Not Before Time

We spent a full day in Venice and  it’s such a beautiful city with its canals, bridges and of course the gondolas, very different to anywhere else we had seen.  This is also where the crowds were –  probably the most we had seen anywhere in Italy,  but it still wasn’t overly crowded and it was easy to move around.  There are some really nice restaurants in Venice, but it’s very expensive compared to other areas in Italy.  For example, just about everywhere in Italy you can buy an espresso coffee for roughly 85 cents to 1 Euro – in Venice it averaged 4 Euro’s!  That’s probably why we didn’t see any Italians eating there – only tourists!

After leaving Venice we drove for another couple of hours before stopping for the night.  And just in time too  – 5 minutes later a huge storm swept in which lasted all night. 

After Rome it was further south to Naples and Pompei..  Pompei is amazing and it would be easy to spend the whole day there.  We only had a couple of hours, but it was well worth visiting.  While a very large part of the site has been  uncovered, the archeologists will be working for years to uncover the rest of it.

After Pompei we headed over to the Adriatic coast where we spent 2 days in Pescara and another 2 days 30km south of Venice in a lovely old town called Chiogga.  Here we spent time at the beach, catching up with washing, walking around the old towns and just relaxing. 

We arrived in Rome just after lunch.  We booked into a bungalow in a tourist park for 3 nights which had easy access by train to the city.  It was really hot so we decided the pool and something to eat would be the  way to go.  When we got to the pool, there was a Contiki tour group there , with the majority of them being Australian and New Zealanders!  There was also an Australian behind the bar and he was making hamburgers – the closest thing to an Aussie burger (no beetroot!) you would ever get in Italy. It was really good too.

The next 2 days we spent visiting all the major tourist sites in Rome, such as the colliseum, the trevi fountain, the Spanish steps, the Vatican and the Sistine Chapel, St Peters etc. We’ve had such a good time.  Rome was actually a lot quieter than we expected.  We thought there would be huge crowds and long lines into the various sites, but the only line we had to queue up for was the Vatican, and that only took 15 minutes to get into.  We were both really pleased about the lack of crowds, as the temperature in Rome was 47 deg C!  At least it cooled down at night so you could sleep. 

After finishing our cooking school, we spent a couple days in Assisi (where St. Francis was born and buried) and then a day in Siena.  The day before we started our cooking class, the Palio, Tuscany’s big horse race, was run in the piazza in Siena.  We actually saw some of it on TV and it looked quite spectacular.  Teams wear medieaval costume and compete furiously for the honour of winning this race.  Both of these little cities are beautiful and we had time to relax, catch up with washing etc. before tackling Rome.

We have finished our cooking school in Tuscany which was great, mainly due to the people we met and the ladies teaching how to cook Italian style.  It was a really funny week.

 The majority of the group (everyone except us!) were from the US, and they were a terrific bunch of people.  They were from quite a few areas in America – New York (New Jersey area); Houston,Texas; Los Angeles; Idaho and Vegas, Nevada.  There were only 3 guys in the group, and 11 women.  All of us clicked on the first day (which went through until 2:30am the following morning), and we became closer friends as the week progressed.  In the classes we learned how to make pasta, soups, sauces, and desserts, all in the tuscany style.  None of the ladies teaching us could speak English, but we had a translator (thanks Christina!) and even when Christina wasn’t there, we somehow managed to get everything worked out ok.  (We will be doing a review of Tuscan Women Cook at a later date).  Outside of classes we all got together and had more fun (helped along with lots of alcohol) most nights until the early hours of the following day!  We have lots of photo’s but since we are still having problems with the laptop they will have to wait for loading.

We stayed at a great hotel called La Costa (Hi Paolo and Paola) which is in Montefolonico, a medieaval hill town which is, here I go again! – absolutely stunning.  It’s a very small town with only 2 smallish hotels, and all the locals are very friendly.

All in all, it was a great week.  Now, off to Rome!