Italy!

FYI: because the posts from Italy are so crazy long with lots of pictures, they will not all show on the front page of the blog at the same time.  You have to click the "Older Posts" link at the bottom of the blog to see the rest of them.

I’ve said this before, but currently this blog is my blended scrap book/journal/photo album for our family. All of the following new posts are from our trip in Italy. It took me forever to get everything organized. The posts are all pretty long, and likely not that interesting to you! I just wanted to record some of our experiences and impressions for our sake. So feel free to skim or skip, we’ll still love you either way. ;-) This post is a combination of pictures as well as random observations and experiences about Italy.

In the US, we have Italian food, Mexican food, Chinese food, American food, etc. In Italy? They have Italian food. Specifically they have pizza and pasta. Their pizza is completely different from pizza in the US. The pizzas have thick crusts and are really thin in the center. The sauce is really watery, kind of like soup. They’ll top their pizza’s with anything from chunks of cheese to French fries. Some of the best pizza we had came from a small pizzeria down a random street in Naples. We paid a euro each for some 8-10 inch pizzas that came fresh out of a wood burning stove. Yummy!! That being said, after a while I was done eating pizza and pasta for every meal. It was amazingly good food, but no variety! I needed something different! Well, about that time we went to the grocery store and saw tortillas and decided to try and make tacos at home… it was a disaster. What they called “salsa” was actually tomato paste. In the end, we ended up with sloppy joe mix on tortillas. There were probable fifty kinds of cheese at the grocery store, but not a chance you're going to find cheddar, so we ended up with mozzarella... not the first choice for tacos. Liz was amazing enough to use her shopping connections at the military base to buy some American ingredients, and round two a few days later was a complete success! And luckily towards the end of our trip in Florence we found a McDonalds. Where I was previously not a McDonald’s fan, it will always have a soft place in my heart now for providing me French fries, chicken nuggets and a strawberry shake when the only other option was more pizza!!

Okay, so moving on to some pictures. This is Liz's house, which is both beautiful and comfortable, and became our home sweet home while we were gone. You can barely see one of the lemon trees in her backyard on the left.

Driving in Italy is an adventure. The really big cities like Rome and Florence weren’t bad at all (comparatively at least), but southern Italy? Specifically Naples where we were staying? No traffic lights, stop signs, or even lines in the road. (Okay, maybe like two traffic lights… in the whole city.) You might ask how you know how many lanes of traffic there are. Why, as many as will fit. And when the cars stop fitting, they start merging. There are no set right of way rules, just a somewhat aggressive “start moving” and be aware of the car who starts moving in front of you. Should you come across an actual stop sign and come to a complete stop, you will get rear ended. Guaranteed. It’s super fun. Parking is another barrel of fun. Smart cars really are smart in Europe. You can fit two of them in a parallel parking spot because you can park them perpendicular to the curb. While searching for a parking spot once with Liz we got turned around in some TINY alleyways that I would have been convinced were not intended for cars, and while negotiating a turn may have ripped the back bumper off Liz’s car. Sad, huh?! She wasn’t too disturbed by this though, apparently these nicks and scratches of bumpers are called “Naples kisses” and every car has them. After a bit of twine and packing tape we were on our way again. Jonathan and I didn’t drive at all the first week we were there. Liz drove us a few places while explaining all the crazy unofficial driving rules and patterns, and when she wasn’t there we took the trains. About a week in we rented a car to go up to Florence, and did a small amount of driving down the Amalfi coast to return to Sorrento for inlaid wood souvenirs we didn’t buy the first time we were there. There was really only one point when I truly thought we might die. But thankfully we didn’t. ;-) So this is the cute and very tiny Fiat Panda we rented while we were there:




I definitely need to mention the Italians and Benjamin. So Benjamin was pretty much our ambassador into Italy. Liz told to us before we went out there that the Italians love children, but we were still in no way prepared for the attention he got! Something about all that blond hair and blue eyes I guess! People would constantly pause in the street to lean over his stroller and say hello and try to get him to smile. Now, people in the US will occasionally do this, but not even close to this extent or with this level of consistency. We went into a small restaurant once, and one of the employees there picked up Benjamin to help him inside. While doing this she noticed his hands were cold, and while chattering away in Italian took him into the back of the restaurant to warm them up by the brick oven stove for cooking fresh pizza. Don’t worry mom- he was within eyesight. (As a side note their pizza was amazing!) People stopped and played with him on the train, in the subways, in the grocery stores, pretty much everywhere.

