Italy - Awesome and Lame

We took a trip to Italy taking advantage of the cheap European airfares and met up with our good friends the Stanley's. We flew to Milan and then took a train to Verona where we met with our friends. One day in Verona, 3 days in Venice, high speed train to Rome for a 3 day stay and then we rented a big house in a tiny mountainside village near Salerno and the Amalfi coast.  I took 700 photos so when we see you next, we can sit down for 6 hours of pictures and mildly amusing anecdotes. You can look forward to that.

Here is a good/bad summary of the trip with some photos.

Moving about:

• Awesome - how about 300 km/hr in a high speed train crossing Italy on a track that is 74 km of tunnel in a total trip of 78 km!

• Lame - spending all of our last day in a 200 km traffic jam from Naples to Rome. It took all day to get the distance of Edm to Calgary. Do not rent a car in Italy; use trains, ferries or pack mules.

Food:

• Awesome - there were so many good meals and a lot of them we prepared ourselves fresh from the market. But the best was a little place in Acropoli where the 9 of us were at one big table on Easter Monday and the owner's friends and family were at the other.  There was no menu, they just brought us whatever they were eating. The courses ran like this: bruschetta, egg&cheese cake, pasta with artichokes, pizza, sausages & homemade fries followed by an Easter cake. Follow that with a shot of frozen lemon schnapps. 

• Lame - seriously, the food is sooo good in Italy but how about some fibre? Talk about traffic jams! 

Wine:

• Awesome - Every restaurant has a house wine but almost never a wine list. You just ask for red or white. Usually, it was very good. Wine purchased at our local village's grocery store cost anywhere from 1 to 3 Euro's. 
• Lame - one of the 1 Euro wine bottles was really bad. No problem - we had more.

Tourist spots:

• Awesome - Most of us agreed that Pompei was the most interesting of the tourist sites. All the other old Roman stuff had been pilfered for building material in later centuries, but Pompei was preserved beneath the ash. The coolest thing to me was the wagon ruts in the stone roadways. Venice is pretty damn cool too.

• Lame - Hey how about some garbage cans, a toilet and maybe some people dressed in period costume? That is very common everywhere else  - In Denmark they even do Viking battles with the kids as soldiers. There was a brothel in Pompei that would lend itself well to this idea.

Buona Visione:

• Awesome - some of the viewpoints from the hike down the mountain were very awesome (see Amalfi coast blog) but we accidentally stumbled upon a great view overlooking the whole city and the Vatican. 

• Awesome - Venice from the tower at St. Mark's Square

• Lame - the walk from the Metro to our apartment in Rome.

From the very heart of the Rome airport we took a wrong exit from a circle intersection and ended up having to drive about 35 km of freeway through two toll booths to get back in a panic before our flight. We arrived back in Copenhagen to sunny spring skies, no garbage, sane drivers, birds singing everywhere and our own dent-free car waiting at the train station brought by our great neighbors. It's good to be back!!