Pictures from Italy!

It took me a while, but I finally have the pictures up from our trip to Italy. I’ll warn you in advance – there are quite a few, but I took about three times this many!

Venice was lovely. We were there for two whole days and parts of two travel days. We didn’t really have any plans to see anything in particular, so we spent a lot of time exploring the canals and visiting churches. The main form of transportation is by water bus, so we got our hands on three-day passes which also had other bonuses: discounts to get into museums and churches. The two main museums we used that for were the Doge’s palace and the glass museum on Murano. It was a bit on the chilly side, and it rained for the last whole day we were there, but we were able to take a late-night gondola ride the last night once the rain stopped. The next morning, there was a water bus strike, so we arranged for a water taxi to the train station. I think we could have spent the whole week just in Venice, but since we’d already made arrangements to head to Rome, we hopped on a train… Venice album (60 photos).

The train ride to Rome included some beautiful scenery of the Italian countryside. We got to Rome while it was still daylight, but we just unpacked, found a nice place for dinner and spent the rest of the evening relaxing and planning the rest of our time there. Saturday morning the first stop was Vatican City. I don’t know if it’s that crowded all the time, or just Saturday mornings, but we spent about 45 minutes in line just to get into the Vatican museum. It was an amazing museum, even if it was a little crowded. We visited St. Peter’s, and climbed right to the top – we didn’t know in advance that there were over 300 steps, which included spiral staircases and everything! Sunday was spent exploring ancient Rome, and then we took an illuminated Rome tour for out last evening there. Rome album (81 photos).

In general, we had no problems with language – because we stuck to fairly touristy areas, pretty much everyone spoke at least a little English. The food was amazing. It wasn’t like restaurant Italian food, but more like Grandma’s cooking – except in a restaurant setting. I couldn’t get into the coffee there, although Denis liked it just fine. The gelato, on the other hand…mmmmm. Oh, and I know it’s a very touristy thing to do, but we had some pizza for lunch while we were in Venice, and it was the absolute best pizza I’ve ever had!

We had a really nice trip, and someday I’d love to go back and spend more time there!