family time in the eternal city and venezia
i was lucky enough to get to meet my family — that is my mom, dad, and older sister — in italy this past weekend. i hadn’t seen them in a month and i’ve always wanted to go to italy so it seriously was a bit of a dream come true (especially the venice part — ever since i read inkheart when i was in like fifth grade or something i’ve wanted to go there). like literally the moment i landed i got this little rush and my heart fluttered and i was like well, here i am. rome fiumicino airport. the actual landing itself was beautiful too. like you look out the window and you see incredibly blue water and all these little vineyards and shingle-roofed houses and (at least for me) you feel like it’s greece and think you’re home.
since i’ve been having problems with lycamobile (or rather since i failed to figure out how you load money onto my sim card online because i didn’t realize the +41 was the international code and not part of my actual number and every time i inputted it into the online sign-in it told me i wasn’t real and i was so so confused and even asked tahnee to help me when we called customer service and it was all in french and neither of us could figure out what to do so yeah…), my dad had arranged for a driver from the hotel associated with our apartments to pick me up since he didn’t want me trying to navigate public transport alone without a stable phone. that was an experience. first off, i walked off the plane and snaked through the terminals past luggage carousels (signs were in every language imaginable— even russian! you don’t see that too often.) and proceeded to get somewhat turned around because i was like where do i meet this man and what does he even look like? but eventually i exited the right door and saw my legitimate chauffeur with one of those fancy pieces of paper that has your last name written on it and was like damn, that’s high class. he was one of those middle-aged, designer sunglass-wearing males with nice shoes that was clearly attractive in their prime. in a lovely italian accent, he asked me if there was anyone else, and i was like nope, just me. so essentially up the fancy because he was going to be my personal driver for the day (or at least for as long as it took to get to the hotel…).
we walked outside and i was hit with a wave of genuine italian summer heat before being whisked away in the cool embrace of the hotel’s black audi (seriously too much fanciness for me). FCO is a little outside of rome so it was around a 40 minute drive on the highway hurtling through vineyards before we got off and wound our way through the narrow cobble-stoned streets of a suburb before going through this one real old roman-looking (obvious right?) archway covered in ivy or some other sort of fun slothing plant and were all of the sudden face-to-face with the vatican like okay there’s st. peter’s basilica. wow this is rome. the eternal city. vaguely recalling the legend of the founding of rome (romulus, remus, something something something :3) i asked which of the seven hills we were on and he answered but i didn’t understand because of accent.
my family had gotten an apartment down an alley from campo di fiori, and me and my suave driver pulled up about ten minutes later and i saw my mom waiting outside on the hotel patio and she was crying when she saw me and i was like whoa… okay. don’t miss me that much, please. it was nice to see everyone again though!
they had just returned from florence and had bought me a nice leather pouch which has already come in handy as i was in desperate need of a place to put money, etc. since i broke my purse zipper in zurich. after some hellos and heartfelt hugs, they took me up to the roof of the hotel to see the view. it was spectacular and made me super excited for the next two days i would spend exploring one of the most quintessential travel destinations on the planet.
after a minor family photoshoot, we went back downstairs, out the door, and across the square to our apartment. for me, two things stuck out about campo di fiori right away: 1. the cardinal statue in the center was possibly the creepiest thing i’d ever seen conformed to metal. it’s like this hooded man that looks like a death eater from behind. absolutely terrifying. 2. it was a happening place. this man with a lovely euro-style ponytail was soulfully playing “wish you were here” by pink floyd on cello (just writing this inspired me to actually listen to the album all the way through because i’ve heard it’s like a story and can only fully be appreciated going from start to finish) and it was really really good — set the mood right away. so many people had gathered to watch, it was actually pretty incredible. even dad insisted on giving him a euro, which was a big deal because he usually never does stuff like that.
