From Happy to Panicked to Joyous

You can't be in Italy without drinking wine, and if at all possible, in my mind, everyone should get out of the city and visit a vineyard,.  I took a day trip for a wine tasting, a visit to a wine cellar, and some free time to explore a little town called Greve in Chianti.  While the rest of the group headed to cafes, I tried to get lost on the outskirts of town.  Deciding that walking uphill was the way to go - better views - I ended up not only passing the town's stream and cemetery, but past a great vineyard where I could get up and close to the vines and grapes.  Awesome!  I could have hung out there for hours, just taking photos in all directions, but my hour was just about up.  I grabbed some gelato on my way back to the bus and was very happy to find it was by far the best in Italy yet!

The first major crisis of the trip hit that night, when I couldn't find my camera when I got back to the hostel.  Asking people around the computers, at the desk, and a few panicked phone calls to the tour company still brought me no luck.  Let's just say that I didn't sleep too well that night, but was very fortunate to have had a kind soul turn it in to the front desk, so when I asked again in the morning it was there.  Phew!

Leather, the David and One Amazing Night

Florence is the a city well known for its leather and I had trouble finding real stores selling authentic goods. However anywhere you look you see street vendors selling anything and everything they can get tourists to buy. Almost from the moment I walked out of my hostel (which was by far the nicest of all the hostels I've stayed in on this trip) I was surrounded. At least they respect the piazza around the Duomo - for the most part!

The Duomo is beautiful with its white and green stonework. I decided to climb to the top of the cupola and then on to the campanile. They said it was 463 stairs to the top, but I counted closer to 600. Either way I was sweating as I climbed but quite enjoyed the twisty staircases and peeks out tiny windows on the way up. And the view from the top was pretty stunning too! Such a great look at the city! Being at the top of the dome - on the inside- also helped me to appreciate and respect the artists who painted frescos on curved ceilings so that they look accurate to people on the ground. Wow.

A foot on a fresco up close!

My second day was reserved for the Academica, the Ponte Vecchio, and the Uffizi. Michelangelo's David is everything everyone says it is - powerful, thoughtful, beautiful, and huge! He definitely was worth seeing, but the rest of the museum was just ok. Am I getting to be an art museum snob?!

The Ponte Vecchio was something new with jewelry stores on both sides of the bridge. The shopping was out of my league but pretty to look at none the less! After some lunch and gelato I headed into the Uffizi with Rick Steves again as my personal guide. He walked me through the museum, from painting after painting of Madonna and Child to those of Venus. Botticelli's talent is evident in the way he created scenes and movement in the Birth of Venus and Spring.

Since art is not as exciting to read about I'll move on and tell you about the unexpected events that made this night my favorite of the trip so far. I got some food and a half bottle of wine and headed to Pizzale Michelangelo to watch the sunset over Florence. If you ever are in Florence, you must do this! It was so much fun watching the city change colors as the sun lowered and watching the sun itself slip behind the far off mountain. I walked back and came upon a guitar-playing street performer who did a decent version of U2 on the Ponte Vecchio, but continued on my merry way in search of gelato.

I never found it because two blocks later I came across another performer... a classical pianist playing on a real (but amplified) piano in the street. He was amazing, brilliantly playing one masterpiece by Mozart, Beethoven, and Chopin right after one another. For almost 45 min I stood in the street avoiding cars and watching from 10 feet away as this man played, his 3 year old son amused himself or talked to his father mid-song, and his wife and infant sell his CDs. At close to 11pm he called it a night and I was disappointed to have to head home. What a way to spend a night in Italy!

Overcoming the Heat with Fountains and Gelato

It always seems to work out that I'm at least one city behind in posting updates.  I'd love to rectify that situation, but I'm leaving for Cinque Terre tomorrow morning, I'm still writing about Rome, and haven't even thought about Florence yet!  As a result, here is the condensed version of the next three days in Rome.

Wandering around a city on your own is always more interesting than going with someone who knows where they are.  Map in hand, I ventured out from Kelsey's apartment and made my way to the National Museum for some sculptures, frescoes and old money.  The best thing to see there was (a replica?) the Discus Thrower; I love the curving body and the way he is holding the discus fully extended and ready to let go.  The rest of the day I found my way to Santa Maria del Angeli, which is built out of ruin, to the Spanish Steps (arriving at the top and got to walk down - what a treat!), the Piazza del Poppolo and then back to Trastevere for dinner out.  Oh, and there was a stop or two for gelato...

Monday is the day museums are closed in Rome, so I visited the outdoor, always open ruins of the Colosseum, Roman Forum and Palentine Hill.  This was a HOT day (as they all seem to be in Italy), and I was in the sun for hours.  Thank goodness for sunscreen and water!  Rick Steves is my hero for providing podcast tours of these places, which gave me insight into what I was looking at for free, since my knowledge of Roman history is a bit lacking.  I loved that the Colosseum had 80+ "elevators" to lift scenery and animals to the arena floor during fights.

The Villa Borghese and Museum were the main activity on my last day in Rome.  They only give you two hours in the museum, which wasn't long enough! 

There were tons of Bernini sculptures - I loved Apollo and Daphne - check out a picture online since photos were prohibited inside.  The five or so Carivaggios were impressive as expected since he is such a master of dramatic lighting and realistic expressions.  A few more churches in the afternoon with frescoes, amazing mosaics (see right), and sculptures - yay for free entry - before heading "home."

The coolest part about Rome, if you forget for a moment about all of the art and history, is the cold water available at every fountain.  If it wasn't available and potable I think I would have died of heat exhaustion, either that or I would have eaten even more gelato than I did!

