I didn't want to leave Florence. It was my favorite city by far. There were so many amazing pieces of art to see, it was sunny, we loved our place, and had just had such a positive time there. I was way bummed to leave, but excited to see the Cinque Terre. We had just heard how beautiful it was, and were excited to go explore. We had heard that it was rainy, but that hadn't stopped us yet, right??
Here is our room at Marcella's. We had a nice bed and you can see our little dining room area. The place was huge!!
These are a collection of Christmas cards from Rick Steves sent to Marcella. Dave was in 7th heaven.
Isn't she the cutest lady you've ever ever seen?? We already miss her.
Farewell to Casa Rabatti
We decided to wake up early this morning and go see the Duomo one more time since it was my very, very, very favorite building. It was seriously so pretty, and I wanted to see it one more time before we left.
Here's a video of the dome since you didn't see it on film yesterday.
Before we caught our train to the Cinque Terre, we went to see the Medici Chapels. This is where the Medici family was buried, and they had some really neat artifacts from the Medici family. Our favorite artifacts were hats, gloves, and hymn books. It was crazy to see their clothes still intact - they were over 600 years old. That's old, people! The chapels were definitely cooler than we expected (like everything else in Florence) and we were super glad that we made time to go. The best part about these chapels though was seeing the tombs of the Medici family that were carved by Michelangelo. Of course, no pictures, so here's some pictures courtesy of the internet of the beautiful chapels.
Michelangelo grew up in Florence, basically in the care of the Medici's, so it's only fitting that he carve their burial tombs. He was more than happy to do so.
Michelangelo clearly favored the male body more than the body of a woman. You can tell because of these statues above. They represent night and day, or the natural progression of a person's life - from the daytime of their lives to the nighttime of their lives. Cool symbolism, but check out night's legs and arms. I've certainly never met a woman with muscles like that, and if I did, I'd probably run for my life. :) Another piece of cool symbolism is that he purposely put the figures of night and day at both ends of the tomb to look like they are weighing it down and it's about to burst from the middle, ready for the day when the grave will yield the bodies of the Medici family. Michelangelo was a one cool dude.
After seeing the chapels, it was time to catch our train to the Cinque Terre. I sadly watched Florence disappear through the window of the train, and was hopeful that it wouldn't be too cold in the Cinque Terre. We listened to some of Rick Steves audio guides about Europe on the train and I would have gotten a lot more out of them if there weren't two LOVEBIRDS sitting across from us on the train. They couldn't keep their hands off of each other, and were loving and kissing each other the ENTIRE train ride. Bleck. We were happy to get off the train.
It took us three trains to get to the Cinque Terre (it's kind of remote), but when we finally pulled into it, neither of us really knew what to say. It. was. beautiful. Stunning. Amazing. And, unfortunately, cold. The Cinque Terre (or 5 cities) is made up of, you guessed it, five cities. They are on the coast, and they are absolutely beautiful. We stayed in Manarola, supposedly the most picturesque one. After exploring for two days, we definitely thought Manarola was the prettiest. We still had our bags, so we wanted to go drop them off at our place and then explore the town a little.
When we got to our place (Casa Capellini, another little room in someone's house), the people who owned it (cute, but not as cute as Marcella) told us that there was a problem with our room. Not quite the words we wanted to hear. I was starting to worry a little bit, but then they told us that we had "La Buona Fortuna" or good fortune. Since there was a problem with the room that we paid for, they upgraded us to the top level room, with a kitchen and a balcony FOR THE SAME PRICE. Awesome, huh?? That was some needed good news for us. The place was beautiful, and the view from our little balcony was to die for.
It was really raining a lot, and we didn't want to get our camera really wet, so we didn't take too many pictures today. We heard that tomorrow it wasn't supposed to rain as bad, so we told ourselves we would get pictures tomorrow and just soak it in today. We explored just the town of Manarola for awhile. We wandered into a little souvenir shop and started chatting with the man who owned it. I wanted to buy a darling little bag from him that looked perfect for carrying little kids' books in (the teacher in me was coming out). We found out that his wife and his 6 year old son made the bags together. His son would think of designs that he thought were fun, and his wife would cut the shapes out of felt and sew them on. He said that they loved making them together, and would be really excited that I was buying one from him. If I wasn't already going to buy it, I definitely would have after he told me that. I'm a sucker for 6 year olds. :)
The town isn't big at all, so we pretty much explored all of it, and then found a place for dinner. We had heard that the Pesto here was to die for, and so of course we had to try it.
See the boats in the background? They were just parked all over the streets.
I ordered Pesto lasagna, and Dave ordered Trofie pasta with pesto. It was pretty good, but mine was LOADED with Pesto, and I think I got a little too much of it for my first try. I think I would have really enjoyed it if it was a smaller portion.
Dave, on the other hand, loved it even though I kept telling him it looked like he was eating worms. :)
After dinner, the rain really started to pick up and it was raining - hard. We hurried to buy some groceries so we could eat breakfast tomorrow morning (thanks to our fancy kitchen!) and headed back to our cozy little place. We were in pretty early, but we just couldn't do anything out there. It was getting dark and it was SOO rainy. We pretty much had no choice but to stay in and hunker down, which we were fine doing since we had such a nice place to stay in with such a pretty view. We ended up watching some movies on Dave's iPod (Italian Job - very fitting - and Remember the Titans), and getting to bed kind of early so we could hit the ground running tomorrow morning - we had towns to explore after all!
Stay tuned for some awesome pictures of the beautiful Cinque Terre!
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