we miss you!

While we all sleep in, eat American food, and enjoy air conditioning, Molly, Laura, Walter and James continue their adventures in France. Here's a pic for them, from our 24+ hour trip home.

We miss you guys!

Sorrento--another vacation from the vacation

Sorrento was our second vacation from the vacation, and it was a blast, although (to me, at least) it had somewhat less charm and lots less culture than Venice. I'll always remember two things about it, though: the lemon trees (which were truly amazing) . . . and the mosquitoes. Unfortunately, the two seemed to go together. We slept a lot, waded in the Meditteranean, ate local seafood at a seaside restaurant, and wandered around in a lemon and orange grove.

lemonness


(oceanness)


(local seafood)

(and Molly and I planned a party! chocolate, lemons, wine lemoncello, Barnyard, dancing)

Rome

If I start writing about Rome here, I don't think I'd be able to stop, so instead here are pictures from our 4 days there.

wandering around Rome at night. favorite.

(this is the Victor Emmanuelle Monument. it has eternal flames with soldiers guarding them and all that good stuff.)

and by day. verrry hot and humid.

the Colosseum. 2000 years old, held 50,000 Romans (usually including the Emperor), 1 death (on average) every 5 minutes during the games. how does one interact with place like this?

a sea-horse in the Trevi Fountain

the next few are from the Vatican Museum. yep, that's Raphael's School of Athens.

I loved the hall of maps. why don't we have gorgeous maps like this nowdays?

this was on the ceiling somewhere, and we found it amusing--infidels being confounded by angels holding Aquinas's Summa Theologica

this next group is from St. Peter's. (to give some perspective, that blackish canopy-thing in the 3rd picture is actually a 7-story altar-cover. the place was astronomical.)

Michelangelo's Pieta is inside, behind bullet-proof glass. We were happily surprised that most famous art, etc wasn't protected nearly this severely.
Kathryn, Mere, Ty and I climbed 550+ stairs like these


to get to this:

(the halfway point of the climb. there was even a little cafe and--against all odds--a free water closet)

and, of course, the Roman Forum. We even saw the spot where Mark Antony said Friends, Romans, Countrymen . . .

(I had enough postage to mail two students postcards from Rome: Arwen's and Emmy's.
Kate, Zack, Gib, Ellie, Amelia, and Jack--yours are sent from Bath, England though they're all from Rome!)

San Gimignano

Italy didn't have much free wifi (or water fountains. or water closets. or parks.) so I will be putting up overdo pictures from San Gimignano, Rome, Sorrento, and Bath soonishly. After 28 hours of travel, some of us are home (some of us are still in France). I have never been happier to be in America, where toilets are free and I actually know how to flush them.

If you ever go to Florence, I recommend taking a day to side-trip to San Gimignano. Something that surprised me about the three major Italian cities we toured is their utter lack of grass and growing plants. One begins to long for a bit of green--and so we were thrilled to find huge fields, olive groves, and vineyards (AND the world's best gelato!) in the medieval town of San Gimignano.


(this gelato is from the shop that won the 2008-2009 world gelato competition. It tasted like it, too.)

random peoples and places

I have dearly bought internet time that I am unwilling to squander . . . so here is a random splat of pictures from our trip =)

We rode the train from Rome to Sorrento last night. After traveling by boat, subway, metro, tube, taxi, bus, plane, and foot (sometimes most of the above in a day!) our professional opinion is that trains are the most comfy and enjoyable mode of travel =)

Attempting to catch y'all up to where we are, here's a post from Florence, courtesy of our hotel's wifi =).

Here are Rachel, Laura, Mere, and Molly in front of the Duomo, Florence's HUGE pink and green cathedral. That big dome on the right is Brunelleschi's Dome!
Brunelleschi's dome crowns the Duomo (cathedral) in the middle of Florence and is considered by some to be the starting point of the Renaissance.



Dome-building was one of the many arts lost since the Classical period, and revived in the Renaissance.
After studying domes built by the Greeks and Romans (yesterday we saw a little hole cut by Brunelleschi in the Pantheon's dome), Brunelleschi won an architectural competition held in Florence. (Ty took this pic standing ON the dome, so you can see a bit of the curve of the dome's outside and the city faaaaaaar below.)


His prize? To spend most of the rest of his life craning his neck up at the dome he was designing/building/painting.

We all climbed Brunelleschi's Dome—all 463 dark, squished, claustrophobic steps! Here are Laura, I, and the gorgeous and somewhat petrifying view below.

When in Rome...

Be sure to bring water! (and suncreen, a camera, and 8 friends!)



We (Walter, James, Molly, Laura and I) are hanging out at an Internet Cafe, waiting for the rest of the gang to emerge from the Sistine Chapel. We started out touring St. Peters Basilica, (I dont know where the apostrophes are on Italian keyboards!), in two groups. You would have laughed to see us...Ty put Rick Steves audio guide of the Basilica on 2 iPods, and with a splitter, we were able to have four people listen to each iPod. So for about an hour, Walter, Molly, Laura and I shuffled side-by-side, an earbud for each of us, around the building, looking at the ceiling, floors, walls, the famous Pieta (Michaelangelo), etc. After the tour, we waited for Ty, Jenny, M & K to climb the dome (they saw us from the top), made dinner plans, then split up again and went through the museum leading into the Sistine Chapel. Yes, amazing.

Then emerging hot and sweaty, we each got 3 scoops of gelato, and checked our email, and now I need to dash off to meet the group again.

R