Italy is a place that I had been before about 13 years ago,
a really good friend of mine did his semester abroad in Rome. And from what I remember Italy was a
beautiful place and a great time. We’ll
see, I kind of struck out with the last place that I had been years before, but
we weren’t headed to Rome so I was going to get a chance to see a bunch of
Northern Italy for the first time, starting with Verona.
I never heard of Verona, but Sarah was super interested in
seeing the city, so we decided to stay there for one night before we ventured
into Venice. We got off the train and
said bye to our new found friends our train cabin mates from Connecticut and
ventured out into the city. We didn’t
have a place to stay, so we just wandered in the general direction of the city
center. Along the way, I found a place
for us to stay that night on the phone, so it at least gave us a target to aim
at. We walked clear across the city, thankfully
it’s not super big and found our bed and breakfast. We checked in to meet our host at the
B&B, Fabio, and he told us how to get to the city center and some good
places to go for dinner. We tried one,
but it was closed. And we tried another
and got there just in the neck of time.
We had arrived at like 7:30 and people in Italy don’t go out to dinner
until like after 8. It’s something we’re
gonna have to get used to. So we sat
down to eat. And we sat and we sat and
we sat. The food we had was good, a
pasta dish and a meat dish, but they sure do like to take their sweet time. Again, it’s something we will have to get
used to. So around 10 when we finally
leave the restaurant, we wandered around town.
I guess Romeo and Juliet is based in Verona and as such, there is a
statue to Juliet and her balcony in the middle of town. So we wandered around trying to find the
courtyard. Well, we find it and after
wandering around for quite a while, it happens to be right near the restaurant. But it’s closed for the evening, we will
return in the morning.
The next morning we woke up to a good breakfast prepared by
Fabio. And left our bags to wander
around the city. Apparently there is a
summer sports festival going on, where they invite people from a foreign
country over to show the people of Verona their sports they play in the
summer. Well, this summer happens to be
Mexico, so oddly it was kind of nice to see Mexican flags hanging all over the
city. Weird. We never did see the festival, but there were
plenty of flags around the city.
So we venture back to the Juliet courtyard to find a bunch
of ruins from the about 100 BC right in the middle of town. There’s just a cutout in the street with the
ruins underneath. Pretty crazy.
Then we go on to find the Juliet Courtyard. As you walk in, there is a wall where every
writes their love wishes in hopes that Juliet will help grant them. I assume to not have them end the same way,
but to each their own. And then there’s
the Balcony and a statue of her. It’s
good luck to rub the statue, and if you’re ever curious to know where you’re
supposed to rub a statue for good luck look for the shiny part.
So I hop on up and rub her boob. Then we continue to walk around the city,
only to come out into a courtyard with an enormous Arena in it. It’s basically the same thing as the Coliseum
in Rome, apparently the 3rd largest in Italy and several thousands
of years old, thanks Wikipedia. But this
one they still use?!? They were setting
it up for some concert. Crazy. But that was pretty much Verona, I liked it,
it was a nice city. It was a nice introduction to Italy and the rest of what we
were about to get ourselves into.
Back to the B&B, say goodbye to Fabio and walk back to
the train station. It’s actually a nice
walk, about 30 minutes dragging our bags
through the city, but since both of us are starting to feel a little soft from
not working out in almost 4 weeks, it’s not unwelcomed. We get to the station, get our tickets and
hop on the train to Venice. The very
first thing that I noticed, first the seats are uncomfortable but no biggie,
it’s about 90 minutes. But second, I
went to the bathroom and you can see daylight coming up from the toilet. Yup, if you gotta pee, you pee straight on the tracks, or you just unload your business
right on the tracks. Don’t drop your phone in that toilet. I guess it’s part of the reason there are
signs everywhere about not crossing the tracks?
