With my wife, her sister, and her sister’s husband, I recently spent two weeks vacationing in Italy. We visited Milan, Rome, Venice (with side trips by boat to Murano and Burano), and Florence (with side trips by train to Pisa and Lucca). It was an amazing trip, and I hope to blog in detail about every day of the trip. But to get me started, I thought I’d serve up some more or less general observations about our adventures and misadventures: just a few high points, low points, revelations, and lessons learned. Here goes:
Wow moment #1. We flew into Milan, which has one of the country’s major airports, I think mainly because my wife and I (mostly I) wanted to see an opera at La Scala (full name: Teatro alla Scala.) We arrived 9/24, and the opera was the next night. That first day, after getting settled in our very nice AirBNB, we took the Metro (subway) to the Duomo (cathedral). Most cathedrals I’ve seen in Europe are kind of gloomy on the outside: tall, sooty, and overbearing. Milan’s was white and bright and stood a bit apart from the other buildings on the square, like a jewel or a wedding cake. Coming out of the Metro, rounding the corner, and seeing the Duomo for the first time was definitely our first wow moment. You could actually walk around on part of the roof, among the statues on those many spires. There were many wow moments, but I thought I’d share just one for now.
Pickpockets! I almost had my pocket picked on the Metro in Rome, on our way to the main train station. The car was not crowded, but a young well-dressed woman with a large black leather bag was standing very close to me. Her bag was actually touching my right hip. After several seconds, I realized that her bag kept bumping against me and that I couldn’t see her left hand. Finally (I’m a little slow) I glanced down at the right-hand pocket of my “pickpocket-proof pants” from Clothing Arts, which has a buttoned flap over the pockets, zippers and snaps to close the pockets, and some hidden zippered pockets inside the main pockets. I had secured everything before getting into the Metro system. Only then did I realize that the flap was unbuttoned and the zipper was partly undone. I clapped my hand over my wallet (still there, thank God), moved away, and said to her, “You think you’re pretty tricky, don’t you?” She gave me a mock-innocent, mock-insulted look that seemed to say “What are you talking about?” But I knew that if I hadn’t been wearing those pants, and if I hadn’t finally paid attention, she would have made off with my wallet and I wouldn’t have been the wiser. In Rome especially, be vigilant on the subway and especially on buses #64 and #40, which famous tour guide writer Rick Steves and even the locals warned us about. Don’t be scared, don’t be paranoid, but be vigilant!
European appliances. They’re different and mostly better, I think. For instance: Toasters have little baskets with handles to hold the bread. So when the toast is ready, you can lift it out and not risk electrocuting yourself by sticking a butterknife into the slot and trying to get toast fragments out. The “Moka”-style coffeemaker, originally made by a guy named Bialetti in the 1930s, is great! (The day after I got home, I ran down to Target to get one.) Some of the AirBNBs we stayed at had a strange little automatic espresso maker that usually didn’t work. It had a Keurig-style pod that you would put in sideways. But the mechanism often didn’t work right, and the pod would just drop into a receptacle below without the water flowing through it. So we usually used the Moka, which makes great strong coffee. All our accommodations had wifi, which came in handy after a long day of touring. Don’t forget your electric plug adaptors and/or voltage converters!
Camera drop. In Florence, in the Boboli Gardens, I accidentally dropped my camera. Thought I had the strap around my neck, but I didn’t, and so it fell to the gravel path and didn’t work after that. Stupid! Anyway, the main outcome was that the photo of Neptune’s fountain in the gardens (above) was the last one I took in Italy with my digital SLR. Had a hard time finding a camera store in Florence, but finally saw a place with a “Kodak film” sign outside that we must have passed 5-6 times without noticing it. It was more of a tobacco shop with a few cameras for sale, and the proprietor didn’t speak English. So I pantomimed dropping my camera and then said “Non funziona” — meaning, “Doesn’t work.” He understood, shook his head, waved his hand, and said, “In Firenze no! Milano.” It so happened we were heading back to Milan the next day, but it was the end of the trip, so I didn’t bother to look for a camera store there.
Using the language. Before we left on the trip, using Babbel and a couple of “basic Italian” books, I picked up a few phrases and a little bit of the grammar — which is pretty tricky, by the way. I couldn’t really speak the language, but I knew how to say a few key phrases and to kind of understand what the locals were saying. It’s really worth it, even though most people speak English and many signs/menus etc. are in Italian and English. I learned from a waiter in one restaurant how to say “One more, please” — the context being a terrific Moretti beer I was having — and tried it out the next night at a restaurant in the Trastevere section of Rome. (See photo above — btw, that is *not* me in the photo.) I held up my empty glass and said “Un’altra, per favore.” The waiter seemed to like this and/or to find it funny and he said enthusiastically, “Come no!” — a combination of “of course” and “why not?” I think that one little phrase helped us to not only connect with the guy a little bit, but also to get really good service the whole time.
Planes, trains, & automobiles. We flew over and back on Emirates, on a jam-packed Airbus, and had no trouble at all getting around on mass transit in Italy. The customer service people were (generally) great in the train stations, the arrival/departure boards were easy to figure out, the subway maps made sense, and we never got off at the wrong subway stop or got on the wrong subway line. The only downside was the attempted pickpocketing on the Metro in Rome, and that ended happily. In Florence, there is an absolutely terrific tourist information office right across the street from the Firenze SMN train station. (The SMN stands for Santa Maria Novella, a beautiful church near the station.) I gotta say though, in Rome there was not much help for the wide-eyed tourist, especially at touristy sites like the Colosseum (beware of people offering you “no lines, no waiting, special price today”). And in the Milan train station, I just could *not* find the tourist info office. The signs seemed to point straight ahead, then upstairs, then right, then left, and railway staff in the station pointed me in completely different directions. I gave up. One of the best things we did was to hire an Allentown-based limousine (a big Cadillac Escalade, actually) to pick us up at JFK and take us back to my sister-in-law’s place in Topton, where we had left our car. We were totally beat after the long trip and the flight back, it was late at night, and driving ourselves home would *not* have been a good idea.
Wow moment #2. You walk out of the main train station in Venice and you’re just a few steps away from the Grand Canal and a good view of the Chiesa San Simeon Piccolo, a large church with a peaked green dome. (See above.) We just had to stand there for a few minutes with our suitcases and take it all in. I single out these two wow moments, but there was beauty everywhere and wow moments in abundance. The only halfway unattractive thing I remember seeing during the whole trip was the train station in Florence, a modern unadorned shoebox of a structure faced with rough plain brown stone.
Art is for people’s sake. In Rome, we toured the Vatican museums and saw the Sistine Chapel ceiling, and I’m glad we did. (Actually, I enjoyed a Michelangelo fresco on the wall, with a Judgment Day theme, more than the ceiling. But that’s another story.) I’m glad we went through the Vatican museums and saw the Sistine Chapel — you see (briefly) a lot of beautiful art and artifacts. But you’re also on your feet for a good two hours, being hustled through endless narrow corridors and jostled by other tourists, and trying to keep up with your tour guide. The thing I liked better, in every city we visited, was to duck into as many churches as we could and spend at least a few minutes looking around. That’s where you really see some great art, in the setting it was meant to be seen in. In just a handful of churches, for instance, we saw architecture, paintings and sculpture by Michelangelo, Tintoretto, Giotto, and Velasquez, to name just a few of the artists. It was amazing, there were no lines, and there was no charge — unless you wanted to put a euro or two in the offering box and light a candle, which was totally voluntary.
Well, I’m sure this blog could use some more polish, but I’m ready to send this out into the world and move on to the next installment. Thanks for reading.