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This is a view of the Florence Cathedral’s dome as seen from the top of Giotto’s Campanile (a.k.a., Giotto’s Bell Tower), overlooking the beautiful city of Florence and out toward the hills beyond. Somewhere in those hills stands the villa in which I lived for two weeks during the fall of 2011.
You can view more featured photos at my Photo of the Day Collection.
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Lucca is a charming Tuscan city still surrounded by medieval walls and featuring several towers that you can climb to get a bird’s-eye view. This photo was taken from the top of one of those towers.
You can view more featured photos at my Photo of the Day Collection.
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This was taken during my 2011 Eurotrip after my long climb to the top of Giotto’s Campanile (a.k.a., Giotto’s Bell Tower) in Florence, Italy. Once at the top, you are rewarded with a splendid 360-degree view of this historic city, so it’s well worth the climb.
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Italy is such a beautiful country, and Tuscany in particular. This was my daily view from the front yard of the villa I called home for two weeks outside Florence in 2011.
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I’m going to try sharing these photos of the day more often to keep my blog active on days I’m not writing.
This was taken on the grounds of a villa in the hills of Tuscany outside Florence in 2011. It was my second day in Italy and, still out of whack from not sleeping on the flight, I awoke before dawn, which is an extreme rarity for me (I’m frequently just going to bed before dawn). Determined not to let this fortuitous turn of events go to waste, I headed outside on a chilly fall morning to catch the sunrise.
The quality of this photo is not the best since it was taken with a point-and-shoot camera, but I like the imagery of peering over the potted plant at the Tuscan countryside under the early morning sky.
This installment covers Days 14–15 of my 2011 trip to Europe…
At the end of our two-night, ill-fated Cinque Terre stay, we checked out of our hotel early to catch the bus that would take us into La Spezia for the train ride back to Florence. The bus was very late and for a while we thought we had missed it or were in the wrong location. Finally it came and we hopped aboard for a long ride into the city. After arriving we walked down to the harbor in the hope that we might be able to take a boat ride so I could get a closer look at the four Cinque Terre villages that I hadn’t been able to visit, but everything was either grounded or tied up in rescue operations. So we headed to a café for breakfast to kill time until our train left.
On the way back to Florence our train had a stopover in Pisa, so I decided to go see the Leaning Tower. Uncle Kipp had already seen it, so he stayed behind at the train station. It wasn’t a long layover so I had to hustle down to the Piazza dei Miracoli (where the tower is located), which was roughly a 30-minute walk across the River Arno.
I made it to the square and had just enough time to walk around the grounds, but unfortunately not enough time to tour any of the buildings or climb the tower, so I had to settle for taking some photos.
The hardest part about shooting the tower is resisting the urge to tilt the camera and straighten the tower out.
Rather than share the clichéd photo of myself holding up the tower, I thought I’d share a photo of other people doing their holding-up-the-tower poses:
After taking my photos I rushed back to the train station and we caught the train back to Florence. Before heading back to the villa we did some grocery shopping so I could make dinner the following afternoon. I bought supplies to make pasta with pancetta and braciole. We also picked up more of that awesome Italian prosciutto to snack on that evening–if prosciutto tasted like this in the States I’d buy it all the time.
So we hopped on the bus to take us back up into the hills and to our villa. Unfortunately, we had caught the wrong one—it only went about halfway up and then came back down again to pick up more passengers and then make the drive all the way up the hill, so we wound up riding it twice before finally making it back to the villa.
When we entered the house we discovered that everyone else in our group had already left, so we would be spending the next two nights in the sprawling villa all by ourselves. Walking the long halls and stairways of the 100-year-old building at night with nobody else around was decidedly spooky.
It didn’t help that a waitress at the local restaurant told us that the villa was supposedly haunted, or that we had just recently been discussing The Shining. In fact, one night while I was sleeping I thought I heard footsteps around my bed. I’m sure I was just dreaming, but it still creeped me out. 🙂
Here are a few of the interior shots I took to try and capture a bit of that creepiness:
The next day, I decided to stay behind at the villa while Uncle Kipp went into Florence. I needed a day to relax after everything we had crammed into the last two weeks. It was an absolutely gorgeous day, as if we were in the middle of the summer rather than the end of October. I walked around the outside of the villa and took some more pictures of the grounds and the beautiful countryside.
That evening I started to make dinner, only to discover that there was no more garlic in the house. We didn’t think to buy any because there had been a lot left the last time we checked. Oh well, I forged ahead, though the lack of garlic made for some pretty bland braciole.