after i somehow didn’t trip on the really uneven steps that led up to our door and threw my stuff down in the *air-conditioned* apartment (first time i’d had AC in four weeks!), since it was well-past dinner and i was literally dying, we ventured out into the world to find food. per the concierge’s recommendation, we ended up deciding to go to cafe lucifero, about a two minute walk from our apartment. my first meal in italy was wondrous (honestly, though. what else did you expect? carbs are amazing and i was starving). i had so much bread, lasagna, some forkfuls of alaina’s hella expensive black truffle risotto #specialoftheday, and finished off my meal with lovely tiramisu and chocolate mousse. the waitress kept bringing us random alcohol and even some italian version of paximadia (we guessed it was special service since we’d made the reservation through the hotel). the whole meal was about a three hour affair. absolutely delicious.
after we finished, mom insisted that we escort her back to the apartment so she could change shoes. of course this turned into way longer than it needed to be, largely because our apartment door was ridiculously hard to open because you had to turn the key like somehow four different ways in a circle in order to open it and i had to stand there for maybe seven minutes just fiddling with it before we got in. then, we walked around the streets of rome in the dark (later, i would decide that this was how i enjoyed rome best: wandering around through the dark — much cooler — cobblestoned streets filled with people and merchants and street performers and just so much palpable energy. being offered a meal of pasta every five paces. hearing the lovely lilt of italian. seeing all the ruins and monuments lit up spectacularly.).
my fam had already seen a lot since they’d gotten into rome about seven hours before me, but they took me to the trevi fountain and the fountain of the four rivers, which oddly doesn’t include the amazon (nile, ganges, danube, rio de la plata). we also passed the pantheon and hadrian’s wall. all of my pictures from this night sort of suck because it was very dark outside, but i did get to throw the coin over my shoulder into trevi. i guess that means i’m coming back to rome someday now doesn’t it??? i wouldn’t mind that at all. mom pointed out that they (still unclear who they is… maybe the gov? or municipal district of rome or something) make like legitimately one million euros a year off of whatever they dredge up from the trevi fountain. that’s pretty impressive, especially when you consider how many coins that must be. (also if the old superstition is correct, whoever threw those coins inevitably returns so add onto that sum even more tourist revenue as well.)
another interesting thing i realized this night was how many italian armed services people were out and about, presumably guarding the monuments. it was a little disconcerting though, because i guess italy must be on high alert? for the entirety of our time in rome, we saw people wearing the italian army uniform and holding guns wherever we went.
after our brief walk, we headed back to the apartment and i received the sad shock that my body did not deal well sleeping in air conditioned places after the long time i’d survived without it. like despite the fact that it was 90 outside, i was wearing full on pants and shivering in bed…
the next day, we had our personally-guided private tour of the vatican city with michela, a recent mother who had lived in rome her entire life. we took a cab to the vatican around 9:45 and then spent around 5 hours inside the smallest country in the world (.17 sq. miles, baby! adding on to my small countries of europe tour along with liechtenstein lmao). michela was extremely knowledgeable and obviously the tour allowed us to skip [side note: i’m sorry i just need to draw attention to the fact that i legitimately just tried to spell skip with a q… squip? send help immediately] the long line to get inside. interestingly enough, the best way to get into the vatican is through the museum. from there, you walk through and sort of skip all of the exhibits until you get outside.
honestly, i found the whole thing to be slightly overwhelming. like you walk outside in a throng of other tourists and are in awe of st. peter’s basilica, then you see an ancient bronze pinecone, a really new-age sphere-within-a-sphere sculpture (favorite moment with michela was when she just casually stepped over the chain around the sculpture and pulled at it it until it started spinning: “it’s perfectly balanced. see!”) and then are walking through all of these beautiful corridors with all of these extremely old marble things in them and then you hit the sistine chapel and you can’t take pictures (or if you do, an italian man comes over the microphone and yells at you). and you are looking up and up until you get a crick in your neck and your head is sort of spinning… don’t get me wrong, i did a project on michelangelo in elementary school so seeing the sistine chapel was super cool. i just didn’t know where to look and honestly got kind of disoriented trying to take it all in… i did get to see the burn mark from where the cardinals put their stove for the whole pope vetting process (white smoke when they agree by 2/3 majority on a new pope, black smoke otherwise).
