Christmas Eve on campus was really nice. Those of us that were still around ate a lot of food and played a card game that involves zombies. The next day, I woke up with the flu. I felt like death. I did manage to do my laundry and that evening I vaguely remember packing a suitcase. The next morning I dragged myself out of bed at 5:30 am, took a shower, and met my friend, H, to go to the airport. She handed me a carton of orange juice so I could get vitamin C and she could clean out her fridge. So, I sat in the back of our taxi to the airport swigging OJ out of the carton, hoping that I wouldn’t be sick for my whole trip.
I got on the plane and slept all the way to Rome. Then, I barely made it through the airport to catch the train to the train station. Once on our train to Florence, I slept again while the Italian guy across the aisle kept giving me weird looks. Apparently, I looked like death.
Anyway, my first two days in Florence were spent in my hotel room. I was miserable. On day 3, our last day in Florence, I ventured out. I still had a little fever, but I wasn’t going to miss an entire city. So, I emerged from the hotel with my friends H, P, and ibuprofen. We first went to the Galleria dell'Accademia to see Michelangelo’s David. Finished in 1504, David is a 17 ft high representation of the Biblical David in his stone throwing, giant felling days. However, in the actually story, David is basically described as a scrawny kid (hence the miracle of him beating Goliath) while the statue is of a very ripped guy with nice abs. That aside, it is an amazing statue. I, being artistically challenged, can’t even imagine how someone can chisel away at a marble block and have it look just like a person. There was other artwork in this gallery by artists such as Boticelli and Giambologna, but David was the main attraction.
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| Giambologna's sculpture of the Rape of the Sabine |
We walked past the Florence Cathedral. The outside is truly amazing, but the inside is very simple and plain, so it didn’t really take us too much time.
We then headed to the Galileo Museum. It was one of my favorite places that we went. It houses the Medici collection of scientific instruments. The Medici’s were a rich political family from Florence that were, for a time, Galileo’s benefactors. In the past, scientific research was funded by families like this. I used to show the Nova special on Galileo to my physics students, so I was soooo excited to see this collection. Even more exciting: the collection includes the telescopes Galileo designed and used to discover the moons of Jupiter. It also had glass jars displaying Galileo’s finger, thumb, and tooth. Religious relics for the science crowd, I guess. (There are some practices that I’m glad went out of style). I also saw astronomical tools, a giant representation of Ptolemy’s universe, and sun cannon (we’re pretty sure the lens focused the sun on the fuse of the tiny cannon so it fires at noon). The museum also houses the Lorraine collection, but other than some disturbing wax models of things that can go wrong during child birth, the Medici collection was better.
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| Ptolemy's universe, Galileos Telescopes & finger. |
After the Galileo museum, we grabbed a snack and head to the Uffizi Gallery. It was late, and we were tired, so we were really here to see the main attractions: Boticelli’s Birth of Venus (you know, the one with the strategically placed hair http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sandro_Botticelli_-_La_nascita_di_Venere_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg ) and PrimaveraI (sort of part II to the other painting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sandro_Botticelli_038.jpg ). When you see a painting that is in so many books and is so incredibly famous, it’s very weird. You think, “Wow, there it is.” Instead of a thumbnail in your textbook, it’s actually 10 ft wide and old. Really old. Over 500 years old. Anyway, we were tired and basically done, so we left the gallery and grabbed some dinner.
The next day, we hopped on a train to Siena. Siena is known as a hill town (because it’s on a hill, obviously) . To start out, we climbed a hill, the wrong hill, in an attempt to find our hotel. Once, we got back down and on the correct road, we found that we were staying at a cute apartment-style hotel that used to be a farm. We then headed out for the old part of the city. I find it very interesting to visit cities like this. They are packed in so tightly with twisting streets that are (very) easy to get lost in. However, I would hate to live in one. I find myself missing seeing trees and grass after only a day inside such places. We found the main town square, every July and August, it is converted to a track and the Palio di Siena horse race is held. Ten riders representing the 10 city wards race around the track. I’ve only seen the pictures, but it looks incredibly dangerous and, from what I’ve read, many horses finish without jockeys, since they’ve been thrown off earlier in the race.