So we get to Venice, and walk out of the train station, it’s
a crazy place. There aren’t cars
anywhere, you just walk out of the station to a bunch of water in a canal. We decided again to walk to our hotel. How hard can it really be, the town isn’t
that big and we’re staying right near the main part. So we cross the first bridge and head into
town. Well, we didn’t know that about
every 100 yards or so you go up some stairs and cross a bridge. And we also didn’t know that Venice might as
well be a labyrinth. You can get turned
around so fast you won’t know what happened.
The maps we had didn’t have all the roads on, not because they are
roads, but because they are sidewalks that cut under and through
buildings. You can come to dead ends
quickly, when something ends at a canal without a bridge. So our quick walk across town took us about
an hour and a half, between getting lost, and crossing multitude of bridges.
We find our hotel, well sort of. We see a sign on a restaurant that says the
name of our hotel, and a bunch of stuff in Italian. So we walked in and asked. Nope we’re at the wrong spot. It’s across the court yard, ok no bad. So we walk in to the front desk. After we check in the lady proceeds to walk
us back out the front door, across the
courtyard through a little alley and into a random building. We walk in and up one flight, two flights,
three flights, four flights of steep stairs.
Stairs we haven’t see the likes of since Amsterdam. But, we found our place and we’re hungry and
we don’t know our way around. So we
figure we will just wander around and try to find some food. What we’ve come to learn is that on travel
days, after finding your way through train stations and airports and finding
where you are staying, sometimes even booking the place after you arrive and
then trying to find it, as long as you can find something simple to eat, that’s
ok. It makes it nice and easy, it might
not be the best food, but once you find your way around a day or two later you
worry about that. So we wander down near
the main bridge in town, Rialto, and come across a place that has Spaghetti Ice
Cream. I guess Sarah’s sister mentioned
it to her so we walked in. We were
seated order some pizza and pasta and get a bottle of wine. A nice older couple sat next to us. Turns out they are on a cruise that ends in
Venice, and since they’ve retired they sold their house and live in an RV that
they just drive around the US. They are
finishing their cruise here, then going to Budapest, Prague, and somewhere else
before flying to Moscow to get on their next cruise to St. Petersburgh. They don’t head back to the States until Nov
7th. And we thought we were
gone for a while. But oddly, he was on
nuclear subs like my dad, and actually was a Naval Academy Grad (C/O ’57) like
my dad and brother-in-law. So we talked
about Annapolis among other things, and that’s when the thunder and lightning
started. Lovely, more rain, Just what we
needed when we are a ways from our hotel at night in a city that is built like
something from Greek Mythology. The sky
just opens, during the whole trip, in Ireland and Germany, we’ve had rain, but
nothing like this. So we order up
another bottle of wine, after our server finally come back to the table after
about 45 minutes of trying to flag her down.
Then something hits my foot and I look down to see a little piece of
ice. Huh? What the heck? The old nuke next to us says, “That looks
like hail.” And sure enough, all the
sudden hail just starts pouring down. Luckily, after we finish our bottle of
wine, the hail and rain start to subside.
So we head out of the restaurant.
PS – Spaghetti Ice Cream is interesting… It’s just Ice Cream put through
a strainer with Cherries for meatballs, but You can’t really go wrong with Ice
Cream.
As, we’re walking back, we start poking in and out of shops
on our way, getting a little lost on our way.
Then it starts drizzling again, and then pouring. So we hop under the awning of one of the
souvenir shops and try to wait it out.
Well, then the hail started again.
And it was coming down so hard, it was bouncing off the building across
the way and hitting all of us under the awnings. It was even knocking some of the knick knacky
things off the stands out in front of the shop.
Earlier in the night, the hail was small little pellets. This was about marble sized. And it hurts!
Luckily, it eventually slowed. We did get a chance to hop awnings and find a
bar to get another half bottle of wine, so that worked out. Then back to finding our plan through the
maze. So the next morning we wake up and
decide that we are going to go and see parts of the city. First things first, St Mark’s square, or
Piazza San Marco. We walked from our
hotel, down around the corner and Wham.
About a million people are there all milling around. So we cut through the massive crowd and get
to the shore line. It really is pretty
to see all the gondolas lined up along the wall waiting for people.