There are two trains that go from Naples to Pozzouli, the small town outside of Naples where Liz lives. Once, we took the wrong train and ended up one stop past Pozzouli because we were looking for the landmarks of the other station instead of looking at the signs. The stop we ended up at was completely deserted and covered in graffiti. Nice. When we got off the train and started looking around, it must have been obvious that we had no idea what we were doing, because an older woman who had also gotten off hung around to watch us for a minute, then came up and tried to talk to us, obviously very concerned. Realizing we didn’t speak Italian she shuffled her teenage son over to talk to us, and once everyone realized through minimal English and miming that we just needed to go one stop back in the other direction, she visibly relaxed and smiled. This really wasn’t a one time incident either, there were many instances of people pausing to help us out. Liz mentioned once that between Benjamin and me being pregnant it provided a strange level of safety because the locals would look out for us, and we really felt like they did.

Speaking of people who love Benjamin, he had SO much fun with his Auntie Liz! She never failed to get him to giggle and smile. :-)

This is a view of the Island of Ischia from Pozzouli, where Liz lived. We took a ferry out there and did some shopping and walking around. Much of the island is very seasonal, and being winter the beaches weren't quite what they are in the summer, but it was still a lot of fun.

Down a street in Pozzouli:

This is the Port of Pozzouli:

These pictures are on the Island of Capri (as in capri pants, which come from there):

 

We would have fonder memories of Capri if our trip there had gone a bit smoother. We had intended to go to the Blue Grotto, but it was closed due to choppy water. We hadn't planned on doing much else, which resulted in us trecking up a mountain instead of taking a ferry like we would have if we had done the research to know any better. It was beautiful though, even during the winter!

Pompeii

This post is going to be super long, because I really really liked Pompeii. Pompeii was a Roman city that was buried when Mt. Vesuvius erupted in 79 A.D. It was lost for 1500 years after this happened until it was rediscovered in the 1599. The concept of this city being over 2000 years old boggles the mind. (At least it boggles my mind!) It is so well preserved, and it's insane to look at everything and think back to the people and culture of that time. The National Archaeological Museum of Naples contains a lot of the artifacts from Pompeii, and we went there also. I particularly like the sculptures there, most of which seemed to be Roman copies of classic Greek sculptures. We saw the sculpture of the Farnese Bull, which is the largest single sculpture ever recovered from antiquity. They had a collection of medical instruments that were recovered, and it was really insane to see them. Some of them looked exactly like modern surgical instruments. At least if you cleaned off the rust. ;-) They also had musical instruments, pots, mosaics, coins, a lot of pottery, and believe it or not glassware.

This first picture is taken of the main city square of Pompeii, and you can just make out Mt. Vesuvius in the background amidst the clouds. (Ominous, huh?) The pillars are from the Temple of Jupiter.
 

These pillar bases still have some of their marble attached.

There is a huge amount of pottery and other artifacts that still reside at Pompeii. After the eruption, many people died and were buried in volcanic debris. Over time, the organic material from the bodies decomposed leaving hollow places. When such a hollow place was found during excavation, they would fill it with plaster and create a plaster cast of the opening. Some of these casts are displayed in various locations in Pompeii, one is in the picture below. A few of them were a bit disturbing. Jonathan had a really good point though. It's not worth getting caught up in the fact that these people died, because they would have died by now anyway... what's amazing about Pompeii is the preservation that occured because of the eruption.
  

They recently finished restoration work on some of the bath houses in Pompeii. (There were a total of six, each with a men's and women's section. I am SO glad they had been reopened by the time we went, because they were amazing. You were able to see the frescos on the walls and intricate tilework on the flooring. The Roman baths were a hot spot for business and political interactions. (No pun intended.)

I wish the frescos on the walls were easier to see in the picture, you can kind of make them out...

