ITALY
We loved Italy so much! It’s hard to write a brief summary of our travel adventures and whittle it down to our favorites! We could write volumes on every location! It was Damon’s first time in Europe and I wanted him to experience a lot but too much. So we kept our Italian travel to Rome, the Cinque Terra area, the Tuscany area, with Pisa and Florence! In the major cities, we always take the hop-on-hop-off buses the first day, just to get our bearing and see where everything is located.
In Rome, we visited the typical tourist destinations – The Coliseum, The Spanish Steps, Tivoli Fountain, the Roman Forum, the Pantheon, and the Vatican (Sistine Chapel and St. Peter’s Basilica). Did you know that you can write the Vatican and get special permission to be shown the Catacombs under the Vatican? That was an amazing tour that isn’t listed on the typical tourist maps.
Cinque Terre – is a group of five small towns along the cliffs on the west side of Italy, middle of the country. They are small, colorful, and are literally nestled into the edge of the cliffs. And you are either walking uphill or downhill. There is no flat land here! Back in the old days, boats took people back and forth between towns. Now there is a tunnel for trains that connect the four towns. No cars though.
Tuscany – our taste of heaven! We stayed in a small winery right in the middle of Tuscany, called Casa Alle Vacche. It was about an hour drive to all the Tuscan towns, so we did day trips for almost two weeks! We visited San Gimignano, Sienna, Pisa, Lucca, Volterra, Monteriggioni and of course Florence! Each village was a WOW – and Florence, big city, was so breath-taking, we had to go back for several days to see it all!