Ariosto Reggio Emilia

... pizzas are almost a work of art, they are made to order and baked in a stone hearth with a fire burning brightly inside, with whole vegetables carefully adorning the top making it look colourful and edible, or full of giant slices of meat that you (not I) could drool over. It's a whole process here (in Italy), and the pizza cannot be matched. I don't think I have ever eaten so much pizza so willingly in my life, but its tooooo good! Canadian pizza ...

Day 2: Modena

This turned out to be a very long day. Thanks to the time (Local time is nine hours earlier than PST) change, we awoke at 0300. We both read our books until it was time for breakfast.

Breakfast was included at the hotel and was buffet style. I ate some granola with cream, yogurt, and a delicious scone with fruit in it and some fabulous coffee.

We walked around Milano for about an ...

... snack lunch and sat down in a piazza to eat. There were pigeons everywhere and we once again asked eachother why the hell there were so many school kids all over the place. School ends around one o clock but they go on Saturdays too. We finished lunch and wandered a bit before we made it to the office. We started looking for information on checking out the regions specialties - proscuitto and ...

... as a necessary evil to feed the racing budget. Well that explains why the cars cost so much. The technology and the workings going on inside the F1 building can't be expressed. It must be seen. But with the same no photo rule as with the production I can't show you anything. (They actually have you visit the gallery/museum and encourage taking photos before the factory tour begin, whilst secretly taking notes ...

... because they have most of the way marked with a bulls eye that which denotes the town’s center so finding the town center of Modena should have been a breeze but along the way to the centre of Modena there was a police detour so we got a little off track. We followed a sign that showed the town centre and parked our car in a spot that showed two hour parking. We started walking while trying to read the map ...

Today we ventured into Parma we had better luck parking today. It had to be the nicest parking garage ever. Each spot had either a green/unoccupied or red/occupied light right above it and there was music playing over the loud speaker very cool! We had a lunch of tomato and basil pasta with a dessert plate of the meats of Parma. We walked around Parma saw a ...

... not like the cities and countryside we had seen that was so beautiful. Other that the inside of the shops I have a hard time understanding how this place could be called the fashion capital of the world. They need to clean up the outside to match the inside of the shops. Back to the hotel for some sleep and tommorrow we visit to Verona!

BERGAMO As we left the small, yet important, village of Bergam, which is located about 60km from the core of Milan, the heat was attacking me with a force like none other. It wasn't just the heat, though, it was really the humidity. It was persistant. After a year of backpacking down-under, a month of picking watermelons in the middle of nowhere, and scaling to the highest point of Uluru, I was questioning why I was so uncomfortable. I realized it was because I was in ...

... Bologna. It was only 40km away via the back roads, but we wasted an enormous amount of time stuck in traffic en route, and barely halfway there decided to cut our losses, find an autostrade heading north and look around in Verona instead.

Once in the middle of Verona and crossing under the enormous Porta Nuova, a huge piazza opened up to form the forecourt to the third largest surviving Roman arena in the world. The first century open amphitheatre ...

June 10, 2002

Back on the bus! This time to Italy!! We went to Pisa (and had pizza for lunch!) We saw the tower, of course, and the church. Got to shop in the souvenir shops and sit for awhile in the sun. Very peaceful day. I can tell I'm getting tired, because the travel journal entries are shorter and shorter!




We were in ...