I just found this post in my drafts folder -- it's from our trip to Italy last year, for my cousin's wedding. I'm pretty sure I meant to go back to it after this post, but for whatever reason never got round to it.
in front of ponte vecchio in Firenze
After my cousin's wedding, Matthew and I rented a car to zoom around in. We pointed at the map and drove; we got lost A LOT.
As holidays go, it was not relaxing. We slept in the car two nights, one of which I spent trying to work out the correct Italian for 'I'm sorry, officer; we are parked on the side of the road because my boyfriend needed to sleep'. It was that night we found ourselves on a toll road without knowing how or why, got yelled at by several irate Italian drivers, drove around for two hours looking for a campsite (that turned out to be less than 15 minutes from where we ended up), and finally at 2 a.m. decided to park on the side of the road to get some rest... only for a group of revellers to ring in that lofty hour with a 25-minute firework display. If you're curious as to where we were, I refer to you the Vatican and it's Greater City Area.
outside the Duomo in Firenze
My camera threatened to die out on day three of our stay, so I only have scant pictures of our visits to Florence, The Greater Vatican City Area and Sienna, and none of Carla, who met us with her husband for pizza on the wettest of wet nights, and is all caps AWESOME, or the campsite we slept next to because it was closed for the season, or the endless mountain roads heading to Bagne di Lucca, which turned out to be the only British settlement within 300 miles,
Matthew rubbing the boar's nose for luck in Firenze
sock in progress at the fountain in St Peter's Square
However, it was an adventure and a glorious one at that. We, my dearheart and I, spent a whole week wandering aimlessly, teaching ourselves Italian from a book my grandmother gave me, eating our weight in pizza, marvelling at the landscape, the architecture, the strange timewarp that seems to shroud the country.
the Duomo in Sienna
Though we've sworn never, on the sanctity of our relationship, to be so stupid as to rent a car and drive without any other plan than that, with no accomodation booked or campsites properly investigated, looking at these pictures reminds me just how much fun it really was. Matthew may think me insane, but I think it was my favourite holiday, if only because whenever the language barrier or the closed campsites or the endless mountain roads with only snouty Anglos at the end of them got too much, we were in the land of gelati.
nuff said
Aww! Your pictures remind me how much I love Italy. I haven't been there in seven years. Really must remedy that. :}
Posted by: Camille | October 20, 2009 at 03:37 AM