A blog about Italy (Naples, Rome, Florence, Pisa & Venice)
We slept on the floor of the ferry, the seats so uncomfortable to sit in, let alone sleep in. We piled up jackets, jumpers, hoodies, pretty much anything we had that was soft for pillows and went to sleep.
We arrived in Bari, Italy. A small town on the coast of Italy where most of the ferries arrive from Greece. We had our first problems here as no one would speak English to us and some yelled at us because we didn’t speak Italian.
We caught the train out of Bari to Naples.
Arriving just before it got dark, we decided to walk to our hostel, we slipped in and out of crowds all the way down, turning what should have been a twenty minute walk into a forty-five minute walk.
Once arriving at the hostel, we asked where some good cheap pizza was, and with Naples supposedly having the best pizza in the world, we were not disappointed.
We woke the next morning and headed towards the part of Naples which is the original area, the streets are narrows but the Vespas will knock pedestrians out of the way if they need to.
A student protest of a few thousand people went down the streets close to us, all chanting, singing and shouting.
We explored these tiny little streets of Naples, found some Gelati and had an ice-cream feast.
The next morning we jumped back on the train, destination Rome.
We arrived in Rome, not only did we notice how dirty of a city it was, but we had to catch the local train line about 45 minutes out of the city. We arrived at our little station and went down to wait for the shuttle bus which was supposed to come every half hour. Waiting there already were two other Australians, Sam & Verelle, who had been waiting about 40 minutes already, Sam called the accommodation and she got some satisfaction when the bus driver said he would make the special trip out to get us.
The accommodation was a caravan, or half a caravan, two single beds and a shelf, the beds were tiny but it was comfortable and cheap enough for us.
Back in Naples, I had purchased a can of Fanta, at the time we couldn’t see the label but it was brown and we could see the letter “C” under the word Fanta, so once it was out we saw it was Fanta Chinotto.
Neither of us had any idea what chinotto was, so once sitting in our room in Rome I got the can out, examined it, opened it and had a sip. Holy shit….this stuff tasted like poison, it was so bitter that it was stupid, I thought I might have a seizure from how bitter it was.
It started raining pretty heavily and lightening and thunder we closing in on the campsite, we needed to eat, so megan armed herself with the umbrella and we walked up the road to the restaurant.
While we were leaving we ran into Sam & Verelle again who had just sat down to eat their dinner, they invited us to sit and have a chat with them…the chat led to a few drinks, which then led to happy hour which was a half litre of red wine for just a couple of bucks. So there I sat, on a balcony in Rome, half litre of red wine infront of me, a storm brewing and the rain coming down really hard.
That evening we organized to head to the Coliseum with Sam & Verelle the next morning.
The next morning we found out that because it was the last Sunday of the month, the pope would be speaking at the Vatican, we caught the train out to the Vatican City and we saw the line, which was a three hour wait to get in. We didn’t speak Italian, so the popes message would have been probably quite boring to us anyway, we jumped back on the train and headed for the Coliseum.
Once there we got a tour guide and bought tickets for the Coliseum and the Palatino, having the guide was good as we got to skip the two hour line to get in.
We walked past everyone inside the great structure, I was shocked at the sheer size of the inside of the Coliseum, it was much taller than I had imagined on the inside, we saw underneath where the floor would have been and it looked like a maze of jagged stones, grass lined the floor like a thick green carpet and where the walls and rock had eroded away light shone through creating streaks of bright colour along the floor.
The walk over to the Palatino entrance was a short easy walk, however, the walk up the hill to the Palatino itself was not.
The tour guide we had for the Palatino, Richard, was excellent, he gave us perfect examples of how massive the place was when it was first built. Most of the Palatino was just ruins now, but it was still so massive with underground staircases and rooms everywhere.
Back where we were staying, we ate some food, then put away about another litre of red wine.
