Venice: Day Two

We spent the next day in Venice around the Piazzo di San Marco. (St. Mark's Plaza) It took us a while to get there. Venice's walking streets are very confusing. They are all very narrow, and there aren't a whole lot of big landmarks. So walking across the city took us quite some time.

Here we are during our hour long journey.

When we got to San Marco, the first thing we did was go in the bell tower. It was quite tall (96 m), but there was an elevator. I was kinda hoping to take the stairs, because that is usually cheaper, plus you have a sense of accomplishment after you are done, but no dice.

The panoramic view of Venice was pretty amazing. In old European cities, it's very difficult to see very far while in the city because all the buildings are so densely packed together. When you do have the chance to get above it, the feeling is really cool. The same thing happened in Rome, Aix, and Paris.

After the bell tower, we went to St. Mark's Basilica. The outside is very beautiful, but half of it was undergoing renovation, so we only have this little tid bit for you. It was also a little bit smaller on the outside than I expected. It was definitely not nearly as large as the basilicas in Rome. But it was still big.

The inside was amazing. It was covered in gold paint (or maybe gold leaf) and mosaics. It had sort of an Eastern style, reminiscent of Constantinople. While we were inside, we tried to find the body of St. Mark (of Gospel-writing fame), who is buried there. We didn't figure it out though. When we got home, we looked it up and discovered that he is interred in the altar.

After our regular lunch of pizza, we went to the Doge's Palace. While we were waiting in line for our ticket, a french lady offered us two tickets for free. Apparently she had accidentally reserved four instead of two, and she gave us the other two. It was extremely nice!

The inside had a lot of interesting rooms. The government of Venice convened here before the Italy was unified. They also had an arms and armor exhibit inside, which I thought was pretty cool.

And here is the famed Bridge of Sighs, where prisoners got there last glimpse of freedom before going to prison. We actually got to walk inside it, which was pretty cool. You may be wondering why the Bridge of Sighs goes between two clouds in the sky, rather than between two Venetian buildings. That is because there were giant advertisements for something but up over this part of the Doge's Palace, presumably to cover up some renovations. It was little weird looking though.

Venice: Day One

After our beautiful, but brief, stop in Assisi, we spent almost all of Thursday taking the train to Venice. We woke up on Friday morning to the sound of more rain! We were super bummed, but still determined to enjoy our vacation. We spent the morning browsing in glass shops {Venice is famous from it's hand-blown glass} and picking out souvenirs for some of you. On our way to lunch, we noticed that the streets along the grand canal were flooding! We thought this was due to all the rain, but we later found out that it's because of high tides. The pizzeria we stopped in had a little bit of water in the entryway. After we finished our pizza, we noticed that the floor of the restaurant was covered in a few inches of water! We knew this didn't bode well.

After lunch, we headed to the Accademia, the major art museum in Venice. A street near our hotel was covered in card tables, which people were walking on to avoid getting wet! We thought this seemed silly at the time, but on our way to the museum we encountered many flooded streets without card tables. By the time we arrived at the Accademia, we were pretty much soaked. Of course, it was still a very cool museum, filled with paintings from the Venetian school. Here's one of the most famous works of art, The Last Supper by Veronese. 

We decided to take a water bus from the art museum back to our hotel. There's no way we could afford a gondola ride {they're about 80 euros for a half hour}, so this was the best option for seeing the city by water. It was so cool to see the grand canal by sunset, even if it wasn't the most spectacular of sunsets that day. 

Assisi

The next day we went to Assisi, in the Apennine Mountains in Italy. It was very pretty. Assisi is most famous for St. Francis of Assisi, my confirmation saint, and the person who founded the Franciscan order of monks.

We arrived by train from Rome around noon. We then decided that we would walk up to our hotel.

Our hotel is somewhere on the right side of this picture. As you can see, Assisi is built on a hill. Walking up the hill took a while and was more difficult than we expected, but the views just about made it worthwhile.

When we got into the town itself, the streets were very narrow and everything was made of stone. It was similar to Les Baux, but while Les Baux seemed very much like a tourist attraction, Assisi felt more like a living town. There were cars that would drive up those tiny streets and then disappear into even tinier driveways.

Assisi had a ton of churches. Something like 30,000-50,000 people live here, but there are I think five basilicas, all about the size of St. Paul's Cathedral in Pittsburgh. It was pretty impressive. The most important basilica in Assisi is the Basilica di San Francesco (St. Francis).

It actually has TWO basilicas in one building. They are on top of each other.

This is the superior basilica. It had frescoes by Giotto all along the walls that depicted scenes from the life of St. Francis. They were pretty amazing.

This is the lower basilica. It has more frescoes by Giotto, but of various topics besides St. Francis, such as the Last Judgment. For some reason the pictures turned out much brighter than in reality. Both of the basilicas were darker than they seemed in these pictures.

The most amazing part of the entire trip, though, was this. The tomb of St. Francis. We spent a while down here sitting and praying. It was incredible to have a chance to see the grave of my confirmation saint.

