ITALY!
For our (somewhat delayed) honeymoon, we went to ITALY ! Wow. Amazing. Incredible.
Rome
Our first stop, and my favorite city. It’s a crazy blend of modern and ancient—behind the roads filled with Mini Coopers (and even smaller cars) are ruins of one sort or another, in various stages of excavation or renovation.
The Colosseum is… wow, just amazing. During the day and the night.
The tour bus brought us back to the hotel in the early afternoon, but we wanted to go back to see the Colosseum at night, so we hopped on a random city bus. We were so far from the city center that we weren’t on any of the maps, so we had no idea if it was the right bus or not. But it got us to a station that actually was on the map and, with some help from the locals, we made our way to Rome.
Florence
Every day we were in Italy, we had perfect, beautiful weather—except the day we were in Florence. Fortunately, there’s this great little church (that used to be a granary) where we took refuge for a while.
And all the pictures, statues, and other replicas of Michelangelo’s David are NOTHING compared to the real thing, standing in all its glory at the Accademia Museum. Wow.
The Duomo was amazing, too, and the Gates of Paradise were breathtaking. Astounding.
Pisa
The Leaning Tower is pretty cool in person, even though it’s such a touristy place. The baptistery (for which the tower was built) is cool because it was built out of some other building—you can see words and random carvings from the previous building in the stones they re-used.
Venice
Ahh, Venice. And, yes, it does look just like the movies show it, at least from the waterfront. All the streets are about the size of alleys in America, since everything is so crowded together. We took a fun gondola ride and got to be in the boat with the musicians!