Megan, Sam, Verelle and I went out the next morning to The Spanish Steps, which were much smaller than I thought they would be, then we walked to the amazing Trevi Fountain. Hundreds of people were gathered around the fountain, all taking in the beauty of it, statues having water spilled all over them into the pool below.
We were back on the train, headed to the Vatican City to have a look around before we went back to the accommodation for some more red wine.
The next morning all our things were packed and we were headed for Florence.
We arrived at our hostel and were greeted with such enthusiasm and excitement, the hostel was an apartment, with a few rooms. We unloaded our stuff and went to sit in the kitchen, the girl working, Alice, was from Brisbane and we chatted for a while before the owner of the hostel, Lorenzo, made his way into the kitchen, as soon as he walked in, we were having vodka with him.
We sat in the kitchen the rest of the night, listening to music and drinking.
The next morning was looking pretty miserable outside, we started walking towards the leather market when the rain hit, it came down pretty hard. We waited about 20 minutes, the rain passed and we continued our journey down through Florence to the leather market.
To say the leather market was massive is an understatement, this thing was fucking huge, it stretched down the street, splitting off and taking turns down other streets.
We tried on funny hats, Megan bought some ear-muffs and we may have stopped along the way to have a gelati feast.
We had walked all the way down to Ill Duomo or ‘The Dom’ as it is known. A church that looked so grand from the outside I couldn’t believe that it wasn’t fenced off or protected in any way. Inside wasn’t as grand as the outside, but the high pitched ceilings, the marble floor and the painting on the roof were nothing to be scoffed at.
We made our way back to the hostel, and had a giant feast made by Lorenzo for dinner, we made some friends with two girls from Canberra, Rujia and Adelaide. I drank about a litre of red wine that night.
The next day we walked down to the bridge that is covered with gold shops, the windows filled with gold jewellery, hurting my eyes as the sun bounced off it.
We made our way to a square that had statues of turtles in it, so of course I had to get on top of them and pretend I was riding them as people walked past and gave Megan and I some odd looks.
We went back to The Dom and once inside I really wanted to light a candle because it looked like fun. I lit the candle and made our way back to the hostel.
When we got there, Lorenzo, Alice and Jenny (an American girl who worked there), were preparing dinner, we sat down and helped them out, Rujia and Adelaide helped out as well.
The four of us organized to head to Pisa the next day as a day trip.
In the morning we headed to the train station and got on the train bound for Pisa.
When we saw the Leaning Tower there was an collective disappointment as the tower was so tiny, although very cool to see, I had always expected it to be huge and leaning, not eight stories tall and pretty skinny.
We took the obligatory photos of us holding the tower, pushing the tower over and we walked around the streets of Pisa for a little bit before we headed back to the station.
We headed back to the hostel for our last night there, ate amazing pasta and salad for dinner that was made by Lorenzo.
We awoke the next morning, sadly said goodbye to all our new friends and jumped on the train once again, this time headed for our last Italian destination, Venice.
Stepping out of the station, we looked down some stairs onto a canal with police boats and gondolas going up and down, people scurried about everywhere we looked.
We checked into the hostel and then started to walk around Venice. It was such a strange thing to see, peoples back doors opening up onto canals and them just having a boat at their back stairs.
The greenish colour of the water was beautiful and dodgy looking men tried to sell us gondola rides.
We walked through tiny little streets, not having the risk of being run over by a car or Vespa was awesome as we could then walk at our own pace.
We walked to Basilica San Marco, where we got out some bread to feed the pigeons and constantly pigeons jumped up on us, on our arms, shoulders and hands, each fighting it out to get the bread.
We walked around for a while taking photos of canals and gondolas and just admiring the beauty of this strange little city.
We made our way to the station only to find that we had to wait a few hours for our train, so we sat on the stairs overlooking Venice. We were sitting in the warm sun, Megan lay down on our bags and had a nap in the sunlight while I recorded people walking past me and listened to Lupe Fiasco.
We boarded the train, ready for our overnight journey to Barcelona.
When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.
BJ