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| Main Square- Siena |
Any other time of year, the main attraction in Siena is the beautiful cathedral. I’ve seen a lot of churches and this one takes the cake. It was incredibly beautiful with marble-inlaid floors and, amazing paintings, and the amazing Piccolomini Library, where the ceiling and walls are brightly painted with beautiful scenes and patterns. We probably spent over an hour in the church. Then, we went to the crypt underneath (where no one was buried, but we saw some very old paintings from the original church on the site) before spending another half an hour in the baptistery of the church. That night we ate at a local family restaurant before heading back to our hotel.  |
| Piccolomini Library Ceiling |
The next day, I went for a morning walk since we had time to kill before catching our train to Rome to catch another train to Naples. It was a long trip and we missed our connection in Rome. Then, once we made it to Naples, we had to catch the Circum Vesuviana, a commuter train that goes around the entire Bay of Naples, to Sorrento. We got it sort of late, and proceded to try to navigate the old, narrow, and poorly labeled streets to find our house.
Our house, was down this curvy road that had steps, so no cars could go down it and it was right on the sea. It was really beautiful there and you just had to walk 200 feet in order to see Mt. Vesuvius across the bay. On day 1, we caught the Circum Vesuviana to Herculaneum, a town destroyed in the 79 AD eruption of Vesuvius. The town has been fully excavated and you can literally walk down the streets. The original town streets. It is a little weird. You can walk into houses, see Roman columns, places they kept wine, paintings on the walls, mosaics on the floors, and even baths. There were also 3 skeletons on display as they found them- holding on to each other. It is a an interesting trip back in time. You can also take a nice picture of Herculaneum with Erculano, the modern town, behind it and Vesuvius in the background. Apparently, humans never learn. We grabbed some pizza before heading back to Sorrento, where we wander the shopping street and even saw a weird New Year’s Eve parade, with a strange band.
That night, we lost power in our little house, so it was dark, and a little cold, by the next morning. We flipped all the circuit breakers, but apparently, we needed to flip the one on the outside, which we found out about the next morning after we contacted the owners. Then, P and I decided to take the ferry to the Isle of Capri. We walked down (and down and down) to the Sorrento port and to catch the boat. We arrived at Capri only to find that the buses from the harbor to the top (city center) were no running, since it was New Year’s Day. So, we walked up the “Road of Death,” as we started to call it to the city center. Eventually we found a set of stairs to the top and after a lot of climbing, we came out in the center of Capri. We walked around the city and explored a little bit and got our picture taken by some Japanese tourists (which was weird, but we think it was because I’m blonde) and then we decided to walk to the Fragolini rocks. These are giant rocks that sit in the Mediterranean just off the coast. We were lucky to arrive in as the sun as starting to set, so the light was really beautiful. Then, we had to climb back up the backside of Capri, up and over to the harbor on the other side. Luckily, on the way down, we mostly managed to find stairs so we could avoid the “Road of Death.” We got back right on time for our ferry. We sat outside, looked at the stars and sort of froze. However, that night we had great pizza at this place in Sorrento, so we managed to warm up. 
The next day, we got up bright and early so we could visit Pompeii before leaving for Malta. We hopped on the Circum Vesuviana before 8 am and arrived at Pompeii just as it was opening. Pompeii is really impressive. It is like Herculaneum, destroyed in the 79 AD eruption, completely excavated, etc, but so much bigger. We could only stay for about 4 hours, and we only saw the highlights. There was an entire side of the city that I didn’t even get to. However, I saw the main city square where the markets and the Temple of Jupiter were located, as well as the two theatres, the Temple of Isis, several homes, a laundry business, the sports training arena, and the ampitheatre- where the gladiators used to fight. The streets here had grooves from cart wheels and stepping stones that were positioned so carts and wagons could still pass, but pedestrians didn’t have to step in the street to get from one side walk to the other. It was incredibly interesting. You could see paintings and mosaics, as with Herculaneum, and since we were there in January, it wasn’t very busy (I think this place would be a nightmare in the summer).
