Tour of Italy!

It would make sense to have this one in chronological order. So here goes:


Friday, October 10th—Saturday, October 11th
Palermo, Sicily

Today we start on our 10-day trek of Italy. We (Andrew, Omar, Laura and me) caught our 3:10am bus to Stansted, and I pulled an all-star move going through security by leaving a lot of water in my Nalgene bottle. I got the excellent experience of going through security twice. Omar’s cheap camouflaged backpack started to fall apart on its trip through the security scanning machine. What a great start! Our flight to Palermo was fine, mainly due to the fact that we slept the whole time. I woke up once to see the mountains from above the clouds, and that was awesome. When we landed, it was 75 degrees and sunny. Boo-yah.
We hopped on a bus headed into town, and the driver was a crazy short Italian man who didn’t speak much English, and it was hilarious when Laura started speaking French instead of Italian to him. We don’t know much Italian, but we knew enough to get by. Once we were into town, we found our hostel which was down a random sketchy side street with a bunch of guys hanging out on their scooters. Our hostel turned out to be really nice, so we dropped off our stuff and went out on a trek about the city. We found a really awesome (and cheap!) “pizza” place (looked like more of a fast-food-type place) and the little pizza things were amazing. We stuffed ourselves for about 2 euro each. Then we went walking down to the water to check out the Mediterranean, and woah it was blue. We hung out on some rocks for a while and took some pictures, then checked out a villa nearby with beautiful gardens and a random courtyard area with a few old-style performance stages (not really sure what was up with that). After we wore ourselves out, we walked back up to our hostel and slept for a few hours before dinner.
The lady at the desk recommended a restaurant down a short ways from our hostel, so we headed out with our hopes high for real Sicilian food. The restaurant was this charming little place, very rustic-looking and full of locals. We had a lot of bread, wine, and awesome service. I ate some antipasta (slices of cheese and salami), noodles in meat sauce and potatoes (meat sauce meaning chunks of beef, similar to a stew, perfectly tender), then grilled swordfish stuffed with pine nut and raisins. What an amazing dinner. And all for under 20 euro. We were very happy, so we got a bottle of wine on the walk back and enjoyed it on our balcony at our hostel.
The next morning, we woke up, checked out of the hostel, went to the train station to buy our tickets for that night’s journey, then set out to see more of the city. We walked through some markets full of giant fish, chicken, beef, dogs…it was crazy. Probably not up to health code either. We also saw a museum with the “Palermo Stone” and a good deal of prehistoric drawings (caveman carvings). Along the way, we saw some beautiful churches and side streets with crazy old Italians and their clotheslines. Palermo is not a very touristy city, so it was a great chance to ease into the Italian way of life.
That night at 830pm we hopped onto a train to Messina (on the Eastern edge of Sicily), then changed trains at 1130pm to get to Naples. Soon after we boarded the second train, it went down some tracks for a few hundred meters then loaded onto a ferry boat to cross over to the mainland. What a bizarre experience, being on a train that’s loaded onto a boat...that was a huge boat. It was also a sleeper train (I felt like Harry Potter) so I got a little bit of sleep that night…probably about 3 hours.


Sunday, October 12th
Naples/Capri

We arrived in Naples (Napoli if you’re Italian) at 6:30am, and it was like a scene from the movie Mad Max: sun just coming up over a post-apocalyptic city of trash. That was a very dirty city. Maybe it had to do with the fact that it’s still mainly run by the mob. Regardless, it was a very bizarre experience, mainly because it was too early to check into our hostel and we didn’t really have an agenda. So, we hopped on a boat to the island of Capri (45 minutes off the coast from Naples) and spent most of the day there. What a beautiful place: random mountainous island town in the middle of the Mediterranean. We took a boat to the Blue Grado (a little cove on the other side of the island where the water lights up to an electric blue caused by weird reflecting of sunlight). Then we ate dinner (not nearly as good as Sicily, mainly because it was very touristy at Capri) and went up to the top of the mountain to see the sunset and the little shops up there. Later, we caught a boat back to Naples and crashed at our hostel.