[insert nonexistent illegal picture of the sistine chapel that i didn’t take here]
my favorite corridor was definitely the cartography one. it was super ornate (check that ceiling though!) with all these map paintings of regions of italy and then italy overall. all of the maps were made within 85% accuracy without gps or anything. blows my mind how they did it.
the highlight of the tour for me was definitely st. peter’s basilica. seeing the original first pieta was also really cool (more from my boy michelangelo!) as was looking down into the crypt where st. peter is actually buried (and of course touching his statue’s foot). the church is incredible. it’s the biggest church in the entire world and the floor is super geometric and really beautiful. honestly, there isn’t a single ugly thing in the place. i realize this section is largely just pictures, but i don’t really think i can do what i saw justice with words, you’ll just have to look and see it yourself.
i mean i’m not catholic, and i guess it largely doesn’t matter, but it was seriously — as in definitely one of the prettiest churches — i’ve ever been in (and trust me, thanks to my experience last summer church-hopping through greece, i’ve been in more churches than the vast majority of people). only weird thing is that it didn’t really feel like a place of worship though… or like not in the way that most churches do to me. maybe it’s because there were so many people in it, snapping away at their cameras, but it just doesn’t feel as sacred as some of the other churches i’ve been to (particularly the ones that are very isolated in the mountains of greece).
after we spent a good hour in the basilica, mom decided we just had to get to the top of the dome, and after much tired/hungry/hot grumbling (i was stupidly wearing pants because somehow despite all my experience with #monasteryskirtliving in greece as i church-hopped last summer, it had somehow slipped my mind to pack a shoulder/knee covering patriarchy-appropriate dress) we took an elevator to the midway point of the dome, looked down into the church from above (the view really enabled you to see the geometric pattern on the floor), and then began our climb up the 305 stairs to the top of the dome. as the staircase curvature became more and more severe, i was actually pretty glad i was short because it was really easy for me to keep walking up. at one point we were holding a rope spinning in a tight spiral staircase, but we eventually made it to the top, felt a wonderful breeze, saw this view, and were immediately glad we’d done it (thanks, mom).
after our trip up and down the cuppola (alaina is afraid of down stairs so that was an interesting one…), we went out into st. peter’s square and looked back at the basilica. it really is absolutely spectacular. but we didn’t take too long looking because dad, alaina, and i were feeling quite faint. the bell rang for 2 pm and dad even joked that papa francesco was going to roll out and give his day’s lunch order to the crowd waiting below. without further ado, we left the vatican, crossed the tiber river, and found lunch. i had my first real authentic italian margherita pizza. in typical diana-fashion, i ate all of it. i also had a sprite because i wanted to compare between italy and greece in terms of flavoring… honestly, greece has better sprite. but still, was very sated from the meal. but was also dying because pants and 90+ degrees does not mix well.
after lunch, we walked back to our apartment, changed/cooled off, and then we were off again! this time to the pantheon and spanish steps (which my fam had already seen without me the day i arrived). the pantheon was another landmark that came up in dan brown’s angels and demons. honestly, i barely remember the plot… remember him attaching some significance to the daemon hole at the top (giant gap> you’ll see in picture. there are holes drilled inconspicuously into the ground to drain the water should it rain) but still it was really cool being there. somehow the romans constructed a perfect semi-sphere over a perfect cylinder. like people nowadays still don’t make perfect spheres so how on earth was this herculean feat possible in the first century AD??? and that’s like not even a rhetorical question. i would seriously love it if someone could please explain to me.
next, we walked up the spanish steps. i’m still kind of confused why it is famous. like we got there and i was like huh… this is it? it used to be the old spanish embassy apparently. but like a lot of rome — if you haven’t been able to tell by all the pictures i clearly took> seriously like 1000 from this leg of my trip alone and sort of how this section is less detailed than everything else i’ve written— it seemed to be more of a photo exercise. i guess that was the one thing i didn’t really like about rome: you get to x place, take a bunch of pictures, and then move onto the next… maybe that’s just me, though. i am willing to accept blame because we literally did the entirety of rome (in terms of monuments at least) in about 48 hours #roamingaroundrome, so maybe you need to spend more time there to really fully appreciate what you are looking at and really take it in. i just couldn’t. (also it might have to do with the fact that i’m not really all that interested in ancient history. like it’s cool and all, but give me from 1400s on please.)
