We've been home a month and I'm just now getting around to posting about our trip to Italy. This year was my year to select our vacation destination. Jim remembered me saying that I'd love to return someday when we visited Italy in 2009. So that's what we did this year. Since we'd already seen Venice and Rome on the first trip, we decided to spend three days in Florence, then drive south to Naples and west to the famous Amalfi coast.
When researching hotels, I like to find places that are interesting in their own right and not necessarily listed in the guidebooks. We stayed at Hotel Torre Guelfa, which boasts a medieval tower that provides a wonderful view of Florence. It's also located less than a block from the Ponte Vecchio, one of the oldest bridges in Italy.
I wasn't an art major, but I did enjoy seeing all the sculptures and painting in Florence. We visited the renowned Uffizi Gallery on our second day in Florence, with room after room of priceless paintings, mostly from the Renaissance era. It was overwhelming to walk between works by Michelangelo, Botticelli, Rubens, Raphael, da Vinci, Rembrandt, Caravaggio and so many other artistic giants. We also walked to the Accademia Gallery, to view even more items by Florentine artists, and got to see the magnificent sculpture of the Biblical hero, David, the masterpiece of Michelangelo's youth.
We also visited the Santa Croce Church, which is forced to compete for attention with the more famous Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore (Duomo of Florence, pictured), but which is just as beautiful of a cathedral. Santa Croce is the burial place of some of the most illustrious Italians, such as Michelangelo, Galileo, Machiavelli, Foscolo, Gentile andRossini.
One of our favorite pastimes during our vacations is to simply wander through the cities we visit. It's fascinating to observe the local citizens going about their daily lives, and we love finding shops, restaurants and sites off the beaten paths of most tourists. We walked from piazza to piazza and all the little side streets in between and enjoyed every minute of it, stopping for a gelato now and then, of course.
After three days in Florence, we drove south and bypassed both Rome and Naples, driving straight to the Amalfi Coast. Well, not exactly straight. I disregarded an instruction by our GPS unit, thinking it was in error, and we ended up driving up one side of Mount Lattari, along hairpin turns and clifftop roads, then down the other side to the oceanside town of Amalfi. Getting the scariest part of the famously frightening Amalfi coast drive out of the way, the rest of the week's driving didn't seem all that dangerous.
If I could describe the Amalfi Coast in one word, it would be 'lemons'. Every small and large patch of ground that isn't covered by a building is planted in lemon groves. Millions of them. Amalfi is famous for its large, flavorful lemons many of which find their way into Amalfi's major cash crop: limoncello. I've enjoyed wines and liqueurs from around the world, but there is nothing quite as tasty as Amalfi limoncello. The lemons mask the alcohol taste - a delicious but dangerous concoction!
We took one side trip to Pompeii. The site is much larger than I expected - it took us about five hours to walk through the ruins. During our walk, I kept thinking about how many lives were lost on that day in 79 A.D. and how close our own home is to several active volcanoes. The ruins are
well-preserved, having been buried for almost two thousand years beneath the ash. There is much controversy about current preservation methods of the site, as exposure to the elements is gradually eroding the buildings and artifacts.
I would love to visit Italy for a third time, because we've actually seen so little of this beautiful country, rich in history and culture. I'd love to visit the Liguria area, which I've read about in books. And I think a drive along the Adriatic side of Italy would be a fascinating journey through less-touristy coastal and mountain villages. Our destination list is very long, though, and since Jim gets to select where we go in 2012, we might end up on the other side of the globe next time.