Monday, October 13th—Tuesday, October 14th
Rome

On Monday, we caught a train that arrived in Rome at 3pm. After we found our hostel, we met up with Eric and Ilyse (our flatmate and his girlfriend) who gave us some pointers on what to see and where to go. We immediately went over to St. Peter’s Basilica, then found some dinner (it was OK, nothing compared to Sicily) and saw the Spanish Steps, the Trevi Fountain, the Hadrian Temple and the Pantheon. It was great to walk around a city with a ton of tourists and not feel so weird about being American.
The next day we took a tour of the Vatican Museum (including the Sisteen Chapel and St. Peter’s Basilica), which was absolutely amazing. Michaelangelo’s work in the chapel is breathtaking and humbling. Right after that we headed to the Coliseum, which was just as amazing. It was also great to be part of a tour group for once and have information blabbed to us instead of us reading it from books and pamphlets. It’s so crazy to think that the Romans built that thousands of years, and the amount of technology they had back then, like a retractable roof, lift systems under the floor…woof. After that, we tried to get into the Roman Forum (archaeological grounds with Roman ruins) but it was closed.
So we set out on our trek to find our hostel out in Ciampino (a town outside of Rome near the airport for our flight the following morning). We got on the wrong train which went 3 stops past our intended stop, so we had to back track and met 3 nice girls from Amsterdam who told us about the wonders of their city. Once we arrived in Ciampino, we hopped on a bus and immediately thought we were going to die because the driver was absolutely nuts. He was going about 60 mph down a rather busy city street…not good. The last stop of the bus was right at our hostel, which was way out down a random access road and in the middle of nowhere. There was even an airplane in the parking lot of our hostel. We asked the guy working the desk where to go to eat since it was 9pm and we hadn’t eaten dinner yet. He told us about a restaurant “about 300 meters walk.” It was well over a mile, walking by a nunnery transformed from an airplane hangar, gas stations and soccer fields. We came upon the Italian steakhouse, and when we walked in it was obvious that we did not really belong there. However, our waiter came over and was very happy to take care of us and try his hand at English. This was probably our second best meal (right behind Sicily), and I had risotto and bruschetta, and a piece limoncello cake. Amazing. We left there extremely happy and ready for the extremely sketchy walk back to our hostel. I got about 3 hours of sleep that night before our 6:30am flight to Venice.


Wednesday, October 15th—Thursday, October 16th
Venice

We arrived at the airport around 11am and took a train out onto the island of Venice. We found our bed & breakfast, down a random side street again, but this time it was more charming because it was a city full of canals and gondolas and no cars/traffic. It was actually kind of strange to not have to look for traffic crossing the street as we only had to walk over a bridge every time we’d come up on a canal. There were so many shops full of masks (carnival of Venice) and glass (the island of Murano off of the coast which is famous for its glassmaking). We walked around the city and saw St. Marks Cathedral and Square, a bunch of tiny streets and little shops. Then we went to a grocery store to buy some food to make that night—Italian sausage, penne, alfredo sauce and garlic bread. Our B&B had a full kitchen to use, and we did. It was an excellent dinner, and very cheap. That night we went to the Venice Jazz Club to see a Brazilian trio playing some bossa nova. We bought tickets earlier in the day for 20 euro each which got us a reserved table and our first drink. It was a great night to hear some awesome music as it had been quite some time since we’d been to a concert. Since it was obvious we had to keep getting drinks when we were there, we ordered a bottle of the house white that actually had the Venice Jazz Club label on it…not great wine, but it was good enough to help us enjoy the night. It was a very relaxing ending to a great day.
The next day we walked around the city some more, did some shopping, found a historic instrument exhibit in a random church, and checked out the Peggy Guggenheim museum to look at some Picasso. That night we had dinner by our B&B, which wasn’t in a very touristy part of the city, meaning it was cheaper. Still not as good as Sicily, but it was still a good ending to our time in Venice.


