Our Month in Italy Comes to an End

Since this will likely be the last travel blog post of this exciting journey, I’ll start with the summary:

• Mathis and I are great travel buddies and love one another. He was very helpful in navigating, finding restaurants, walking to get lost, and cheering me on when I didn’t want to climb another 300 steps for a dome view. We danced in the streets to music played during dinner and poked fun at the other tourists. Oh, we knew we were ‘one of them,’ and people were surely talking about us, too. There are very, very few dark-skinned people living in Italy or touring Italy.

• We met our goal to eat and drink anything we wanted. Unfortunately, we may have over-performed in this area. Sharing a bottle of wine with dinner, two pastries for breakfast, cheese, and mortadella sandwiches or pizza for lunch, and pasta or pizza for dinner. I had the occasional fish, and Mathis was not pleased with the beef. We tried to grab some fruit when possible and totally failed in the fresh vegetable category. Our nutritional eating pyramid looked more like the ruins in the Forum.

• Oops…I forgot to mention the gelato almost every night. I missed a few nights, so I had three scoops to make up for that egregious error.

• Since we had such great tours (live or audio), we now want to go home and see some historical documentaries. Sorry, Marlon Brando, Shakespeare’s Julius Cesar is not what we mean. However, we did see the very well-done Netflix documentary called “The Roman Empire” and loved Netflix’s Medici series.

As the tour planner, here are things I learned:

• Biggest blooper: Wasting over $800 for a tour of 3 villages in Cinque Terre from Florence. Complete false advertising. It ended up being a beat-up car service to the top of the 1st village, then a pick-up at the La Spezia train station at the end of the day. We should have just taken the train. Captain Obvious: This company did not get a good review from me.

• Positive: Air travel and Airbnb rentals went smoothly.

• Positive: Investing in skip-the-line tickets is a must-do…everywhere. There are so many options online, and we booked them when we landed in each city.

• Positive: Carry on luggage! There was so much schlepping on and off trains, planes, and automobiles, not to mention rolling down cobblestone roads. Negative: I still brought too much and shipped back a box after five days. By the end, the well-used washing machines did a number on my clothes, so I left a nice stack for the cleaning lady in Rome. It was very freeing. Fewer choices, and we just don’t need that much! I’m going to go home and purge closets to donate.

• Recommendation: The best time of the day to tour are first thing in the morning or later in the evening. We toured the Vatican Museum and Sistine Chapel at sunset and had a fabulous tour of St. Peter’s Basilica and Dome climb at 7:30 in the morning. Fewer crowds, cooler, no lines…you get it.

• Recommendation: Take care of your feet! Bring two pairs of shoes that you know are comfortable for you. I bought new Sketchers a week before the trip, and they were too tight at the top, so I got blisters. Our feet expand in the heat (duh), so I bought a new pair in a Foot Locker in Florence and shipped the Sketchers home.

Mathis and I want to thank everyone who gave us recommendations, travel tips, introductions, and much more. We compiled all of your ideas and created our perfect trip of a lifetime.