All Roads Lead to Rome

So we're in Italy at last! It's the home of pizza, pasta, and loud angry people. :P

Firenze was our first stop in Italy. (That's the actual name of the city - we've just anglicized the name into Florence. I'm going to try to call cities by their proper names from now on.

We stayed in a decent hostel near the river that runs through the center of town. It turns out that there's not a ton to see in Firenze unless you're an art lover, but we made do.

We decide to take a side trip to Pisa our first day. The train trip was only a few Euros, but we had an expensive day anyways. The main attraction of Pisa was, of course, the famous Leaning Tower. There wasn't much else interesting about the town; in fact, the tower itself would be pretty unremarkable if not for the fact that it /looks like it's about to fall over/.

We took the obligatory touristy pictures of us holding the tower up, then bought tickets to climb up to the top. They cost 15€ each. What a tipoff! But we had to do it just to say we did.

Climbing the tower was an experience in itself. You couldn't see outside while climbing, so the only way to tell how slanted you were was how hard climbing felt. On two sides of the tower, the stairs were normal. On one side, it felt more like walking across flat ground. On the last side, my legs burned as if on a steep slope. But the stairs looked the same to us on every side. Very bizarre. (Yes, I know the tower is cylindrical and therefore has no sides; I'm simply referring to each of four quadrants as sides for ease of language.)

You could get out and walk around on the 4th, 6th, and 7th levels of the tower. The 6th was the one with the bells, and the 7th was the top floor. Awesome view across Pisa, by the way.

We had real Italian pizza that afternoon. After looking at some of the weird choices on the menu (one of them being raw ham), we decided to just get a regular ham pizza. It was fantastic. The tomato sauce we use at home is way too sweet, in retrospect.

I had a frazzling encounter with a loud, angry Italian that night. He shouted at me in Italian for moving his laundry out of the dryer.

We had only booked two nights for Firenze and so we had to check out the following morning. But we left our packs at the hostel and explored Firenze for most of that day. The two biggest sights in Firenze are the Statue of David (which we skipped, since we refuse to pay to see art for the most part) and the Duomo, a huge cathedral.

This next part will take a bit of explaining. I had a need to see the Duomo because of a specific dome on top of it. My summer reading book for Freshman year history was called Brunelleschi's Dome, and it was horrid. It was 200 pages explaining in a very dry manner the challenges that this guy Filippo Brunelleschi faced in constructing this dome. Great, the dude transported his materials by river, I had thought. When will I ever need to know that?

Long story short, it was almost painful for me to finish reading the book. Everyone I knew agreed it was the worst book they had ever read. And so when I remembered that Brunelleschi's Dome was in a city I was visiting on my Eurotrip, I decided I had to see what the big fuss was about this dome.

We did see the Cupola di Brunelleschi. Although not mind-blowing, it was a truly impressive work of architecture, and having read the book, I could appreciate the difficulties involved in building it. I guess sometimes, things pay off in unexpected ways!

I went inside the Duomo itself. David stayed behind since he was wearing shorts. It was a very impressive building, and the fresco on the underside of the dome was beautiful. I lit a lumini for my family back home in the middle of the cathedral.

That was it for Firenze, really. We explored a bit more and had some delicious fresh waffles with gelato on top, but after that we headed off to the train station.

They say all roads lead to Rome. Ours did, at least! After a frazzling encounter with a loud, angry Italian (deja vu), we hopped on a metro and headed out to our hostel. It was the cheapest we could find, and more importantly the only one that had space, so it was far from the center. This meant that we had a particularly stressful time finding the place, even for our standards. But we found it and settled in to a reasonably sketchy hostel.

Breakfast was minimal - cereal and prepackaged croissants. We only paid 12€ each per night though so I'm surprised we got free breakfast at all. This is undoubtably the cheapest hostel we've stayed in.
We went into Rome in the morning to see some of the sights. Or to do as the Romans do. Whatever. We spent a good half hour looking for a nonexistent cyber cafe before we gave up and saw the Trevi Fountain instead - which was very impressive, by the way. After that, we decided to try to do something we had both wanted to for the whole trip: rent segways.

Segways are those cool auto-balancing two-wheeled contraptions you see tour groups on. We didn't want to take a tour, though - both of us have developed somewhat of a dislike for tour groups since they clog up the attractions and give tourists a bad name.

We finally found a cheap place in Roma that would rent us segways and took off. Narrowly dodging passersby, we made our way to the Parthenon. Riding a Segway was very odd. You control it by leaning - leaning to one side makes it spin in a circle, or turn if you're moving. Leaning forward makes you accelerate. And leaning backward brakes. The weird part is that the Segway is computer-balanced. So when you lean forwards, it accelerates, but also tilts your feet backwards to compensate. It feels like you're going to fall off when in reality you're perfectly balanced.

My Segway was even better when I discovered that there was a button on the control that looked like a turtle. It was active, so I pressed it to see what would happen if I deactivated "turtle mode". My Segway's top speed immediately went from 8mph....to 14. XD it was awesome. David's Segway refused to deactivate turtle so I rode in circles around him.

We saw the Spanish Steps later that day. Unfortunately, we don't know exactly what they look like, since there were multiple flights of steps in the general area. But we know we saw them at one point or another.

Dinner was from an extremely cheap grocery store we found. We got a big dinner and some things for the next day for around €7.20.

There was a surprise waiting for us back at our hostel - we found that someone had stolen our rechargeable batteries and the charger. It's a huge inconvenience for us because of the SPOT, but they weren't worth very much.

Today we intended to go into Rome and see the Vatican. I'm not Catholic and David's an atheist, so neither of us was interested in the religious significance of the city. We just wanted to see the famous sites, like the Sistine Chapel. After learning that we would have to wait in a two-hour line and pay 20€ to get in, though, we decided to just see the outside of the Basilica and move on.

We saw a castle today as well, but didn't do all that much else interesting. Our tickets for the Colosseum are reserved for tomorrow though - we'll be some of the first people to see the dungeons in decades. Tomorrow is the opening day. We'll also be heading out on a train to Venezia in the evening.

Overall, Rome hasn't lived up to expectations. The transport system is not too great and it's a fairly dirty city. I'm certainly looking forward to the Colosseum tomorrow though :D

< Derek >