Whirlwind Italy

Seeing as I answer the question of "Where's Slovenia?" with "It's to the right of the top-righthand corner of Italy's boot", it would've been weird not to go to Italy while so close to it. We had a week off of work, so off we went for 9 days to see Trieste, Venice, Florence, Cinque Terre, Pisa, Lucca, Siena, and Rome. So much walking, so much sitting on trains...and so much gelato. As in literally gelato every day.

Statue in a plaza in Trieste.

We started off in Trieste, a quiet and relatively understated town on the Italian-Slovenian border. From the bus window, you can witness the gradual transition of languages as you cross (I love that it's spelled Trst in Slovenian), and see the bright blue Adriatic appear, with red roofed-buildings populating the coast. It’s a place with a long history of changing hands between nations and a name like the Italian word for sadness. I tasted my first Italian pastry there, and it was delicious – a flaky thing filled with lemony ricotta. We only stopped there for a little over an hour, though, before we headed off to Mestre, our base for Venice.

Venice was the realization of a long-time dream. One of my favorite books growing up was The Thief Lord by Cornelia Funke, which is about orphans living in an abandoned movie theater in Venice and mystery and magic. I remember I wrote an essay for the state standardized test some years later about how it inspired my desire to travel - and now look at where I am!

There was a lot of getting lost in alleyways, hearing an unexpectedly high number of American voices (a trend throughout Italy), and continuous wonder at the fact that there just were not roads or cars and that crosswalks were no longer a thing. It was packed from morning to night with tourists, as expected of Venice, but it was still possible to get away and find quieter corners - some favorite moments were trying to communicate with the owner of the smallest bakery I've ever seen despite the fact that we had no shared languages ("non capisco, non capisco...", peeking into an understated church and seeing nuns at prayer, and wandering into the northwest corner of the city, where laundry was being hung up in the afternoon sun and the sound of dinner tables being set could be heard through open doors. Wandering hours followed the pattern of alley, alley, alley, piazza - alley, alley...there was so much to get lost in, and every corner was beautiful in its own way. I couldn't help but constantly think of this song, which captures that tinge of elegant melancholy that you see in water lapping against the sides of canals and worm walls.

I ended my time there with a ride on a water bus. It doesn't quite capture the romanticism of riding a gondola, but you do get to feel more anonymous and better people watch locals. And it's loads less expensive. I randomly hopped on the first one that arrived, and lucky me, it went right to the bus station to Mestre! So back to our hostel it was to catch a bit of sleep before waking up at 4 to catch the early train to Florence.

Florence: my favorite of the Italian cities we saw. As some travelers we met at a hostel in Rome told us, we didn't really do Florence due to our failure to visit the Uffizi or Accademia (where the original David statue is) galleries (tip: it costs a little more but book those tickets in advance or you'll wait for hours and maybe still not get in), but it was a grand time anyways. The phrase "crown jewel of the Renaissance" is still echoing in my head from some travel guide I must've read, and it's accurate - never have I seen so much art, both public and private, contained within a single city. There were enough basilicas of unbelievably ornate beauty every few blocks that I've been somewhat desensitized to the beauty of churches ever since.

Especially exciting was that we were joined here by a long-time friend of mine, Olav, who flew over from Norway to wander through Italy with us for a few days. We've been friends for several years, but this was the first time we had ever met in person after meeting as bloggers back in the day - and what better place to do so than in a place that makes us both abroad? Catching up is even better when done while wandering the streets of a beautiful Italian city.

I don't know if I've ever seen anything more magnificent than Il Duomo (pictured in the two nearby photos). It's ornate to the point of appearing unreal when you see it for the first time. It was a lot of narrow stairs on a hot day, but we went up to the tops of both the tower and the dome for an unbeatable view of the city. We counted the number of construction cranes, listened to the sound of sirens against the murmur of thousands of people talking below, looked for non-red rooftops (difficult), and delayed the task of going back down hundreds of stairs for as long as possible.

A note now on food - it's delicious, and often even ridiculously cheap if you look in the right places. As someone who enjoys maximal filling and minimal bread, I've never enjoyed sandwiches with only one or two ingredients as much as I did in Italy. Who knew just prosciutto on ciabatta could be so good? And of course, the tomatoes are always fresh and delicious in any form. I mentioned gelato in the first paragraph - that fact alone should be enough to tell you how good it was.

