Don't Worry Be Happy

Venice is a great city just to meander and wander around.  No cars, traffic lights, horns honking - well a few boats do have horns and of course there were the 2 boat drivers having a bit of 'water rage' when we first left the train station - yelling at each other for about 5 minutes while we decided NOT to take the water taxi (€80!) and walk the 20 mins to our apartment. Speaking of our apartment, it was right on the grand canal a bit north of the Rialto bridge. And I mean right on the canal - we could almost reach out and touch the water. It was quite amazing to see the amount of traffic going by here all day - the vaporetto (water buses), ambulances, boats delivering produce to the stores, garbage 'trucks', police, EVERYTHING in the city is done by boat. View from our window: We hit the main tourist sites - including St. Marks Basilica - again an amazing church lined with gold mosaic tiles for which no picture can do it justice. The intricately tiled floor ma...

. . . rain.  On our last morning in Florence we were awakened by a very loud thunder and rain storm.  That was the morning we took the train to Siena, rented a car and stayed one night at Montepulciano.  The walled village is a series of relatively steep hills and the rain stopped just long enough for us to walk up and down a few. The next day, near Cortona, was our scheduled cooking class.  We met our teacher Rita in town for coffee and pastries, during a downpour, and decided on a menu for the day. Then we went to the little village shops to get our vegetables, bread, chicken, etc. The only complaint about the cooking class was the over abundance of food - we had enough leftovers for several days but unfortunately no way to keep them (except for Alanna's biscotti of course). First we prepared several dishes for lunch - rice stuffed tomatoes, eggplant topped with pesto, tomato and cheese, zucchini blossoms stuffed 3 different ways, bruschetta topped with eithe...

If you like stairs Cinque Terre is the place to be.  I can't even begin to think how many stairs I've climbed in the past 2 days since we got here.  However, the natural beauty of the place is almost enough to make you forget about all the hills. I can certainly see why it's become a favourite tourist destination. We're staying at Monterosso, the most northerly of the 5 small villages on the hills above the Ligurian Sea.  The thing to do here is hike the trails from one village to the next so of course that's what we did yesterday. Well at least we hiked from one to the next which took about 2 hours, mostly uphill (or so it seemed).  My calves are saying things to me today that I don't want to hear. This is at the end of the hiking trail coming down into Vernazza. This morning (Saturday) we took the boat to Portovenerre, a larger village about 1.5 hours away, with stops at the other villages along the way. Then back to Manarola and Corniglia - where you...

I wouldn't say that the Sistine Chapel was the only reason I came to Italy but it was certainly up there on my list.  Our tour started at 7:30 am and we entered the Vatican about 8:00 'before the public'.  By the time we made our way through to the Chapel there were actually quite a few people there - but not as crowded as it would get later.  According to our guide, to see everything in the Vatican Museum would take 7 days at 7 hours per day and our guide did her best to show us as much as possible in the 3 hours we were there. Much of the time we just got a quick glimpse of the tapestries, sculptures, relics, paintings as we moved to another section of the museum. Here are 2 photos of random ceilings along the way: In the 1980s the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel was restored but since the Vatican didn't have enough money for the restoration (?) the Japanese came up with the 4 million euro necessary.  As part of the deal the copyright for Michelangelo's ma...

We arrived to a very hot and sweltering Rome on Saturday.  The 2 bdrm apartment we rented on airbnb is quite roomy - huge bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, big living area and kitchen with everything except a toaster and air conditioning. We're about 10 mins from the Vatican so on our way to find the hop on hop off bus on Sunday we noticed a large crowd starting to gather by St. Peter's square. Alanna approached one of the security guys who mentioned that the crowd was here to hear the pope speak at noon. So we decided to come back after the tour and joined a few thousand others as the pope gave his sermon in Latin then Italian. When the Romans built the colosseum 2000 years ago I can't imagine they thought it would last this long. Only an earthquake in 1349 managed to down part of it.  The first few hundred years after it was built saw lots of death and violence - animals, gladiators, Christians.  We joined a tour but it was really a waste of time as the guy just droned on for ab...