We decided that we had enough of the throngs of people. So we try to find a place that one of my
friends from Long Beach had mentioned.
First, a little background.
I worked with Maya and got to know her and we became fast friends. We’ve kept in touch since she’s left the
company and her husband and her have decided to actually move to Venice, and no
not the one about 15 minutes from Hermosa.
The one we were standing in. They
are going to start a food tour of Venice, www.venicebites.com
(Maya’s link??) So, if you are there, go
on the food tour, I can tell you, you won’t be disappointed.
We found the first one and got some really great tapas, or
the Italian version anyway. Then we
decided that we would try to find the other places that Maya mentioned. After about an hour or two of wandering the labyrinth
that is Venice. We find the first and
walked in to see if they had reservations.
They did… at 9:30PM. We take it
and walk out side. Sarah decided that it
was fun to go on these treasure hunts to we tried to find the next restaurant
on the list. We found it, walked in and
asked if they had reservations, they did… at 7:30PM. So we were going to try and find our way back
to the first place to cancel our reservation, but on the way we had a change of
heart. Why not try a small amount at
each? So that’s what we decided to
do.
Before we made it back for our two dinner we decided we had
to do the quintessential Venetian thing to do… a gondola ride. We walked down to the main area of town and
met up with some folks from Chicago and split a ride with them.
We made it back for our first dinner, it was fantastic…
Thanks Maya! And then on to the other …
again, great food Thanks Maya!
The next day we made it to the train station to make it over
to the other side of the country. At our
two dinners the night before we decided that we wanted to do most of the
traveling in one day so that we could enjoy the coast and the beach. So we rode the train to Florence, then to
Pisa and then to Suzana. From there we
got a cab to Tellaro. Tellaro was
beautiful. A tiny little town, right on
the coast, with hardly any people around.
It was fantastic. We went down to
the beach in front of our hotel, and laid there, just soaking in the Italian
sun. We walked into town and found a
place to eat.
This place was amazing.
We went back for our reservation at 8.
Walked in and our waiter loved the fact that we were from
California. He hardly spoke English, and
our menu was had written in Italian, so he did his best to explain it to
us. So we ordered one order of Antipasti
and some pasta. Then the waiter pulls
out a table and sets it next to ours. We
were kind of curious to know what this was all about. Well, then we found out, our antipasti came
out, it was about a dozen plates of various seafood dishes, all of which were
amazing. Then our pasta dishes came out,
and they were HUGE! And amazing. This was quite possibly the best meal we have
had so far on our trip.
The next day we make our way to Cinque Terre. We were staying in Monterroso. And we found a place to do laundry on the
way. We found our place, the smallest
house in all of Italy, I’m sure of it.
Sarah got to feel like a local and hang her clothes out the window.
We cooked our own dinner from some stuff we got at a local
store. And decided to have a quiet night
in. The next morning we got up and went
for a hike to Vernazza the next town over.
This hike was crazy. Straight up
some mountains, along the coast. It was
beautiful.
We had lunch and proceeded to take the train down to the
next town, only to find more stairs to get into the town. At this point it was almost 90 degrees and we
had walked about 5 miles. So we went
down to the next town, decided it was more of the same and hoped on the boat to
get back to where we were staying.
We had dinner at a local restaurant, not exactly a locals
place, it was ok. Then there was some
sort of festival to end summer. A bunch
of folks marching around with lemons for glasses, and they were singing songs
and stopping a random people’s houses to recruit them for their parade. It all culminated at the town square with a
concert. We went to bed early so that we
could travel the next destination, Barcelona.
All in all, I don't know that I need to return to Italy any time soon. It's beautiful, and the food was great in spots. But there were people everywhere, and the trains in Cinque Terre were almost as bad as the trains in London.
Tellaro was amazing, but the other places could stand to have a few less people in them. I think Sarah put it best on our way to Genoa, "I think I'm Italied out." Anyway, we're excited to get to Barcelona.
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