Travels WithJohn and Janice
Italy

Italy

Italy

6 adventures documented

All Stories

The Colosseum in RomeItaly
6 min read2016

Dateline June 11, 2016, Rome

Rome was the grand finish to our weeks of Italy by rail. We threw our coins in the freshly cleaned Trevi Fountain, stood before Michelangelo's Pieta and under the Sistine ceiling, walked the Forum and Palatine Hill, and looked down into the tunnels beneath the Colosseum floor. We caught a bishop's service by luck at the oldest church in Rome, paid our respects to Raphael in the Pantheon, and went back twice to a tiny family restaurant we loved. Then, in the morning, on to Athens.

#Rome#Trevi Fountain#Vatican
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The boat houses at HerculaneumItaly
4 min read2016

Dateline June 8, 2016, Pompeii and Herculaneum

We gave our one full day from Sorrento to Pompeii and Herculaneum, and a guide named Rosanna turned it into one of the best days of the whole trip. She made the dead cities live again: the shops and bakeries, the wagon ruts worn into the stone, the picture signs for people who could not read, and the plaster casts of those caught by the eruption. At Herculaneum we stood by the boat houses her own professor helped excavate.

#Pompeii#Herculaneum#Mount Vesuvius
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Mount Vesuvius at night from SorrentoItaly
4 min read2016

Dateline June 7, 2016, Sorrento and the Amalfi Coast

Sorrento gave us a beach apartment with Mount Vesuvius framed in the window, reached only after our phone tried to march us off a cliff. From there we drove the hair-raising switchbacks of the Amalfi Coast with our guide Julia, through Positano, Ravello and Amalfi, and made a friend of a Polish cafe host named Gabriella we hated to leave. Pompeii fell in the middle of it all, but that day earned a page of its own.

#Sorrento#Amalfi Coast#Positano
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The Leaning Tower of Pisa and the basilicaItaly
4 min read2016

Dateline June 5, 2016, Pisa, Siena and Cinque Terre

With Florence as our base, we took three days out into Tuscany and beyond. We went to Pisa to see the leaning tower everyone told us to skip, and were glad we didn't; to Siena and its astonishing shell-shaped square, just ahead of the afternoon rain; and to the cliffside fishing villages of Cinque Terre on a perfect blue day. Along the way a laid-off engineer turned taxi driver, and two young Chinese executives, taught us a thing or two about the world.

#Pisa#Leaning Tower#Siena
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Michelangelo's David in the AccademiaItaly
5 min read2016

Dateline June 3, 2016, Florence

Florence was the heart of our Italy, with the local wine flowing at six dollars a half-liter. Our hosts met us with a map and a bottle of red, and from there we walked it all: the great Duomo and Brunelleschi's dome, the Piazza della Signoria with its turtle searching for Utopia, the Uffizi and its two da Vincis, and the Ponte Vecchio with its centuries of shops. But the moment we will never forget was standing in front of Michelangelo's David, far larger and finer than we had ever imagined.

#Florence#Duomo#Michelangelo
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St. Mark's Square in VeniceItaly
4 min read2016

Dateline June 1, 2016, Venice

Venice was the start of our first trip to Italy, and the start of a happy lesson: order the house red, it is always excellent. We ducked our way through a rustic little flat with five-foot doorways, talked ourselves out of an eighty-euro gondola ride, got turned away from Hemingway's Harry's Bar for John's shorts, and were serenaded at five in the morning by an opera singer under our window. St. Mark's Square was every bit as magnificent as promised.

#Venice#Grand Canal#St. Mark's Square
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