after we walked up the steps, we tried to find the de medici villa (everyone had apparently taken a liking to seeing de medici things after florence), but it was under renovation or obscured by renovation or something and we couldn’t get to it. then i drank from a random unmarked fountain and got yelled at (typical) because it wasn’t clearly marked potable, but i lived to tell so clearly it was okay…
we walked back past another church were bernini (another great italian artist) was buried and then looped around by the colosseum on the way back to our apartment. we also walked by palatine hill, constantine’s arch, and a bunch of other ruins that we would revisit the next day before we took the train to venice.
as i said before, i like rome a lot better at night than during the day. so it was no surprise that just as the sun started to set we came to the monument of victor emmanuel ii (first king of unified italy #garibaldi’sredshirts that just happened to be buried in the pantheon as well). it’s this huge marble acropolis-looking thing right off the side of a major roundabout. rome has a lot of great and important things to see, but this was my personal favorite.
it was free to get in, so we walked up the steps, past the tomb of the unknown soldier, and the extremely large statue of VE on a horse with a giant scrotum, and got to experience the lovely afterglow of the eternal city.
then, we headed back home, ate more delicious hand-made pasta (having older woman kneading and spinning the pasta dough in the window of the restaurant= best advertisement for this place ever), and then headed back to the apartment to pack a bit before bed.
the next day, i woke up, i went out into the campo di fiori market to buy some peaches for breakfast. i had an incredibly awkward exchange with the person i was buying from because i have him a really random quantity of money for what i owed. i ended up also buying freshly squeezed mango peach juice and trying on a bunch of the shirts in the market, to no avail. i really wanted to buy some cheap article of clothing from italy and i was pretty deadset because italian girls are actually generally my size (can be confirmed from available items and especially shoe size), but nothing from the market looked right. i went back to the apartment to get alaina because she had promised to get cappuccino with me the night before. as we left, dad told us to go check and see what time we were supposed to check out, so we walked straight to the hotel which was honestly a good thing because we got there at 10:49 and were supposed to be checked out by 11:00 so ran back to tell parents, grabbed our stuff, and then threw it into a closet in the hotel so we could enjoy ourselves before our 4:15 train to venice. of course this took a lot longer than 10 minutes… it’s fun to travel with family, but literally so much more inefficient than being with friends. especially here because everyone wants to see everything and we are willing to sacrifice sleep to get up at like 7 am and get out at 8 to see things. at least my family isn’t like that.
anyways, after we’d put our stuff down, alaina and i walked through a bookstore and then sat down for cappucino and this delicious nutella pie thing that seriously blew me out of the water. mom and dad eventually came down from the apartment with their suitcases and found us before officially checking out and putting their stuff in the closet. alaina and i paid and then i went off to find myself a shirt (success!) and she went with mom to go buy pasta from the market.
we met up about thirty minutes later and then headed back to the area with the ruins to see the colosseum, circus maximus, palatine hill (randomly there was a modern art exhibit going on… like inside of the ruins??? like we walked past an arch with a plastic bag suspended in it which was incredibly odd), and the forums (most of which we’d seen at night maybe 15 hours before). i don’t really have much to say about any of these things since we really just ran through them since we wanted to make sure we touched everything before we left. kind of funny too since we said we would read one of the many italy guidebooks my parents somehow accumulated in the brief span of time i was gone on what we’d seen, but we never did… oh yeah, we also saw some older woman get hit by a moped when crossing the street. he wasn’t going all that fast, but italian vespa drivers are crazy and weave in and out of traffic… i felt bad. but he was barely going like 8 mph so i’m sure she is fine.
after we basically sprinted through as much of palatine hill as time would allow, we walked back to the hotel, grabbed our stuff, and then took a taxi to rome termini station. rome was cool, but i was already beyond pumped to get to venice. i thought (correctly) that i would likely like it better than rome.
