountain at night on the way back to our hotel. My wife and I travel a lot together and we're always able to pack a lot of stuff into a short amount of time, but this trip really took that to another level.
The next day was an early tour to Vatican City. The only way I can really describe that tour is to ask you to imagine you're walking down a long hallway, the walls are covered with screens which are all playing a different movie at the same time, and after three hours try to remember what your favourite part was. It's indescribable. If you could somehow magic away all the people and then spend a week wandering the halls, you might just start to get a handle on the sheer volume of stuff. We had three hours. I don't have any photos of the Sistine Chapel as they were strictly prohibited, but if you're ever in the mood to have a quiet stand in maybe the most fascinating room on Earth, it should definitely be at the top of your list.
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| The ceilings in the Vatican were covered in thousands of these detailed carvings, except they're not carvings, they're paintings designed to look exactly like carvings because [head explodes] |
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| I think this was called The Big Church or something? |
After two full days in Rome, it was off to Florence! Once again, our first full day there was all go. We saw the Basilica di Santa Maria Novella first, and after a quick tour we began exploring the rest of the city. The best thing about being a tourist in Florence is everything is pretty close together and easy to find. We also went up to Piazza del Duomo that day, and just before sunset we made it up to Ponte Vecchio and Piazzale Michelangelo and...well,
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Yeah. Just go to Florence.
Damn I'm only up to day 3 or so? Okay gonna really start hustling through the rest of this. Next day was our bus tour throughout Tuscany! This might have been my favourite day of the entire trip, but it's also tied with every other day. We first visited the town of Siena, followed by a trip out to the Famiglia Mazzarrini winery for a really fantastic lunch and not a small amount of wine sampling. After that we were off to San Gimignano where I took the below photo of the Italian countryside (itself, somehow, also a deliberate work of art). We also had "The best gelato in the world" there, though there were two gelato places both making that claim and they were directly across from one another, so I'm skeptical. It was very good though. And then a visit to the Leaning Tower of Pisa before heading back to Florence. Just typing this out is making me both physically exhausted yet also strongly desiring to go back.
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The next day we got to go inside the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore (the first picture on this post) before heading up to the Uffizi to explore on our own. Again, I do need to stress that I have literally thousands of photos of all these things and could write about fifty pages on each one of them, and the only reason I'm not doing so here is because I've already been writing this for an hour and I still have like three more days to cover and definitely no one is still reading by this point.
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| I became really interested in Emperor Trajan both because of this trip and because he's a playable leader in "Civilization VI". This bust of him is really cool. |
Whoa, I haven't even mentioned the food yet. The food! Oh my god the food in Italy, and specifically the steak in Florence. I don't think I can ever have steak again. Every meal we had was incredible and we tried quite the variety of dishes. Every restaurant had its own house wine which was invariably fantastic and I'm not sure if I've stressed this enough, but you gotta just go there and eat some food. Chloe came up with a pretty great system that lead us to a lot of excellent places: if they don't post pictures of their food outside, odds are it's gonna be good. Hell, the best pizza place we went to didn't even have labels on the pizza they sold because the old guy who ran it probably just makes whatever he feels like making that day. Find those places. Go to them. And for the love of Christ go to Florence and eat the steak.
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| DO IT |
We left Florence and headed back to Rome the next day, but before doing so we managed to squeeze in some time at the Central Market and then popped over to the Galleria dell'Accademia to see Michelangelo's "David" in person. I don't think I was ever made aware that the statue of David is five meters tall before going there, so needlessly to say I was pretty stunned. There are things you'll notice about the statue that you can't really appreciate from photos so, once again: you just gotta go.
Back in Rome, we had some time to actually go inside the Pantheon and visit the tomb of Raphael, who I think was some sort of famous artist before he became a Ninja Turtle. We stopped by the Piazza Navona afterwards for lunch, and of all the things we did on our trip, this is the one I think about the most. We were seated at a small table outside, right next to the street and not too far from another gorgeous obelisk-topped fountain surrounded by intricately carved marble statues. We ate some pasta and pizza under gorgeous late afternoon sunshine while a band set up and played a medley of Italian music just across the street from where we were sitting. This is the place I go to the most in my mind now when the stresses of everyday life start to get to me.
Alas, the final day. Our flight was scheduled to depart at 7pm so we managed to visit the Bocca della Verita (the Mouth of Truth) and did some sightseeing near the Circus Maximus across from Palatine Hill. We kind of dragged our feet on the way to the airport, neither of us really prepared to go. We packed up our bags and laughed at how we were just 500 grams below our maximum luggage weight limit now that we had loaded up on souvenirs to bring back home. We talked constantly about everything we had done and everything we would do when we returned, as we were already certain we would.
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| And I can't think of anyone I'd rather see the world with than this amazing woman. |
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