Italy - Day 1. Buon Viaggio!

WARNING: These posts will have like a bajillion pictures in them. Sorry. We took 10GB worth of pictures and so I'm being serious when I say we are really narrowing it down. These will all be long, picture-heavy posts, but this blog is mostly for us to remember our amazing trip together, so you'll just have to bear with us. Maybe these long posts will make up for the fact that I haven't written anything on my blog for 5 months (seriously??).

The trip starts! This was the morning we left - Friday morning at 6:00 a.m. before I went to school for the day. We had our bags all packed and were SOOO excited to finally get to Italy.

After a long flight to Paris, then from Paris to Rome we finally made it! We found a shuttle bus to our little hotel called Hotel Oceania. The lady who sold us the shuttle bus tickets must have told us 10 times how to pronounce the word Oceania, and I'm not sure that we ever got it up to her expectations. Ha! On our way to our hotel, the shuttle bus driver was listening to none other than Michael Jackson. Seriously! We wanted to go to Italy and be completely immersed in Italian culture, but the Italians sure do like our pop culture. He loved some good old MJ. 

After we checked in to our hotel, we had to hustle to the Borghese gallery. The Borghese was a completely amazing stop. It definitely "wow"ed us. The museum is full of baroque-era paintings and sculptures, and we were mostly interested in the sculptures by Bernini. He was pretty much the father of Baroque era sculpting, and it was amazing to see his works in real life. I wish we could have taken some pictures, but they weren't allowed, so here are the best pictures I could find on the internet of some of the best pieces that we saw. 

David was my FAVORITE piece. One of my favorites of the entire trip. I just couldn't get over the fact that I was really seeing this in real life. It was incredible. This picture does not even come close to doing the statue justice. I almost didn't want to put it on here because it doesn't show at all what it looks like in real life. 

Bernini's Apollo and Daphne

Bernini's Persephone

The Borghese got me REALLY excited about all of the amazing art that was ahead of us.

 Outside the Borghese

 I loved it here!!

Dave loves to plan trips. Like seriously, loves it so much. Sometimes I think he chose the wrong career path and that he should have been a travel agent instead. He absolutely loves Rick Steves, a travel guy who has made a career out of traveling to Europe and writing guide books about what to do and where to say while in Europe. He has his own TV show about traveling in Europe and Dave has seen every single episode. Not kidding. So we went by a lot of things that Rick Steves said would be fun to do in Italy. One of his ideas was to have a romantic night stroll through Rome, finding the Spanish Steps, the Trevi Fountain, the Pantheon and Piazza Navona. I think that our night stroll would have been really romantic IF:

•  The city wasn't so hard to navigate. It seemed like every time there was an intersection, the streets changed names. Talk about frustrating.
•  There wasn't a political rally going on that evening for an election being held in Italy (there were people EVERYWHERE with signs, yelling stuff)
• There wasn't a benefit concert thing on the Spanish Steps - we couldn't even step on them. :(

It was fun to see all of the sights, but it wasn't quite the romantic stroll we were hoping for.

I was so sad about the Spanish Steps.

The Pantheon was incredible. I just couldn't get over the fact that it was built in 27 BC. BC, people!! And still standing. I think it was the oldest thing I've ever seen in my life. SOOO old. AND, it's so crazy to think that it was once a pagan temple for all of the Roman Gods, and that it was converted to a Christian temple and now there is mass held in it regularly. That's so funny to me. A lot of things were like that in Rome. There are just so many layers. Layers upon layers upon layers of history. And I got to see it all!!!

Inside the Pantheon

Raphael's tomb

This dome was amazing. It was what inspired Ghiberti to design the dome for the cathedral in Florence that helped to kick off the Renaissance. Those Romans really knew what they were doing. The big hole on the top was the only source of light for the whole building, so what if it rained? They had a plan for that, too. The floor is slightly slanted so that it would drain properly. Talk about ahead of their time! I wish we could have explored longer, but because we kept getting lost trying to find it, we got there right before it was closing so we didn't have too much time to explore.

Dave loves the book Angels & Demons and was so excited to see all of the sights along the "Path of Illumination". This was one of the sights, the 4 Rivers Fountain in Piazza Navona. The pictures are a little funny because it was so dark, but we did the best we could.

We have some cousins who come to Italy a lot and they suggested this gelato place for us. We stopped for a tasty treat, and it was the tastiest gelato we had of the whole entire trip. I got an apple cinnamon flavor and it tasted just like my favorite comfort food in the entire world - apple toast. YUM! Dave got hazlenut, pistachio, and almond. 

The Trevi fountain

 Don't mind my tired face. We were completely exhausted.

Dave throwing in his coin. Sorry for the blur.

BEAUTIFUL.

We finally made it back to our hotel after a long, exhausting day. We left on Friday afternoon, traveled through the night, landed Saturday at 2:45 Rome time and explored the rest of the evening. Needless to say we were very tired, and our beds at the Hotel Oceania were calling our names. We slept like babies that night.

Stay tuned for the adventures of day 2!