We just got back from our trip to Italy on Saturday night, and I have definitely needed the past 24 hours to recover. Our first night was spent in Rome, and even though we landed at 7pm we still got in a full nights-worth of sight seeing.
Colosseum....and a taxi
Roman Forum
Trevi Fountain! You could hear the fountain from blocks away and It was packed with people even at midnight.
Sarah at the top of the Spanish Steps. She so pretty!
Spanish Steps
We ate dinner at 12:15 am and then dragged ourselves back to our hostel. Rome at night was definitely worth the walk, and I don't know how anybody could ever get used to seeing monuments so old and majestic on a daily basis.
Tuesday we caught a train, a bus, and a ferry to the Island of Elba (an island off the coast north of Rome).
Elba through a window
Our ferry/cruise (which had a café and a ball pit/jungle gym on board).
These two weirdo's are Vic and Sarah: my traveling companion extraordinaires!
The view from our balcony! Elba was so beautiful even on a cloudy March day like this. I can't even imagine what it would be like during the summer time. Oh wait, yes I can, it would be MAGICAL.
Napoleon's house! After he was exiled from France for the first time he was sent to rule Elba. I wonder if that is Napoleon's bathtub as well....
That night we went down into the city, Portoferraio, for dinner. At the suggestion of our hotel hostess we had dinner at a restaurant that specialized in Elban style cuisine (which apparently involves a lot of sea food). We were even served wine that is made and sold only in Elba. The whole menu was in Italian, so I picked a safe looking dish that had pistachio gnocchi in it. I must have missed something though because when the waiter put my plate in front of me there were two massive crawfish/shrimp things staring back at me.
Wednesday am there was a big rainstorm and our ferry was canceled due to the weather. Luckily there was an even bigger ferry, so we took that one. Yay for modern technology!
After a long day of traveling and barely making various modes of transportation we made it to Naples!
Naples was...interesting...and by interesting I mean kinda sketchy. There were multiple trash piles spilling into the streets at every corner that looked as if they had been sitting there for days. The bigger side walks were lined with the homeless and street vendors. Some of the buildings on our street had plants growing through the roof's and through cracks in the plaster, and countless other buildings seemed to be rotting from the inside out. Every time we left the hostel we were warned of pickpockets, and every time we returned we had to be buzzed in through three separate locked doors. Albeit we did only see the central section of the city, so perhaps the rest of Naples is not as impoverished. On the positive side: the pizza in Naples is fantastic. Over the course of 1.5 days we had 5 pizzas, and they were all phenomenal.
Also as you can see I didn't take any pictures in Naples...because I was afraid my camera would get stolen. But the pizza was great! And the people inside all the restaurants and at our hostel were very nice.
Thursday we went to Pompeii and Sorrento. We met a lovely couple from Canada who are backpacking through Europe for 5 months (after previously studying the French language in France for 4 months). They were checking out Pompeii for the day then heading back to Rome to catch a flight to Greece (woaaah!). They gave us some directions to the best coffee shop in Rome and wished us luck in Naples before we parted ways. I don't have a picture of them but they were wonderful; classic Canadians being nice.
To preserve the preserved people of Pompeii molds are made to display on site, while the real remains are in museums across the world (and in the Archeological Museum in Naples). Most of the people of Pompeii escaped, however the 2000 that didn't mostly died of asphyxiation.
The baths. On the right is our tour guide Pascal: a sassy, spit-fire, tell-it-like-it-is Italian historian.
Hot baths in Pompeii.
This is the biggest house in Pompeii! Most houses had gardens inside their homes and a section of the ceiling was left open so that rain could drain into a pool in the front room of the house. This water was mostly used for house-hold chores. Mosaic tile was also a symbol of affluence, and there are many houses in Pompeii with their original tile floors still intact.
gladiator!!!
I think this was the cemetery?
TO BE CONTINUED! My computer is about to die!
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