We then collected our suitcases from the bag check and got back on the Circumvesuviana for Naples. We caught a train to Rome and then the airport so we could fly to Malta. The entire country is only 121 sq miles and it has an extensive bus system. I looked up the information and found that the airport is only about 25 minutes away from our hotel. Well, by car. The bus apparently zig zags around the whole island for almost 2 hours before getting to our hotel. Hmm, things that aren’t mentioned. Anyway, we did finally make it to our hotel, which was full of retired British snowbirds. We were the youngest people at breakfast by a lot of years. However, who doesn’t enjoy flirting with old British men by the toaster in the morning? Plus, the breakfast was so good, that we got by on breakfast and one meal in late afternoon for our entire stay.
Day 1 in Malta was rainy and we didn’t exactly get an early start, so we decided to visit Mdina. This city was settled by the Phoenicians in 700 AD, but the currently, the oldest buildings are from the 1000’s. It is a walled in, midevil city, on a hill. It is like stepping back in time. Of course, the moat is now an orange orchard, but I could imagine the water. We walked around the small city until we came to St. Paul’s Cathedral. Mdina, like the rest of Malta, has a lot of history dealing with the Knights of Malta. The cathedral and the museum next to it, focuses on a lot of the history. Inside the cathedral, the floor is covered with beautiful marble tombstones that belong to the knights buried underneath. It was really amazing. After the cathedral, it was raining again, so we stopped in a nice café to eat lunch and warm up. We then took in the view over the wall of Mdina and finished our loop of the city before heading out of the walls to Rabat, the village Mdina is connected to. We wanted to visit St. John’s catacombs, but we didn’t get there before it closed. For those keeping track, this is the second time I’ve missed catacombs due to closure. Sigh… Anyway, we headed back to our hotel and tried to warm up.
The next day we went on to Valletta, Malta’s capital. It also started out as a walled city, but has since expanded significantly. We started our walk around the city walls, looking out over the harbor. We took a lot of pictures. We then found the Lower Barrakka Gardens. They were really beautiful and offered a great view of the harbor and the WWII memorial bell. We finished our walk around the wall and stopped at a café for some coffee/hot chocolate before taking a tour of the theatre. The Manoel Theatre is one of the oldest operating theatres in Europe. It was built by the Knights of Malta in 1732. It has basically been operating every since, with the exception of the time it was used a cheap hotel (people could sleep in the theatre boxes) when the newer Opera House was opened (it was later destroyed in WWII, so the theatre came back into major use). 
Next, P and I went to St. John’s Co-Cathedral. Like St. Paul’s in Mdina, the floor is covered with marble tombstones of the knights, but this cathedral is much larger and the artwork and decoration is really extravagant. It is also being restored, so it looks really nice. Next, we stopped for lunch and I had some great pasta (the only pasta I ate one this trip, oddly enough) at a little restaurant near the cathedral before heading to the archeological museum. This museum is filled with incredibly old figurines and statues from pre-historic malta. Lastly, we took some pictures of Valletta at sunset before heading back to our hotel. 
(Side story: that night I went to the hotel café to get some ice cream and read my book and the waiter acted like me wanted ice cream was the oddest thing he’d ever seen. Then, at breakfast, I saw him again and he commented on my food saying, “oh, today you are eating a lot.” Excuse me? I found him to be really rude.)
On our last morning in Malta, I took a walk around St. John’s bay near our hotel. We then caught the longer-than-it-should-be bus ride to the airport, where we hung out for about 1.5 hours, perusing books in English and other duty free merchandise, before boarding our plane home.
In the morning we were in Malta. It was warm. There were palm trees. That evening we returned to Sofia. It was cold. There was a lot of snow. Oh, well, back to reality.
