Big Adventures, Little World

Another early start, this time to head into the city of Florence once again for a walking tour with a local guide. He took us around and we saw some pretty cool sights and some amazing statues, including the statue of David, which they have a few replicas throughout the city. Florence is a really beautiful place and we could have spent so much longer there. We headed off to a leather demonstration where we found out how leather was made and how to tell genuine leather products from the fakes. It was quite interesting and also amazing at how much work was put in to making some of the objects they had. We had the chance to buy some of the goods, but they were so expensive and I couldn’t really afford too, and didn’t really need anything either.

We had a couple of hours to ourselves in the city before we had to head back to camp and get on the bus for Rome, so a group of us went off to get some pizza at a little restaurant not far from the leather demonstration. The pizza there was amazing, nothing like the pizza back in Australia. The pizzas are so much more basic, yet for some reason they are at least 10 times more delicious. I love the pizza in Italy and only wish it was the same when I get back home.

We arrived in Rome later that afternoon to 43 degree heat and had a 3 and a half hour walking tour with Hottie through the amazing city. Rome is a city full of so much history and it was so hard to take it all in, but with such historical and beautiful sights I think we all forgot about the heat (as much as we could) and just admired the city. The other thing that helped forget the heat was all the fountains throughout the city, connected by an aqueduct beneath the ground which all supplied clear, clean drinking water constantly, but the best part about it was that it was always cold.

We visited some incredible sites, including the Trevi Fountain which ridiculously huge for a fountain and where we stopped to throw some coins over our shoulders, the first for a safe return to Rome one day, the second for us to make a wish, and the third to ensure you would get married, or if you were already married, then you would get divorced. We filled our bottles with the water, which was supposedly ‘virgin  water’ which when drunk is supposed to make you a virgin again. Then there was the gigantic monument to Victor Emanuel II which was so ridiculously big that the statue of him on his horse atop the monument could apparently have a bus driven under the horse’s legs! We also went for a short visit to the Pantheon, which when standing inside of it and looking up through the hole in the middle of the roof is just mind blowing. How they could have constructed these building really is a mystery to me, even with the story of the dome from the Pantheon being so big that the made it over a giant pile of dirt. While filling it with dirt they buried gold coins all throughout of it, and when it had been completed they said to all the poor people that there was gold coins all throughout the dirt and whatever they find is theirs, so the poor people of Rome began to dig out all of the dirt from the Pantheon for them.

Halfway through the tour we stopped for a break and a bit of food, pizza again, this time from a small little storefront that Hottie loved going to. After eating some we knew why. The pizza was so delicious, by far the best pizza I had ever had.

We continued our walking tour, and after watching ‘Angels and Demons’ on the way to Rome, we came across a lot of the sites used in the movie (or sets based on the sites). That was pretty cool to see some of that, but still took nothing away from the real history and architecture of the buildings and fountains. We made our way through the city before getting a view of the Roman Forums, which are still being excavated today and new discoveries are being made from thousands of years ago, and then onto The Colosseum which is just astounding to be standing in front of and just admiring it. While we didn’t go inside, we still had a whole day in Rome to explore on our own to come back and visit anything we wanted.