Cinque Terre is the kind of place you'd see on a travel calendar but never actually think you'd see in person. Comprised of five towns on the Mediterranean coast connected by trains and hiking paths, it's full of colors, beachgoers, and cliffside gardens. The hostel we stayed at had the most strangely but passionately written description I've ever read, and indeed, as its reviewers mentioned, have loads and loads of stairs. Scalini.

The day was spent going between the towns and jumping into the water whenever the opportunity presented itself. Unfortunately, many of the hiking trails were closed due to landslides, but at least we got to do the last one between Vernazza and Monterosso al Mare. My favorite moment was near the end, and not just because the hike was over - as we descended a hill, we heard the sound of an old radio. As we got closer, we looked to the right and there was a surprise lemonade stand, run by an old man enjoying his tunes while squeezing the fresh lemons that he had plucked from the trees around him. Of course, we got some.

(If you're still there, bear with me, we're more than halfway done now!)

Of course we had to see the leaning tower, so Pisa was next. I got the idea in my head that I was going to avoid taking a photo that made me look like this, so I bought a piece of cheese at a corner store and took my own cheesy photo instead.

Thank you, thank you.

But Alaina and Olav foiled my plans and made me do this one as well.

We went to Lucca on the same day, and walked around until it started to storm. It was fairly uneventful, but pleasant. If you can't tell, this was the day around when the layout of Italian towns started to become really familiar and we all got a bit of mid-trip fatigue. The night was nice, though - the hostel we stayed at had a piano, two guitars, and a xylophone, so we got busy making some music. We also played a game of ladders that involved me sending a deadpan photo of my face to someone of their choice on my Facebook friends list, Olav flopping around on the ground in front of the train station like a piece of bacon in a frying pan, and Alaina asking ten strangers if they could braid her hair (pictured below).

The next morning, we said goodbye to Olav and headed back to Florence, our base for a day trip to Siena. This one involved a lot of walking around getting lost and not finding the city center for two hours, but when we did it was plenty lovely. Again, another day like Pisa and Lucca - walking around and seeing pleasant but mostly uneventful things while getting continuously tanner in the hot sun and refilling our water bottles like crazy.

A day of beautiful clouds, no?

Rome, however, was a different story. Rome the Eternal City, Rome the epicenter of culture and history, possibly also Rome like every American girl's dream of Rome after watching the Lizzie McGuire movie.

Or Rome like the English romantic poets' Rome, which is certainly off the beaten path but what I ended up doing after remembering that John Keats, eternal love of my poetic life, died and was buried there after leaving England for a sunnier winter climate in hopes that he would recover from the tuberculosis that claimed his life too early. I decided to give up on the line for the Vatican (seriously, always book these things in advance, the extra fee is totally worth not having to stand in line for 4+ hours in the burning sun) and instead waited around the Spanish Steps until the Keats-Shelley House opened.

The whole experience of being in the house definitely got me emotional and thinking back to the time at the end of senior year in high school when I really started falling in love with poetry. The photo in the middle is of the entranceway to Keats' room, and the one on the right is of his life mask. It was incredible, getting to see so many items, paintings, and manuscripts in person that I'd only seen photos of previously.

Next I went off to the Non-Catholic Cemetery to visit Keats' grave, a calm area compared to the rest of the Rome that I'd seen so far located just few subway stops away. It was closing, but obviously that wasn't going to stop me. I took advantage of the fact that the gate opened every time someone left, and darted in before the groundskeeper could catch me again.

He lies next to Joseph Severn, his artist and friend who watched over him throughout his last months. His grave is anonymous as he had wished for it to be - "Here lies One Whose Name Was writ in Water". I wish I'd had more time to linger, but soon ran back out before I could be glared at by more people for not leaving.

Of course, I did other more normal touristy things as well.

From left-right top-bottom: Vittorio Emanuele monument, Pantheon, Roman Forum, Colosseum

Being in Rome: one of the occasions in which I slightly wished I'd taken Latin in high school. But having a conversation in half-Spanish with a group of Mexicans from our hostel and being able to understand most the signs in Italy overrode that just as quickly.

By the end of the week, I was pretty tired (walking for 10+ hours a day takes a bit out of you) and ready to head back to Ljubljana. Done with the trip, but certainly not done with Italy. Someday I'll  return at a slower pace, because there's definitely more to see - maybe as a guide on the promise to my parents that I'll take them on a European vacation someday? Until next time, Italia!