Doesn’t everyone expect some place in Europe to capture their hearts? Italy is famous for it, and for good reason. It was a rainy week when we arrived in Rome, the nation’s ancient capital city. Our hostel was a smelly little place in China town, located in between the train station and, as I discovered on an early morning run, the Coliseum. We learned the place in no time and were soon making our way around to places like the Spanish steps, the Vatican, Coliseum, and Saint Peter’s Basilica. Here’s a hint for travel in Italy, some free advice for you: buy tickets ahead of time. Also, for the Coliseum, you can enter through the Palatine hill entrance and skip the humongous line! Rome deserves a second viewing. Our first day made for splendid weather in the park near to Palatine Hill where we devoured fresh Italian vegetables, bread, olive oil, wine, pesto, cheese, and salami. Such were all the rest of our Italian money-saving and still ever-so-delicious picnics. After lunch, it was a turn about the park which left me with an itch to rent a bicycle. The rainy days that followed allowed for no such thing, but plenty of museum scoping.
So four days and five conefuls of gelato later we were on a high-speed train for Florence where we experienced the ricketiest bus ride of our lives through those cobbled city streets. After a couple of smoking breaks (for the driver, you know. This is Italy after all) we arrived at our decked-out in pink hostel in the Piazza di Pitti right in front of the Pitti Palace. I made quick friends with our concierge and hostel manager, Nicholo, who spoke excellent English as well as Spanish, having worked for two years in Mexico, and offered some excellent apperitivo sites.
The aperitivo. This is something you must must must try in Italy. Forget your American eating schedule, just let it go because this is too great to miss. Beginning around 7 or 8 you can walk into a bar, order something to drink and suddenly, magically, a plethora of hors’ devours appears at your fingertips. That’s at no cost apart from the beverage. So enjoy. Now, some are better than others and just a couple of the better ones are Pop Café in Florence in the Piazza di Santo Spirito and the classic Zanarini’s in Bologna. That’s how we dined in the evenings until we got to Venice, where the aperitivo includes no food at all, only beverage. This is because “Down South, they eat. Here, we drink – a lot!” as one Venetian graciously explained to me when I inquired about the absence of snacks for the evening.
I’m not much one for sculpture, but I followed a crowd of art students through the Gallerie d’Academie and came upon the famed David. He is no joke. I stared at that thing, glued to the floor, for about an hour. Yes, his head, hands and feet are about twenty percent too big proportionally (art folks, you’re welcome to correct my figures) but he’s a beautifully realistic figure of a man. After that we ventured to the Tuscan countryside (very cliché, I know) to tour a vineyard and learn some old family secrets about wine making. A young musician named Alexander walked us through the vineyards and olive tree groves, Giovanni introduced me to classic Italian music on his old gramophone, and Christiana prepared the pizza, salad and everything else that was divine. Our wine tour guide, Jesse, was very knowledgeable and I left the tour that day with some new information. During our stay in Florence we also made it out to Pisa, where for hurry to get to some body of water for Lord’s sake, we picnicked in front of the tower, shot some photos, and promptly caught the bus to Marina di Pisa beach. It turned out to be a windy and cold experience if not rather pretty.
Make you no mistake, even with her looming crowds Florence is an enchantment and one that we were sad to leave. On we went one early Sunday morning to Bologna. We arrived right on time to go to a church where we had contacted missionaries who are supported by our home church in Alabama. Andy and Linda Brucato have lived in Bologna for 24 years I think and are practically Italian, as Mom and I discovered. So we were introduced to the Italian/American home life: eating your salad before your pasta, savoring the combined flavors of prosciuto and melon, watching Columbo dubbed in Italian, and slurping your afternoon macchiato. Paolo is a young Italian youth worker who lives with them. His parents founded a children’s outreach in Florence especially for helping gypsy/Romano children. These amazing people are the reason that Bologna was my favorite stop. Not to mention, I did climb the tower that in the long ago past only college graduates were allowed to climb. One was even required to present a diploma to do so. Nowadays, the only thing that is required to present is three euros and viola! Adelante!
Our final stop was Venice where we saw very little other than the incredibly interesting floating city and her non-navigable streets (and non-navigable because half of them are canals). I could go on and on about the things that I saw, but the truth is that anyone who travels to these places will to see the same things I saw and probably make many of the same observations. So the most important thing I have to say is that my experience was made exponentially richer by the people of Italy. So I am convinced that if you travel and you don’t like to meet people, you are wasting your time. I learned a great deal not because of things that I saw but because of the people I met. With people excluded, the heart of the culture is lacking and the traveler might only experience perhaps the ten percent. You will see what the place contains but will not understand the culture, the minds and hearts of the people. That’s the most important thing I have to say. I believe myself to be an anthropologist at heart.
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