Two Countries in Two Days

Thanks to cruel bus drivers I got lost as soon as I arrived in Rome and tried to get a bus to Kelsey's neck of the woods.  However thanks to great friends who are willing to track you down, I made it back to Kelsey's apartment without wandering around the city, lost, at night, for too long. 

Italy is country number five, and as Kelsey pointed out when she gave me and her boyfriend Nick a personal tour of the Vatican the next day, I had just entered country number six!  My count - 10 countries in 9 weeks - now has to become 11 countries, since the Vatican is technically it's own country.  So cool!  The museum has many beautiful works, as is expected, but the highlight really is the Sistine Chapel.  Kelsey told us some cool stories/facts about Michelangelo and the paintings, one of which was that when he moved the scaffolding after completing the first half of the ceiling he was disappointed in his work feeling that it wasn't powerful enough, so when he started on the second half, he made the people bigger and the scenes less busy to increase the grandeur. 

I think both halves show Michelangelo's brilliance, especially evident by the fact that he was able to paint a man to look like he is leaning away from us, while his feet are closest to us and he is placed on the curve of the ceiling!

We also visited St. Peter's, the Trevi and Four Rivers fountains, a bunch of other churches, and the Pantheon.  My first two thoughts about the Pantheon were "how the heck were they able to make that dome" and "I wish it was raining to see it come through the hole in the dome!"

Nick cooked us dinner - it a fabulous spaghetti bolognese - and then we spent the night talking and drinking wine.  I couldn't have asked for a better day!

Gaudi: Crazy Brilliant

One View of La Sagrada Familia

I'm not really sure how to describe Gaudi's design style, but for your sake I'll give it a shot.  It is abstract, but based in nature and geometry.  Things aren't square or rectangular (rooms, doors, windows), which is something we don't (at least I don't) really even consider as being something to change.  Mosaics are quite frequent, because they allow shapes to influence one another and create something greater than the sum of the pieces, especially when they take the form of abstract stained glass windows.  And while there is simplicity in some of his work, I would say more often he keeps adding things so that you would think it is over the top, but it somehow works.

All of this to say that I love Gaudi.  I could have sat and stared at the intricacies of La Sagrada Familia for hours (we did stay there for a while just looking!).  The church is still under construction - since the 1880s - and won't be done for at least another decade.  However through the scaffolding and around the curtains you can see that every surface is unique and the shapes are all so different than any other church I've seen.  It's hard to explain, so take a look at the pictures of his work and look for some others via Google.

Gaudi Mosaics

In addition to La Sagrada Familia, we walked around Parc Guell, a park he designed that has serpentine paths making their way up and down the hill, a beautiful mosaic pavilion, and the famous Gaudi mosaic dragon.  Kat and I also added Casa Mila (aka La Pedera) to our Gaudi day, which is an apartment he designed.  Again with the nothing square!

It had a roof full of funky sculptures (some looked like abstract ice cream cones, some like warriors), an "attic" with scale models of his designs, and an apartment where you could experience the atypical shapes of rooms and furniture firsthand.  Amazing stuff!

Dinner was tapas and sangria, followed by gelato.  Yum!  The next day was cut short due to traveling (I jumped a plane to Rome!) but we took a quick trip to the beach to dip our toes in the water.  It had beautiful clear, clean water and made me wish we could have spent the day and gone swimming!  However new cities and countries were waiting...

Selling Our Souls to European Fashion

A soccer player and La Sagrada Familia - in Chocolate

You'd think that we have better things to do and see in Barcelona than to go shopping, but we went shopping none the less.  Walking up Las Ramblas, a pedestrian only "road" flanked by one way roads and then shops on either side, we saw one store that we had to go into, and then another, and then another... you know how that goes.  So we spent a good portion of the afternoon trying on cute shirts and dresses that are way more colorful and with multiple patters on any one piece than anything you'd find in the US.  We were hooked and luckily I have a limited amount of space so I couldn't buy out the stores.  However Kat kept reminding me that she could take things back for me, which was dangerous!

After our shopping adventure we did some real sightseeing, visiting the Chocolate Museum!  While it did have information about where chocolate came from and how it is made, we were most excited for the chocolate sculptures.  They had everything from Sponge Bob to gladiators fighting and from Up to Michelangelo's Pieta.  It was a fantastic museum - if you're ever in Barcelona, you really should go!

We did get to the main Cathedral in Barcelona and a cool market where we got fresh mango and kiwi juice to cool off.  This day was very atypical and was topped off by watching a women's tennis match taking place in Canada on TV with the announcers speaking German.  Go figure!

My Obsession With Calder

While Madrid is more often known for its famous works by Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, and Juan Miro, I was most excited to see some quality Alexander Calder mobiles at the Reina Sofia Museum of Modern Art.  The Guernica (Picasso's huge take on the bombing of Guernica and the tragedies and suffering of war) was very cool to see in real life.  Miro is too out there for me to understand, so I didn't bother analyzing the dots and lines of his works.  However Calder is my hero, and I love the way he balances and counterbalances shapes. Such cool stuff.

A walk through some late blooming flowers in the Botanical garden and the Retiro (similar to Central Park) before few more adventures trying to find Morgan Stanley so that Kat could take a picture of her employer's Madrid branch.  (We made it in the front door but weren't even allowed to take a picture of the sign!)

Our last day in Madrid included some souvenir shopping for Kat, eating churros con chocolate (think fried dough, kind of like funnel cake, but twice the size of french fries, to dip in melted chocolate in a mug), and then a few hours at the pool at Kat's aunt and uncle's condo.  Dinner was tapas at a restaurant in the suburbs - so tasty!