To Nice

The first of our 3 legs of the train ride to Nice is gorgeous so far, at least the parts I've been awake for. Which is probably like one tenth of the actual ride. I keep falling asleep and waking up when my head bobs all the way to my chest, and Michael is laughing at me from his seat. He's actually reading about Nice, being productive. At least one of us will know what is going on when we get there.

I'm very sad to have left cinque Terre. I can't wait to write about it. It was unlike anywhere I have ever been before. A wonderful place to relax and enjoy a few lazy days. We did do some hiking, but the conditions weren't good enough for us to do quite as much as we wanted so instead we went in shops and, when the sun finally came out, we laid out on the rocks and dangled our feet in the Mediterranean sea. Which is beautiful. And when the sun shines on it, it's my very favorite color of blue. And even when the sun doesn't shine on it, it's a nice grey. Again, win-win.

Cinque Terre: Corniglia and Riomaggiore

The last full day in cinque terre, we visited the two other towns, Corniglia and Riomaggiore. It was a rainy day so we umbrellaed around Corniglia after walking up the 400 some steps to the town. We took many Panoramic photos, shopped a little and took the train to Riomaggiore. The sun came out just in time for some shopping ;) and then a picnic lunch on the rocks.


We had a bit of a tradition of getting up extra early on our last day in a place and walking somewhere. Innsbruck, it was to the garden. Florence it was around the olive grove. But the most impressive, and scary, was the morning we left cinque Terre. We wanted a good view of the sunrise so we left the hostel at 615 and headed up a trail towards this hill town called volastra. It was overcast, with a chance of rain. The path was steep and less protected than I expected. It would have been a great view of sunrise. If there had been a sunrise. We got about 20 minutes in to the supposedly 35 minute hike to volastra when I chickened out and made up turn around. I just figured better safe than sorry and we were not really prepared to face rain on the muddy hillside. As Michael said, the clouds were ominous and better safe than sorry.

We safely made it back to town, picked up bread and Nutella and fruit from the little co op grocery store in town and packed up all our stuff in time for our 10 am train.
Our route took us to Genova and Ventimiglia and lastly to Nice, where we stayed in an adorable bed and breakfast called Chez Josephine.

I believe I have a post already written about the ride from Italy to Nice so I will post that at some point but for now I'll just say that it was amazing. Upon arrival in Nice we had pasta for dinner and gelato for dessert and we watched a 4 man dance group on the street, which was very entertaining even though they actually were not very impressive dancers. It all almost made up for having to leave the wonderful Cinque Terre behind.  Almost.

Cinque Terre: Monterosso and Vernazza

The second day began with a visit to the church we had walked to the night before. It had a stained glass window on the front that was carved out of marble, but was so intricate that it looked more like lace. This style actually appeared in at least 3 of the churches that we visited in the 5 cities.

Our goal was to visit all 5 cities in our 2 days so we had to get started. We hit up Monterosso first, since we had seen it the day. It was every bit as adorable even without the lemon festival- we walked by the water, saw the town church, ate at a little cafe.

We also observed a wedding photo shoot in progress, as well as the couple walking down the tunnel from the train and a lovely tunnel performer who accompanied the couple with a wedding march. We also ran into them in the next town, where they were taking photos on the beach. Standing on the rocks. In the wind. Adorable.

Cnque Terre is a great area for hiking. The towns are so close together that you could hike trails from one end to the other in a day. A long day, but a day. But you can easily hike from one town to the next in part of a day. So we took the 2 hour hike from monterosso to vernazza. It was along the coast the whole way, with amazing views, and lots of stairs! There were multiple "dangerous pathways" along  the hike but it was really fun.  And supposedly it's one of the most 'rewarding' because at the end of it you get to be in vernazza. Equally adorable, with a lovely little church and one of the best gelato places we'd been to. Gelato de amor...the gelato of love. And love it we did.


The waves were intense that day and we sat and watched them, and almost got swept away at one point! We walked to a different place on the rocks and I played in the waves in a shallow area. Michael was camera-ready in they've that I got smoked by the wave. Unfortunately for him, I did not :)

The wedding couple was on these rocks taking pictures as well.

That evening we went to the very top of the Manarola hill for dinner, where we had more scampi and some of the best pasta I'd had all throughout Italy. And also a hilarious waiter. I took forever to eat my food, as always so I was about half done and Michael was almost finished when the waiter came by and said "don't say you give up...I can kill you." Of course, said with irony and the nice Italian accent, we didn't take him too seriously.  But we absolutely finished that food. And we were glad we did :)

He also did some magic tricks and we bet him our dinner bill that he couldn't guess the card . And then we owed him ten dollars because of course he guessed our card. We happily tipped him.