Uncle Kipp returned from his day out, during which he also took care of paying the final bill. To our shock, we got slapped with a heating bill of 800 Euros! The nights were cold and it was a huge building with lots of people requiring different levels of heat to stay comfortable, but we were still stunned. It didn’t help that there was a broken window in one of the rooms that we had to force closed with a rock that the landlords never fixed during our two-week stay. They also failed us in other ways (including shutting off the heat and hot water on our last night) but I don’t want this post to turn into a laundry list of complaints. Suffice it to say that they received a lengthy letter after we returned home.
That night I walked around outside taking some more photos. Here is one of Florence.
I watched some TV before heading to bed. The Cinque Terre disaster dominated the news channels. The only English-language channel was showing Jersey Shore. Ugh, I hope that’s not how the rest of the world thinks the average American behaves. 😐
The next morning we awoke early so we could close up the villa and head to the bus for our long journey to Switzerland and the beginning of the second half of our trip, which will be covered in the next installment. In the meantime…
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This video is a tour of the grounds surrounding the villa I lived in for two weeks outside of Florence, Italy in 2011. You may have already seen this if you read Part 1 of my Eurotrip journal, though the video is now much smoother thanks to youtube’s smoothing software (with the minor side effect of wacky looking text at the beginning).
The villa was over 100 years old and full of character. The view of the Tuscan countryside from the gazebo was sublime: the hills, the olive groves, the other villas; very peaceful. And on the other end of the grounds I could see Florence in the valley below—an amazing view at night. It’s not difficult to understand why someone would decide to drop everything and move to Tuscany; it’s such an easy place to fall in love with.
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I thought I’d kick off the new Videos section of this blog with the very first video I made from one of my trips. This video covers most of my month in Europe in 2011, including visits to Italy, Switzerland, and Croatia.
This video is nearly 18 minutes long, so I’ll understand if you don’t want to sit through the whole thing :-), but it is accompanied by a couple of pleasant pieces from Holst’s The Planets.
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This installment of my travel journal covers Days 2–4 of my 2011 trip to Europe…
Picking up where we left off in Part 1, we finally arrived at our villa in the hills of Tuscany, which would serve as our base of operations for the next two weeks. There were 15-20 people sharing the sprawling villa, though we would separate into smaller groups for our excursions around Italy. Most of the rooms had already been claimed but I was able to secure a nice room on the far end of the villa with decent view.
That night we all walked up to the only restaurant in the area for dinner, which also served as a meet and greet session since I had not previously met most of my villa mates. They were all very nice; it was a good group. Dinner was delicious, a spicy bacon pasta dish. I also had my first taste of Italian prosciutto that night, and it was amazing, nothing like the overly salty prosciutto we have in America. I ate a ton of it during our two weeks in Italy.
I left the restaurant early by myself to go to bed since I had been awake for a good 28 hours by this point. It was cold and windy during the walk back to the villa and I began to wonder if I had made a mistake by not packing a heavier jacket, but those worries would prove unfounded as the majority of the weather we experienced during the trip was beautiful, even into November. I got back to the villa grounds, which was surrounded by a wall with a gate that could only be opened by an electronic key. I had a key, but could not figure out where to use it because it was pitch black, so I wound up having to press the call button to the caretakers, an old couple who spoke no English. After a few minutes of back and forth talking and not understanding each other, they finally let me in and I went upstairs and collapsed in my bed.
I woke up the next morning at 3:45am and couldn’t get back to sleep, so I decided to catch a Tuscan sunrise.
Later that morning we took a small, rickety bus down the hill into Florence, where we spent the entire day visiting the historic center and the area along the Arno river. The highlight of the day was our long climb to the top of Giottio’s Tower, affording us views like this:
After the tower we walked along the Arno river, had lunch, and crossed the famous Ponte Vecchio, a medieval bridge with shops built along it.
After that we did some grocery shopping and headed back home for a dinner cooked by one of our villa mates. The next day we hopped on a train (the first of many during our stay) for Lucca, a walled, medieval city.
It took us a while to find the historic center, but we eventually did, and climbed a tower for some amazing views.
We visited a few cathedrals, including one where I gave money to a man who I thought was collecting for entry to the church only to realize later that he was just a beggar. Oh well, you live and learn. For dinner we made our way to the circular main plaza at the center of the city where I had a tasty lasagna dish, topping it off with a stop for gelato (we rarely went a day without getting gelato from somewhere).
That evening we returned to Florence too late to catch the bus so we had to take a cab (the last bus for the hills leaves around 6pm, so if you want to stay out later, you’re screwed). Once again, our driver had no idea how to get to our villa and got lost, so my uncle showed him a picture of the bus stop closest to our villa on his camera, which did the trick. Unfortunately, the driver forgot to return the camera and my uncle was unable to retrieve it from the cab company after numerous calls. Fortunately, he had his iPad to tide him over for taking pictures until he could purchase a new camera.