 

I thought this was really cool, it was a bakery. It looks just like a modern brick pizza oven. The curved upright stone to the right of an oven is a flour grinder. The flour went in the top, and as the stone was turned (by animals or slaves) the flour dropped out the bottom.

This is the ancient fast food joint. ;-) The holes in the counter acted like a thermos into which pots of food were placed.


The Italians love dogs. Both anciently and modernly apparently. We saw quite a few stray dogs, particularly in Naples. They are well fed, loved by all, happy to lounge on the street strays! And apparently smart too. Funny story: I talk about driving in Italy in another post, but to recap there aren’t really official traffic rules. So as a pedestrian, if you wanted to cross a street it consisted of “start moving when there is a gap in traffic and pray.” The locals there have a much better grasp than we did of what constituted an appropriate gap, so we would often tag along behind them and go when they did! (An effective technique.) We were crossing a SIX lane road once, and there was a stray dog crossing with us. I kid you not. He went to the marked crosswalk (no light, but still at least marked), waited for a gap, crossed halfway across the street, waited in the median, and crossed the rest of the street when there was a second gap. It was amazing. We followed him just like we did all the other locals.

Without Benjamin seeing (we don’t want to support the feed-the-dog habit he and Lady already have) we fed some pizza to a stray that lived at Pompeii. They have a whole organized effort (with giant signs explaining this effort) in Pompeii to support and feed the strays that live at the site. He was a surprisingly well behaved stray. We initially told him no, and he immediately walked a little bit away to lay down. After we gave him the pizza I thought he would follow us all day, but he meandered for a short while and then moved on. Like I said, well fed. We were not going to be his only chance for dinner. The picture below is from the House of the Tragic Poet. This famous "Beware of Dog" or "Cave Canem" mosaic is in the entryway.

Another household with some amazingly preserved frescos on the walls.

Easier to see them in this picture I think:

I don't know how those pillars are standing after 2,000 years.

I can't remember which house this courtyard was in either, but again, you can see the preservation of the tilework and frescos.

This is the Temple of Isis, serving Pompeii's Egyptian community. A shrine here held holy water from the Nile.

This is the larger of two theaters in Pompeii:

These next two pictures were taken in the smaller theater next door.

Florence

By the River Arno:

 

The Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore, is particularly famous for its dome, which until modern times was the largest in existence, and an architectural marvel. To be honest... we didn't care a whole ton for the outside of the building, it was kind of pink... but we really liked the inside.

Positioned next to the cathedral is the Baptistery. These bronze doors on the East Side of the building (the originals are in a museum) took 27 years to complete and depict scenes from the Old Testament. Their perspective and depth were revolutionary for the time. Many of the figures are almost free standing, it was impressive.

The inside of the cathedral:

The inside of the dome:

You can actually climb to the top of the dome, and the view of Florence from the top is supposed to be spectacular. Frankly though, after two weeks of running all over Italy, no view was promise enough for us to cart Benjamin and stroller up that many stairs unnecessarily. Maybe that would have been different if we had started in Florence. ;-)

This is the Palazzo Vecchio, in front of which Michelangelo's David stood for hundreds of years. Currently there is a replica in the square, which you can just barely see in the bottom right of the picture.

We were able to see the origional statue in the Galleria dell Accademia. The museum was small, but it was worth going to just to see the David. The hallway leading to the David houses some unfinished statues by Michelangelo, they were also really amazing. They say the statues appear to be breaking free from the marble, and you can see what they mean by that description. I feel like I am using the word "amazing" a lot, but you really do just find yourself in awe as you look at some of these pieces.

This is the Fountain of Neptune in the Piazza del Signoria:

Additional statues in the Piazza del Signoria:

The Piazza del Signoria is very close to the Galleria degli Uffizi, which is one of the oldest and most famous art museums in the Western world. We were able to go there as well, but they also do not allow pictures inside.

This is the Basilica of Santa Croce, which is the burial site for many famous Florentines were buried, including Machiavelli, Michelangelo and Galileo. I have pictures of their funeral monuments... but it seems a little strange to post them.

In Florence we also went to the Museo Galileo, which houses scientific instruments through time. It was really interesting and somewhat different from the other museums we went to, which was also nice.