Cinque Terre I - arrival and a lemon festival

As hard as it is to pick a favorite from all the places we went- because I honestly loved all of them- I now have a slight preference towards the Cinque Terre. The elation I felt as our train burst forth from the dark tunnel and the sunlight and blue water of the Mediterranean Sea met my eyes was pretty much indescribable.   Even though I really enjoyed Florence, I was hankering for some water. And with the Cinque Terre, I got it.  As far as our eyes could see was gorgeous water. And as far as our peripheral vision could see was coastal hills and adorable villages (though you have to get closer to see how colorful they really are because peripheral vision cannot see color...just a little science for you ;)


Cinque Terre also scored some points based on the place we stayed. It may sound superficial, but the place you stay absolutely changes your view of the city.
My expert trip planner and travel buddy had discovered this sort-of hostel, more like hotel, in the city of Manarola. Oh, a little orientation,"Cinque Terre" means five cities. And, surprise, it's made up of 5 cities, which are all buried in the hillside of the Italian riviera. It's a major tourist hot spot, meaning we heard more English than Italian and Michael even saw someone he knew from Grinnell. The cities are (in south to north order): Riomaggiore, Manarola, Corniglia, Vernazza, and Monterosso.

Ok, so the place we stayed was right across from the train station in Manarola, meaning we only had to walk about 10 steps up the hill, which was great with our backpacks. Everything in Manarola is on a hill. The town begins down at the harbor and then climbs steeply up. Our fancy hostel was run by Simone, a super helpful guy who clued us in on an iPhone app he created that had restaurants, beaches, train schedules, ect for the area. He also supplied us with a corkscrew on one occasion during our stay :)

Our room was large and simply decorated- looked as though it came right out of Ikea. Which I loved!

Wen we checked in, Simone told us that Monterosso was having its annual lemon festival and it was only that day so we must check it out.  After tossing our stuff on the bed, we hopped on the train and went to Monterosso. It was adorable! Lemons, lemon juice, lemon pastries, and lemon souvenirs were everywhere! The whether was perfect and we just walked around admiring everything until we decided we were hungry enough that we must try some lemon specialities. We also saw a great local "band"....well, it was a group of people in traditional-type clothing, walking through the streets, singing, clapping, playing some instruments and engaging all the passers-by in their songs. We followed them through town until I got distracted by a store (which happened fairly often on this trip). Michael also had found a cute art store that had paintings he really enjoyed so we looked around there. Turned out it was also a custom jewelry store so I'm now the proud owner of a wonderful "made in Italy" necklace. And we had a nice chat with the American-born, now Italian citizen, owner of the shop.
Before long we headed back to Manarola for dinner at one of the four restaurants in the town. It was actually very nice having just 4 places to choose from. And having them all be basically next door to our hostel.  I enjoyed unpeeled scampi for the 2nd time (Michael is now a champ at peeling them for me) and then tried pannacotta, a popular Italian dessert. Popular for good reason, I'd say.

We then tried to watch the sunset from a hill on the edge of town that juts out into the water but it was a little cloudy so we vowed to come back another night, which we did. We also climbed up the main town hill to a church that we were planning to go see the next day and to a good nighttime overlook of the town. Even though the towns bustle with tourists during the day, at night they are quiet and peaceful.  And with that view...pretty good way to end a day

And, unsurprisingly, Florence III

Saturday
'Twas a rainy morning, so we weren't quite as motivated to get our touristing on, but when we finally did get to town we went straight to the duomo (common nickname for the cathedral Santa Maria del fiore) to climb the 436 steps in the campanile. The pictures probably weren't as good as on a sunny day but it was still a pretty good view and we got our leg workout for the day. We then checked out the inside of the cathedral (which we hadn't been able to do the day before because I absentmindedly wore shorts, which are not allowed). The inside is surprisingly simple, without the ornate decorations that we saw in many other churches. There is, however, a massive fresco on the inside of the dome, depicting the final judgement and the dead rising out of their graves and heaven and hell. It is 3600 square meters of intense.

It was still raining quite a lot at that point, so we went to the central market. We were rather overwhelmed by all the amazing stands with fresh fruit, fresh meat, fresh fish, lots of varieties of alcohol. We found a nice place to have some lunch and stayed inside until the rain let up...sort of. We made our way to the Boboli gardens and the sun came out just in time for us to enjoy 2 hours of wandering around the gardens, taking pictures and admiring the impeccable landscape. A floating island, Cyprus alley, a Danish family that we happened to meet near the main statue. It was all very lovely :)

Sunday we walked around the olive grove since we hadn't done it before. We got the bottoms of our pants all soggy but it was worth it to see the property and the view from the hilltop. Finally we ate our Italian breakfast and departed for Cinque Terre.

