Campeggio dei Fiori Venice

Day 7, Florence

If Rome and Venice were “aerobic sightseeing,” Florence was a triathlon! Three world-class museums (plus lunch,, Rick Steeves’ “Renaissance Walk” and two harrowing bus rides in and out of town) all in about nine hours!

We started the day with a bus ride into the city center of Venice. (Even though we have a rental car, the city center is what is called locally a “no go zone’” This is a ...

Day Six, Venice to Florence:
Today was a travel day for us: getting out of Venice, picking up a rental care, making our way to Florence by way of Padua.
How we hated to leave Venice! We agree that a month here would just scratch the surface. Around every corner is a new piazza and a new adventure. We will be back!
Michele was intent on seeing the Calatrava bridge before we left Venice. For ...

... endowed a museum of modern art, which seems especially radical in Venice, with its nearly universal focus on the Renaissance.
After dinner and a rest, we finished our day with a night at the Opera! We saw “The Barber of Seville” a great, silly romp of an opera - and to add to the fun, it was performed inside one of the old Venetian palaces, with each act taking place in a different room. (The small audience followed the players and the Piano Quartet from room to room.)

The two weeks after finals were very interesting and fun… Katy, Steve, Kelsa and I took a night train to Venice to start our trip. The train was not as nearly as bad as the one we took to Paris… at first, Katy, Kelsa and I were in a 6 person seating compartment with 2 other people serving in the military in Germany, but Katy and I quickly realized that the train was almost empty, so we took ...

... have spent most of our remaining travel budget in the one shop! Some of the things were just so beautiful, there was one sculpture in particular that I loved which was kind of twisted glass but it looked a bit like a heart. It was about 50cm tall so unfortunately it was much too big for my luggage.

We were all getting a bit hungry after this so we went to find some lunch. This proved to be harder than we thought it would be, because a) we kept getting distracted by all the glass ...

... eagerly showed me how to lock our room from inside, because of all the thieves walking around. But my question is, do I prefer to take the risk of having a thief stealing my backpack (please do, I beg you, I can't carry all that weight anymore..) by not locking the door or do I really want to lock myself in with a complete stranger, in my undies? Well, luckily it didn't take long for him to ...

... English! After setting our bags down in the tiny but homey room we were off to explore Venice by foot. There are no cars or mopeds in Venice, just gondolas, water taxis and waterbuses navigating the murkey green canals. Our first stop was to St. Marks Square (just 10 min from the hotel). There were hundreds of people littering the square, eating gellato ...

... and fries and the past two nights dinner has had too long of a line and so that had been my dinner and snack options as well. The overdose of sugar and salty food combined with grease was probably a trigger for the headache on top of not enough water and too little sleep. Thankfully I finally managed to fall asleep, but unfortunately I missed a really cool fireworks display that went almost until midnight. -T

... method to order and pay, we got a boat over to St Michele, the cemetery island. It was very regimented with lots of aisles with banks of 'units' but also extremely beautiful thanks to brightly coloured artificial flowers. Each marker also had a photo making them feel more personal than a plain name and dates usually do. The regimentation continued into the more regular graveyard with different groups getting their own areas - the young children ...

... it was raining, and the canal water was definitely dirty, you could see the trash chutes from the flats coming out the windows into the water. The only good thing about Venice was the shopping. There are tons of back streets with little shops, almost everything local to Venice. I found the majority of my ...