Italia!

Hello! I am so excited to tell you about our family trip to Italy! We left last Tuesday around noon (I left my last day of class a bit early and met the fam at the Bahnhof) and took the 2 hour train ride to Frankfurt. We then took a one hour shuttle bus to the Frankfurt-Hahn airport, and then the 2 hour flight to Rome, where we took a taxi to our hostel, arriving there around 11 PM. Surprisingly, we were not so dead tired by that point that we wanted to just go straight to bed... Temptingly, Rome's oldest gelato factory was right across the street from us. We grabbed some of that and than wandered over to the Colosseum. To see it lit up at night was fantastic, especially the juxtaposition of this ancient structure sitting amidst the blearing night traffic whizzing by all around it. We went back to our hostel, which was really nice.

The next day we had a marathon day in Rome, first visiting the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, then jumping on a Bus city tour where we hopped off at the Vatican. We tackled a sizable fraction of the vast Vatican museums and were struck speechless (and crick-necked) after taking in the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. We then had some lunch (pasta) and then headed for St. Peter's Basilica. I remember being stunned by the size and dark magnificence of the cathedral in Koeln a few years ago, but St. Peter's was.... ethereal. The bright white and colored marble and just the sheer space was overwhelming. We saw the beautiful Pieta by Michaelangelo, which is a statue of Mary cradling the crucified Christ in her arms. Next we went to the Trevi Fountain where supposedly, if you toss a coin in, it promises a return trip to Rome (I threw in about 10, just to make sure). We got some gelato and then walked over to the Pantheon. The ancient architecture was amazing- there was a big hole in the ceiling for light to come in and to show what time of day it is. The incredible part is that for the keystone of a domed ceiling to not be there, it is still to standing today. Of course the interior was completely transformed into what it looks like now when the Catholics destroyed all evidence that it used to be a temple devoted to worship of pagan gods. Kara, obsessed with Greek and Roman mythology as she is, was in denial of this fact and was re-titling and re-imagining all the Christian statues and paintings as possible mythology scenarios... in an only slightly sacrilegious way.... :) It was dark by this point and so we meandered through a couple piazzas and then got some dinner at an Italian restaurant (I guess Italian was an unneeded adjective) and I had this amazing lasagne.

The next day we caught an early train to Pompeii. It was gorgeous and green and relatively warm there and it was one of the highlights of the trip for me: it was hard to grasp how old and well-preserved the city was. We were able to see the remains of mosaic floors, frescoes, pillars, pottery, and countless homes and civic buildings up to the bottom of the second story. The higher stories had mostly been made of wood as opposed to the stone and brick of the bottom story, which is why nothing very tall survived the volcano or the nearly 2000 years since. We saw some bodies that had been found too; that is, holes that were filled in with plaster to reveal that a body had been there. One of them, though most likely crouching from the heat, to me looked like he was praying. We then spent a few hours in Naples and went to a museum that had more antiquities from Pompeii.

On the 3rd day, we were in Rome for most of the day. It was pretty rainy, but we braved it and took a tour of the inside of the Colosseum as well as the Roman Forum and Palatine Hill (essentially the ruins of the ancient Rome government buildings and temples). We left that evening for Florence.

Day 4: Florence (or Firenze in Italian) was beautiful, but cold and rainy. We took a bus tour of the city and got thoroughly chilled sitting on the open upper level of the bus. We ate some more great Italian food and then we went to the Pitti Palace, which housed the royal family of Florence, and an exceptional and colossal amount of paintings and sculpture. We saw many works of Michaelangelo, Raphael, and other famous painters. Walking around town, a poster for the Opera La Traviata caught my eye on a church. We found out it was showing that night and that we could just come half an hour early to get tickets. So we went and got some dinner (and then gelato of course) and did some window shopping on this cool bridge that has shops lining the bridge that are held up on stilts. And then we went to the opera, which was fabulous!

The next day we took a train to Venice (or Venetia). Once again, cold and rainy.... but of course still marvelous and beautiful. We shopped and just wandered through the almost claustrophbically narrow and building-lined streets. We ate some great pizza and looked at the beautiful Venetian glass and mask shops. Dad let us take a gondola ride where our gondolier pointed out the home of Marco Polo. We were all impressed at the way he masterfully steered the gondola through narrow canals and under low bridges. We saw an amazingly gaudy and dark cathedral there that Kara said reminded her of the Holy Sepulchre. And we got hopelessly lost in the maze of Venice. But we caught our train back to Florence ok after having another amazing Italian dinner involving a lot of seafood and pasta.

Monday morning we saw the Duomo cathedral and visited the catacombs below. We did some last minute shopping, after finding out that the Museum housing the Michaelangelo's David was randomly closed :( and then were on a train to the Pisa airport (no we didn't have time to actually stop in Pisa) and then a plane back to Frankfurt. Unfortunately, we missed the last train of the day to Goettingen, so Dad rented a car and him and I drove back to Goettingen. It was kind of stressful for me to drive on the autobahn, along with the fact that it was a manual (thank goodness Kristi let me practice on her car...), but also really fun- I hadn't driven a car in at least 3 months. Anyway, we got home around 1:30 AM, but had a marvelous time!

Italy is beautiful, but we are also glad to be back to our Goettingen where the food is not quite so rich :) if it's possible, we got a little sick of pizza and pasta, after eating it virtually every meal for a week. Don't worry though- I could never get sick of the gelato! Love you all and hope you had a fabulous Thanksgiving- we missed and thought of you dearly while we ate our pizza on Thanksgiving.