Friday, October 17th—Sunday, October 19th
Milan

We caught a train to Milan and got in sometime around 3pm. We found the hostel (called the ‘Bed & Bed’) and set out to see some of the city. The first major thing was the Duomo, a giant church that had started to be built in the 9th century. It was gigantic, and extremely gothic. We decided to come back the next day to take an audio tour. After the Duomo, we wandered around the city and happened upon a restaurant by our hostel that didn’t have English translations on the menu (always a good sign) and was very cheap. I ordered four cheese penne and Milanese chicken (basically a big hunk of breaded chicken) and it was all fantastic. Laura ordered something called ‘carne cruda.’ We weren’t sure what ‘cruda’ meant, but we knew ‘carne’ was meat so she went for it. When her dish came, it was literally a platter of raw ground beef with olive oil and basil. She started giggling and drew the attention of the entire restaurant, including our non-English-speaking waiter who came over to see what was wrong. Omar tried helping out by saying “caliente” wanting him to cook it. He eventually got the idea and had the chef cook up the ground beef for Laura. Despite the mix-up on Laura’s part, it was a great dinner.
The next day we met two Americans studying in Rome for the semester who were in Milan for the weekend, and they told us the hot places to go that they heard about. We checked out La Scala (very famous opera house) and I noticed a sign for a concert that night including Brahms Piano Concerto No. 1 and Also Sprach Zarathustra (more commonly known as the theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey), and tickets were only 5 euro. We researched a bit about that and found out we had to go 2 hours early to get in line, and decided to do it. In the mean time, we had lunch by a giant castle and hung out in a beautiful park. Laura and I had hot chocolate, which was literally melted chocolate in a little cup. The plastic spoon they gave us would stand up on its own in the cup because it was so thick and delicious.
After that, we took a tour of the Duomo with an audio guide and spent about 2 hours walking around inside. It consists of 52 giant columns representing the 52 weeks of the year and beautiful stained glass windows depicting biblical stories. The relic held there is supposedly a nail from Jesus’ cross. It’s so beautiful inside, and to be surrounded by all of that history was extremely humbling. And it made me happy that I knew a relatively decent amount from just looking at the place (courtesy of my British Art & Architecture class). Then we went back to the hostel for a short bit to change rooms and head back to get the tickets for the concert. We met up with the American girls while Andrew went to the 5:30pm mass at the Duomo, and he said the organ sound was so big and full that it had a 10-second reverb.
We grabbed a quick dinner before the concert and I got us slightly lost on the way back to La Scala (oops). We got to our seats and realized that there was a group of pre-teen schoolchildren in front of us. Laura freaked out a little because they were a bit rambunctious, but hey, we were at La Scala. We couldn’t really see the stage from our seats so we stood most of the time, looking over the children. The Brahms was great and the pianist was amazing. Then Also Sprach was just…epic. I’ve never heard that piece live, and holy crap, what a difference. It was basically a perfect end to our tour of Italy.
After the concert I had the best gelato yet (double chocolate fudge mousse stuff, chocolate chip and “cookies”) then passed out. We easily caught our flight the next morning and arrived back in London at 11am. All in all, we did really well for a small group of poor college students traveling around a beautiful country where we don’t really know the language.
A few things I’ve learned:
- Everyone is in a big damn hurry, especially the ones in cars and on scooters, and they don’t have lanes on the roads or stop-lights at cross walks, so you just start walking and hope they stop
- The Italians are very aggressive sellers. Especially the creepy guys with the flowers who would just walk into a restaurant and push flowers in your face with a bizarre half-smile until they got the hint that you didn’t want them there.
-A good way to judge a restaurant is whether or not it has any translations on the menu, and also if there are any tourists inside. If not, you’re good to go.