Despite the title of the blog, it might be the longest blog post ever written, ever. I have a lot to talk about considering I went to 6 Italian cities in 6 days… I will do my best to cover the best information without drowning you with negligible events. I've decided to break it up into chunks so there will probably be 4 or 5 long posts. Aren't you lucky?
As soon as we docked in Naples, I got on a bus and headed straight for the train station. And from what we drove through in Naples, I wasn't missing anything. There was graffiti and trash everywhere and it just kind of seemed gross. Especially after the beauty that was Barcelona. We got to the train station and met our tour guide, Anna, a wonderful 50 something woman from outside of Rome. She introduced herself as Anna but said we were only allowed to call her Mama Anna. But at the end of the trip it became Mama. She is great. Anyway, we caught a train to Rome where we had a 20 minute layover and then took a four hour train to Venice. We found out that our hotel was in a small town outside of Venice called Mestre, which was kind of like a suburb I guess. Oh well. It was a 10 minute bus to the actual island of Venezia. We found that out after dinner and pretty much my whole "Gems of Italy" trip piled into a bus and went to explore Venice. 30 Americans dropped off in downtown Venice, with no tour guide (Mama said we could go out on our own), and pockets full of Euro. Great combination right? It was awesome though. Pretty quickly we broke off into groups. There was a group went to a bar, a group that caught a water taxi, and a group with me who just wanted to get lost. And get lost we did. We just meandered through the city, at one point making only right turns, just for fun... We ended up in all these crazy alleyways and crossing tiny canals with gondolas going up and down. It was so much fun. Then I decided I wanted to see St. Marks Square. I wanted to find it without using a map (after all none of us had one anyways). And I am proud to say that my superior navigation skills got us there in time to hear a live string quartet playing a cafe on the square and to see a drunken Italian bachelor's party making a bunch of hilarious noise right outside the basilica. After having our fun on the square, we remembered that the last bus back to the mainland was at 12:30. And it was 11:45, so we high tailed it back across the Grand Canal (twice) and made it in time for the bus (which was so crowded it felt like a Sardine can).
The next morning we began our tour of Venice by jumping on a private water taxi. Mama explained that we were going to see several of the islands making up Venice before stopping on the actual island of Venezia. Our first stop was an hour and a half boat ride north, Torcello. I later found out that this was the first island settled, around 500 AD. Torcello was pretty small, very few inhabitants, and its only real draw for tourists was a Byzantine era church built around 800-900 AD that was still in pretty good shape. The floors and ceilings were the most important parts of this building. They were both completely mosaic and beautiful. We weren't allowed to take pictures though.... :(. After exploring this small island, we got back in our boat and went south to the island of Burano. You might have seen pictures of Burano before because it is Beautiful. They paint their houses really vibrant colors, like electric blue and hot pink. It was incredible. The story goes that the women would paint the houses such incredible colors so that their fisherman husbands could separate their houses from the Sea. Nowadays Burano is famous for its silk and they had street vendors everywhere selling it. It was so cool. After we left Burano, we went to Murano. Murano is wold renowned for its glass blowing factories and we went to tour the first factory ever built, that was still operating today. We saw a glass blowing demonstration and it was so incredible. I didn't realize how quickly everything had to be made, like a 7 inch tall glass horse... 1.5 minutes. Crazy. Then we had some free time to explore their ridiculously expensive, but beautiful inventory where they had everything from cutlery to 60,000 Euro glass statues of horses heads.
After Murano, we went to Venice and explored the island. We pretty much did everything that we had done the night before on our own, except we went inside Saint Mark's Basilica. It was so awesome on the inside, the whole ceiling was gold mosaic and the whole floor was ceramic tile mosaic. But again, no pictures (I snuck a few). After walking around the square for some lunch, we went to a small cafe and I got some Margherita Pizza which was delicious. Then we went on a gondola ride through the city, It was so cool, but unfortunately we couldn't get our gondolier Mario, to sing for us. Oh well, once we got back we had some more free time. I bought a cool glass fountain pen, and after we met back up for dinner: veal, tortellini, creme cake, and a bottle of red wine for the table. Delicious. After dinner we met back up with our private boat and set sail around Venice on a sunset cruise to our bus to take us back to our hotel. A thoroughly satisfying and busy day.
Robbie
No comments:
Post a Comment