We eventually made it back to the villa and, after some socializing, I began packing for our three-day trip to Rome, which will be covered in Part 3. In the meantime, you can follow the links below for more pictures from this part of my trip.
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I’ve finally gotten around to writing up the journal of the month-long trip I took with my uncle last fall to Italy, Switzerland, and Croatia. I had intended to keep a journal while I was over there but it didn’t work out, so the following story is based on what I can remember nearly eight months later. This is one case where facebook’s timeline has actually proved useful in allowing me to go back and see what I posted during that time period. I’m going to release the journal in installments so as not to overwhelm you with a month’s worth of info in a single post. Here is Part 1…
Our adventure began on October 14th when we were picked up at my house by the shuttle service that shall not be named (why they remain nameless shall soon become apparent). On our way to the airport we stopped at a hotel to pick up another passenger, and wound up waiting around twenty minutes because he was late. Finally, he showed up and we were on our way. Upon exiting the turnpike we had to wait in a long toll line because the shuttle did not have E-ZPass (you would think an airport shuttle service that uses the turnpike seven days a week and whose business is to get people to their destinations on time would invest in E-ZPass, but that was the least of their faults).
We eventually made it to Newark Airport, where we had to transfer to another shuttle (run by the same nameless company) to take us to JFK, and this is where the fun really began. They overbooked our transfer shuttle and we almost got kicked off and told to wait for the next shuttle, which would likely have caused us to miss our flight. When we tried to discuss this with the driver he very rudely brushed us off—well, let’s be blunt, he yelled at us. Ultimately, we were allowed to stay on the shuttle (another couple got kicked off) and began the long rush-hour drive to JFK. The driver had the heat in the shuttle turned up so high that everyone was dying, especially the people sitting behind us with no windows. I finally asked him to turn it down, which he reluctantly did (previously, he had actually turned the heat even higher after we had turned it down while he was out of the car).
Finally, we arrived at JFK, leaving the driver (and Voldemort Shuttles, Inc.) behind, though we would have to deal with them again upon our return. After boarding the plane, we sat on the tarmac for two hours before finally taking off, causing us to miss our connecting flight in Paris. At this point, between the shuttle debacle, the heavy traffic getting there, and the flight delay, I had already made up my mind that I would never fly out of JFK again (though my bad experience with that airport had only just begun—more on that later). Anyway, lest this journal seem like a total bitch-fest, I think it’s time we moved on. 🙂
During the long overseas flight I managed to fit in three movies: The Hangover 2 (meh), Bridesmaids (very funny), and Cedar Rapids (just okay). I had a comfortable aisle seat with extra leg room, which was nice. When we landed in Paris, we frantically ran to try and catch our flight, but as feared, we missed it. We eventually secured a later flight and were on our way to Florence. I had a window seat for this flight, and the scenery while flying over the mountains in Italy was gorgeous.
After landing in Florence we got a taxi and gave the driver the name of the villa. She proceeded to drive us all over the city, winding up at the wrong place (with the same name as our villa). She had no idea where our villa was located (this would turn out to be a recurring theme among cabbies in Florence). After some back and forth on the phone, she eventually took us to the office that managed our property, and from there the property manager drove us to our villa, located in the hills of the Tuscan countryside outside of Florence.
The long ride into the hills was a neat experience: a narrow, winding road surrounded by olive trees, often just wide enough for a single car to pass. When we would encounter another car driving toward us at one of these narrow passes, one of the cars would have to back up until it found a place where it could get over to let the other car pass. Our driver frequently beeped her horn as she approached curves to signal any potential oncoming vehicles. On our way up the hill we occasionally passed through small villages that reminded me of the Sicily scenes from The Godfather.
Even this part of the trip, however, was not without its little side adventure. Some of our villa mates, who we had met up with at the office, were following our car, but the property manager was driving so fast that she lost them at a fork in the road. We pulled over and waited for them, but they never came, so we assumed they took the wrong turn. The manager turned the car around in an effort to catch up with them, driving through the hills on these narrow roads like a bat out of hell. It was a little scary, I must confess. We drove for a long, long time before the manager finally gave up, turning the car back around and taking us to the villa.
At last, after a long, two-day ordeal, we had arrived at our destination: The Villa Belvedere.
This seems like a good stopping point, so I’ll close this first journal installment with a video of the villa and the beautiful surrounding grounds. Stay tuned for part two, which will cover our first night at the villa and our trip into Florence the following day.
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Michael Rappa 