Rob & I just got home from a trip of a lifetime! My sister, Jessica, is living in Florence, so who needs a better excuse than that to go to Italy! We started our trip in Rome to see the sights before heading to Florence
The first morning in Rome we had a tour of the Vatican Museum, Sistine Chapel & St. Peter's Basilica. Here we are with our headsets on so we could hear our tour guide as we power walked through most of the museum
We saw sooooo many marble statues, busts, tapestries, paintings, painted ceilings, mosaic marble floors, even the side walks are made out of travertine. The amount of work put into the littlest details are unbelievable
Here's a picture inside St. Peter's Basillica, it is enormous!
Outside St. Peter's, all the chairs were set up for the Wednesday service by the Pope
St. Peter's square
Piazza Novona
Later that night back at Piazza Novana at the start of our night walk through Rome
The Trevi Fountain
The Spanish Steps
Emmanuel Monument, looks a lot like Ceasars Palace in Vegas : )
We had a special tour of the Colosseum, we visited the bottom & top floors
So much history
The Ruins, they are still excavating and discovering new things even today
The Pantheon
Back at the Trevi fountain because we forgot to through in a coin during our night walk
At the train station waiting for our train to Florence with too much luggage, stupid Americans : )
In Florence, it's tradition to rub the boars nose to insure that you'll come back
A hike through the Boboli Gardens, a part of Medicis summer palace (Piti Palace)
Beautiful Florence in the background
My parents were also visiting my sister, so it was a family affair
I'm pointing to our beautiful & spacious room right off the Signoria Piazza
On the Ponte Vecchio Bridge
The 2nd day in Florence the weather turned to winter with a really cold and strong wind. Behind us are the amazing brass doors on the Duomo
Brushing up on our Italian and travel books to make sure we don't miss anything
The whole family
At the Micheal Angelo Piazza at the top of the city, so cold!
Our Chianti Classico wine tour started off at this amazing terra-cotta pottery farm
The countryside in Italy is so breath taking
They have these cute street markets in all the cities we visited, so fun and great shopping
One of the castles we saw on our drive through the countryside
One of the wineries we visited
There we had the best lunch and learned all about the Chianti Classico, yum yum
Salute!
We had gelato almost every night, delizioso!
All our hotels gave us these crazy room keys with little dumb bells on them
On our way to Cinque Terre, five tiny cities on the coast of Italy all linked together in a national park. Bellissimo!
This is the city where we stayed, Vernazza
This is the last city Monterosso
These little cities were so quaint & picturesque
We took the train to the fifth city, then a boat back to Vernazza where we had to say goodbye to my parents and sister
The next day we decided to do one of the walking paths from our village to the next one and explore the villages we missed the day before. Well we heard the one to Monterosso was really hard so we went the other way : )….well we went up rock stairs for over an hour. Oh my goodness it was hard! We did so much walking on this trip already and now we were hiking through the mountains.
Can you tell how high we are and we started at sea level
Here's some pics of our rocky terrain
I tripped at one point and had a little panic attack, because at points it was just cliffs down to the ocean
Then our last day in Italy, we stopped in Pisa to check out the leaning tower then got on our plane to London
Buckingham Palace
It took us almost an hour to find the spot where we had to catch the London by Night double decker bus, it's always an adventure with us. That bus took us around to see all the major sights in London.
The London Tower Bridge
Big Ben & the House of Parliment
Overall we saw everything we wanted to see and more. We ate amazing food, met lots of fun people, toured, walked a lot, shopped, and had the best time! We were sad to say goodbye to Italy, but so ready to see our little guy! Arrivederci Italy we hope to return one day soon!
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