Rome: Day Three

When we woke in Rome on Tuesday morning, our last day in the Eternal City, it was still pouring down rain! We were so glad that we had planned an indoor activity for the morning. We headed over to the Vatican Museum to see all sorts of cool religious art. Of course, the highlight of our visit was seeing the Sistine Chapel. The detail is amazing! I illegally snapped some pictures of the altar and ceiling. 

Another highlight of the Vatican Museum was getting to mail postcards to our families from the world's smallest city! After lunch, we were sufficiently tired of art for one day, so we met up with Kristin again, our friend from the Newman Center at Pitt. We were sad to see that the rain hadn't let up at all, because we'd planned to spend the afternoon walking around the city center, with Kristin as our tour guide. We decided to make the best of it and headed to the Spanish Steps. 

I was really excited to see the Spanish Steps because they play a role in my favorite Audrey Hepburn movie, Roman Holiday. But they were actually the only thing in Rome that was smaller than I expected. Next, we headed to the Trevi Fountain. It was the biggest fountain we've ever seen!

Of course, we threw the obligatory coins into the fountain, in hopes that we'll return to Rome one day. Then, in celebration of Fat Tuesday, we had our second helping of gelato for the day. 

Rome: Day Two

On our second day in Rome, we went to the Colosseum.

It was pretty cool. Apparently, the Colosseum could seat between 50,000 and 75,000 people. I did not realize it was that large when we were there! That's probably because it is falling down, and the field is not very large compared to modern day sports fields. It was crazy to think about how many people died in the Colosseum, too. They would have gladiator fights to the death, hunts against giraffes, hippos, rhinos, and lions, and plays in which the actors would all be torn apart by such beasts at the conclusion of the play. I never really realized how cruel society must have been if such activities were considered entertainment. Interestingly enough, there is no written record of Christian martyrs in the Colosseum. However, there almost undoubtedly were Christian martyrs killed in the Colosseum, as all kinds of criminals were used for the above entertainments.

After the Colosseum, we went to the Palatine Hill, where nobles lived during the time of the Roman empire. There were some pretty impressively extensive ruins. I also thought it was interesting that these ruins are still active archaeological sites. I kinda figured that they would have finished with them by now, since they are not inaccessible (basically in a city park), and they have been known about since archaeology became a thing. But I guess it takes a while.

This is an ancient mansion on the Palatine hill. It's amazing how much of it is intact after almost two thousand years!

Above and below are the ruins of the Roman forum. They had an impressive display of columns. Woo! Everybody loves columns.

After the forum, we went to the Roman pantheon. It is the oldest intact structure in Rome. Sometime around the 7th century (give or take a hundred years), the Pope turned it into a Church, which it still is today. Raphael (the Renaissance artist, not the ninja turtle) has his tomb inside.

There's also a big hole in the roof! Apparently, it has to be there so the dome doesn't collapse. I don't exactly know why, but it was there in the original structure.

We met Kristin (friend from Pittsburgh) outside the Pantheon. It was pretty strange seeing someone from home in Rome. We had dinner with her, but by then it had started raining rather hard, so we called it a day after that.

Rome: Day One

Adam and I spent the last week in Italy for our Winter Break! We used our handy Eurail passes {such a good investment} to take the train from Marseille to Rome last Saturday. It's not as easy to get between those two Mediterranean cities as you might think. We left Aix at 6:00 am, took five different trains, and arrived in Rome at 11:00 pm. The highlight of that very long day was finding a gigantic jar of nutella when we were buying dinner in a little train station on the France/Italy border.

Luckily, our hostel was only a five minute walk from the main train station in Rome, so we got to sleep around midnight. We spent all of Sunday in Saint Peter's Basilica. The first thing {after marveling at how huge and beautiful the basilica was} we did was go to confession in English, since that's kind of difficult in Aix.

Then we rushed back outside to see the pope give his twice-weekly address to the crowd. At noon every Sunday and Wednesday, he appears in a window in Saint Peter's Square and blesses those gathered below. The most amazing part was hearing him greet everyone in seven different languages! He spoke Latin, Italian, French, English, German, Spanish, and Portuguese, all with a pretty good accent.

We left the Vatican for a typical Italian lunch of pizza and gelato {the same lunch we had for the rest of the trip} and then went up to the cupola, or the top of Saint Peter's dome. We took an elevator up part of the way, stopping to view the church and the top of the dome from the inside.

We took stairs the rest of the way. Here's a picture of us at the cupola. Can you spot the difference between our outfits here and in every other picture on this blog? That's right - I changed up my scarf for our Italy trip.

The view of Saint Peter's square from the dome of the basilica. You could see the whole city from up there!

After seeing the top of Saint Peter's, it was only fitting that we see the bottom. So we headed down to the grottoes, or basement, to see some of the Pope's tombs. It was especially moving to see the grave of the previous pope, John Paul II.

We ended the day by going to Mass. By going to Saint Peter's, I'd only ever seen one Cardinal in my life {Cardinal di Nardo of Houston}. Now I've seen at least a dozen! After Mass, we had a typical Italian dinner of spaghetti and tiramisu, which we proceeded to have a variation of each night for the rest of the trip.