That will be the start of another post

As I (and this post) are currently lacking good transitions, this is Florence II

Friday
Bike tour:
Piazza Della Republica (the location of the old city, when it was merely a fort built up for soldiers)
Piazza Della Signoria
Palazzo Vecchio (location of the Capitol building)
Ponte Vecchio (very old, adorable bridge with tiny little gold shops. It used to be a place for selling meat because they could just dump any bad or unsold meat into the river and it would wash downstream to Pisa (whom the Florentines did not like) but since the Medici family used that area, they didn't want it to smell bad, so they changed it to just gold shops.
Pitti Palace (with over 1000 rooms, you can go there to have a 'pity' party, as the Pitti family did when the Medici family bought out this beautiful palace from them)  Also the location of the Boboli gardens that we visited later
Holy Trinity Plaza
A leather market
Santa Maria Novella (and plaza)
Duomo- more accurately known as the cathedral de Santa Maria del fiore. ("Of the flowers." Because the symbol for Florence is the flour de lis.) It is often called the duomo (as most big European churches are) for the Latin word for house. And also because of the giant dome, which is the main feature of the Florence cathedral. It is the largest dome in Europe. And this cathedral is the 3rd, right behind St. Peter's Basilica and Milan's duomo (which I've also had the privilege to see and to climb). It actually took 25 years after. Te cathedral was built for an architect to figure out how to build the dome that large. And then after he finished and before he died, he burnt the plans. So they are still trying to figure out how he actually made it work.

After the bike tour Michael and I set off on our own. We went to the Galleria Dell'academia,which houses Michaelangelo's David and other important statues and paintings. Michael had downloaded a walking audio guide by Rick Steves so he and I shared headphones and followed Rick Steves' helpful and amusing directions through the museum. It may have looked weird but I loved it! It was a great way to get a lot of interesting information out of the museum, which is something I can admittedly be bad at sometimes. I get museum-ed easily (similar to how my mom and I say we feel "malled" after Abby makes us shop too much). But in Florence, you gotta just push through the pain cause there is so much to see!

After the academia, we got some good Italian food from a restaurant on the square of the duomo. Well, it would have been good Italian food, except that I didn't know the difference between salt and sugar and ended up with some very sugary cheese, which is a very VERY unpleasant experience. Michael agreed to find a place for me to get chocolate because I was pretty unhappy about my food faux paus. Sugary cheese is just not a taste you want to stay in your mouth very long. Or in your imagination. I have to stop talking about it now.

After that we went to the Uffizi, which is the Italian word for office. It is one of the most important museums and is housed in what was the Medici family's office building, hence the name. We also did a Rick Steves guide for that, which was useful because we probably could have spent upwards of 4 hours in there on our own, but we got there at 430 ish and it closed at 7 and we kind of had to rush through the end. There is currently a lot of renovation on the building so there were a few rooms we didn't get to see.

Our last sightseeing stop of the night was Piazza Michaelangelo, which is a nice public square up on a hill overlooking the town. We watched sunset from there and played a good round of hackysack. Add that location to my list :)

Walking back along the river, we ate dinner at a cute restaurant along lungarno, which we think means "along the Arno river".

Florence

It will be somewhat hard to write about Florence because our days were jam packed so not only is there a ton to write about, but I also didn't do any of the writing at the time. All 3 days we left our adorable bed and breakfast by 9am and came home somewhere around 10 or 11Pm. Our B and B was a 20 minute bus ride and a 10 minute uphill walk away from the city. This was awesome because it gave us peace and quiet and a great view, but it meant we packed for the whole day and just stayed in the city until it was time to go to bed.

Florence is an incredible, exciting city. We bought the Firenze card (Firenze is how you say Florence in Italian) which gave us free entrance to many of the city's millions of museums for 72 hours. I think we packed enough in that it was well worth it. The first day we did a bike tour of the city because we figured that would be a good way to see the main sights, get a good feel of how to get around the city and learn some of the history. It did all of the above, and gave us gelato! Our guide was great and I learned a ton about the city and the family that ruled the city for many hundreds of years, the Medici family.  The Medici family was behind most of the buildings that we visited and much of the artwork that we saw. I'll just list the places we went and give little descriptions. Otherwise this post will be waaaaay too long for anyone to enjoyably read.

Thursday
Arrived in Florence. We almost just camped out in our B and B in the evening but we decided to go into the city to get our bearings. We walked around, saw some churches, saw the church....the Cathedral de Santa Maria del Fiore....and then got dinner at a nice place on piazza Della republica. Since it was our first night in Italy, we just had to follow dinner with some gelato....of course. we ate it while sitting by palazzo vecchio while admiring the many statues of the square's  'open air museum', then we found our bus stop and headed "home".