we got to the train about an hour early and sat down for lunch. i had really overcooked salmon, but it was nice to have some protein after straight eating carbs for the past 52 hours. i couldn’t entirely avoid them though… still ended up helping my mom finish her spaghetti. somehow we ate until we had like 15 minutes to go before our train left, and then we reached the moment of truth when we realized we had no clue where the train left from in the station because we were supposed to be on platform 4 and platforms 1–6 were all obscured by fencing so i was mildly freaking out with like eight minutes to go before the train left and we still weren’t making any progress but we eventually just walked through the security thing and saw what the fence had been blocking the whole time and then speed-walked until we were on our railcar.
it was about a three and a half hour journey to venice. if this trip has taught me anything, it’s that i love traveling by train. it was super pretty and relaxing to look out of the window and see how the landscape changed from rolling hills to sort of just flat olive groves. it was a pretty uneventful ride, although i was quite amused by a text message i received from my dad informing me that mr. worldwide (aka pitbull who he for some reason hates which is hilarious because i just bought tickets to see him and enrique — or as my mom says, “ricky” — iglesias in october with my roomie, alisa) had gotten on the train and was sitting behind me.
we got off in venice around 8 pm and immediately i knew it was the place for me, moreso than rome could ever be. i was beyond thrilled when we walked out and saw the canals right away, filled with boats and gondolas. i’ve heard a lot of things about venice — apparently it’s a very polarizing place. when i was deciding where i wanted to go on my italy trip, i talked to people that raved about it and people that detested it and said the canals were sewage-filled and gross, but i absolutely loved it. the romance of the old world is all there, what with the incredibly narrow labrythine streets. i would be beyond happy merely getting lost there and wandering the streets for days, but since i was with my family and we were on a mission to reach the hotel, i had to route us there (of course everyone preceded to complain since i used apple maps instead of google maps and apparently the user interface is worse or whatever, but i got us to where we needed to go so go find another token boyscout to lead you.). besides the somewhat roundabout path, the only other downside was that i also had to carry my mom’s suitcase over many stairs on bridges. venice is backpack, but not suitcase friendly.
after about a 20 minute walk, we checked into our hotel, which had real walnuts for you to crack/enjoy and these really oddly princess-colored chandeliers (products of the murano glass factory i’m guessing. you might be asking what “princess-colored” even is and honestly i have no clue… it just was pink, purple, orange, whatever. looked like it belonged in a little girl’s tea party is all i’m saying), and then went up to our room which was legitimately almost 100% red, which was kind of hilarious. like literally, look at this:
after we got settled, we went out to find dinner and had another delicious italian experience, complete with pinot noir our waiter recommended. he also did this super clever thing where he carved a circle out of the wine cork casing and then secured the cork to the side of the bottle with it. great intellectual property hahahaha….
we got home from dinner kind of late and then went to bed with the goals of somehow locating st. mark’s square and the doge’s palace the next day. [side note: to be entirely honest, alaina and i were more pumped for the doge than anything else. much italy. such venice. wow. amaze.]
realistically we only got like 20 hours in venice… some of which we slept through. i know i said i loved it more than rome, but honestly i don’t really know what you would do there beyond a day or two. like we were more than able to fit in everything on sunday before we left around five to take a bus to the airport.
we woke up around 8. alaina and i watched this really really bizarre italian children’s show called doraemon in which a robot cat comes back from the future to help one of his owner’s ancestors become more of a legitimate human being. i was dying laughing. it was just too perfect. we got out of our room around 9 and went downstairs to eat breakfast. i had more coco rice, which was my favorite thing to eat in greece, and also this really good marble coffee cake. i tried to eat a kiwi but failed because it was too hard and i couldn’t get the spoon to scoop it out. then, i had to print out all of my family’s boarding passes to fly back with me to geneva (the next journal entry probably as soon as tomorrow afternoon before i leave for barcelona. SCRY so far behind and so much schoolwork to do…) since i had made the reservation.
then we ventured out into the maze to make our way to st. mark’s square. for some reason, even after they’d complained about my navigation skills the night before, i was left in charge of getting us where to go again. after much confusion— especially when we reached a sign pointing in two opposite directions — we eventually made it.
we hadn’t booked any tours or anything, so we just went with the shortest line in terms of st. mark’s square attractions: ended up going up the clock tower first for yet another incredible vista.
then, we came down, were disappointed to see the line for the basilica had increased, and decided we’d go into the doge’s palace instead. this was not a problem for alaina and i. honestly, i liked the doge’s palace far more than i liked versailles (kind of makes me wonder how i would’ve ranked the three had i have been able to go into sansoucci, but alas). it was really ostentatious but that’s what made it cool. like it has the largest room uninterrupted by columns in the world and also the largest canvas painting.
i made my fam buy an audioguide anticipating that it would be as loud as the audio thing at sachsenhausen and that we’d be able to turn it up super loud and share it, but then it didn’t end up going that loud, so we just had to pass it along. the palace is super cool because different parts of it were built at different times. like there was never one great big project to finish it. when you are in the courtyard, the audioguide points out how each wall was finished in a different era. the audioguide also said a lot of things that sort of jogged my ap euro memory. i was like wow. venice → venetian spice traders. huh. that makes sense…. with their monopoly on the spice trade they could afford all of this. we also got to see the bridge of sighs and a bunch of medieval armor and weaponry which was fascinating. i guess i never really consciously had recognized that knights were real before. seemed too fairytale, but really it was as real as could be.
anyways, here are some pictures, because once again i really can’t do the experience justice with words:
the last picture is of the biggest room in europe. it looks pretty spectacular doesn’t it? besides the multiple paintings of venus doing who knows what, every single doge has a painted portrait along the banner directly after the ceiling. what’s interesting, though, is how the one doge that was executed for treason has a black veil painted over his face.
after about 90 minutes, we left the doge’s palace and then mom went to stand in the line for st. mark’s cathedral because it was a lot shorter. dad, alaina, and i went to go find lunch and i had this delicious calzone-type thing with a stracciatella milkshake that i somehow finished in five minutes right before we entered the church (no food allowed obviously). alaina and i had once again failed to address monastery attire and were forced to buy this table cloth for one euro to cover ourselves which was sort of dumb… but then we got to go inside the cathedral. it was also incredibly beautiful, but could never compare with st. peter’s. interestingly enough, the icons inside seemed to be more in the byzantine style than in keeping with western christian tradition.
after a brief 15 minutes in the church, we headed back to rialto bridge to take the much anticipated, quintessential gondola ride through the canals of venice. we awkwardly were 3 euros short (rip to my milkshake but no regrets) of the 80 euro asking price, but paolo [side note: dying that he was called that. too perfect] was alright with it. talk about rent-seeking though… these gondoliers could extract practically any price because monopoly on skill. i even asked how long it takes to get your license (3 years) and other stuff about the process of becoming a gondolier. paolo said that it was mostly passed from father to son down the generations and that we started learning how to steer a gondola when he was around five years old. of the 433 gondoliers present in the city today, there are no females. apparently, there has never been a female gondolier, but i kind of wonder if anyone has ever tried…
after the brief but spectacular 30 minute ride, we disembarked and headed back to our hotel (were only derailed for a little bit when alaina found a really fashionable nine euro pleathure jacket that she couldn’t turn down) to get ready to leave for geneva. thus, our italian trip was almost over as we cooled off a bit in the lobby for a little bit to prepare for lugging our luggage all the way to the bus station.
about an hour later, we were sweating profusely in the hot unforgiving meditteranean sun next to the bus station. we took the bus to the airport, alaina and i had some really bizarre seafood pasta (remind me why we thought this was a good idea), and then we were on a plane headed towards geneva (back home for me).
even though i didn’t like it as much as berlin, i thoroughly enjoyed my time in italy and i’d love to come back. let’s hope that trevi coin toss worked it’s magic, because if it did, i’ll be back in no time at all.
