You can’t go to Venice without taking a ride in a Gondola! But they’ll make you pay out your nose for it. My photos from the little boat trip are now up in the gallery.

Gondolas have been an important part of Venetian transportation for hundreds of years. One of my favorite parts of our stay in the city was watching the Gondoliers ply their trade. The city may have felt like a giant theme park, but the gondoliers were real. Definitely authentic.

Venetian gondoliers are required by an old law to be born in Venice, and they pass down the trade from father to son. The boats are all required to be painted black, and most are elaborately decorated in an extremely sumptuous manor. The boats are asymmetrical – they curve to the right to counter the constant rowing off the right side of the boat.

The stroke mainly used is called Sculling, but not in the usual sense of rowing teams. The gondolier faces forward and moves the long oar in figure-8s behind the boat in order to provide propulsion forward. They can also use little swirls to move the boat completely sideways, backwards, and around sharp curves without any problem. Sometimes they would kick off a wall to swing the back end around, but these guys were expert boatmen, all of them.

Also, gondoliers don’t sing. Not at all. Sometimes they would have a little flotilla of boats traveling around, and one of them would include a serenading accordion player. That was always nice to see float by in the evening as you’re walking back from dinner. But gondoliers pretty much just yell at each other. They have little phrases they call when going around a blind corner, or docking, or passing other boats. The way the calls echo off the water and steep brick walls of the narrow canals is very melodic.

I think Mark’s favorite part of the whole trip to Venice occurred while we were in the gondola. We pulled into a thin canal behind a very old building, with ancient rotting wood piers and crumbling brick on either side. All of a sudden, Mark gets really excited and yells:

“Look! Look! A rat! There’s a rat swimming in the canal!” Sure enough, a very large rat was swimming away from our boat at we headed down the ancient waterway.

“Ok, now Venice is real.” Mark said as he settled back into his velvet cushion. And the gondolier chuckled to himself.

On the Forth of July last week, we hopped on a train in Rome and headed across the Italian countryside up to Venice. I’ve put the first batch of m photos up in the gallery! The pictures were all so nice, I think I’ll keep the writing here to a minimum. Check out the descriptions to the right of each photo for more info about the subjects.

The trip on the train took a little less than 6 hours, and we stopped at several towns along the way: Florence, Bologna, and Padua among others. Mark experienced instant Italian Espresso (for 3.50 euro), and I got to sit next to an old Italian man who smelled like a frat house: beer and pizza!

Arriving in Venice, the place didn’t seem real. It felt more like… a casino in Vegas. Or an expo in Epcot. It didn’t help that everybody we could see seemed to be American. The place was full to the brim with tourists, from all over the world. I suppose the Americans were just the loudest.

On our first full day in the city, we saw the view of the island from the Bell Tower, and explored the courtyards, prisons, and beautiful bridges around the Doge’s Palace.

Dinner that night was at a small restaurant in a dark alley near the Rialto Bridge. It was a wonderful seafood ratatoria. I had a whole grilled sea bass, and it was great, even though I came at the fillet from the wrong side. Walking around the city that night was warm and full of soft lights reflecting off of smoothly lapping waves. It may not have felt real, but it still felt wonderful.

Well, I’m back in Colorado. After 24 full hours of traveling yesterday, I’m feeling stiff, sore, and exhausted still. I’m moving slow, and spending some time getting photos organized and documented. I rearranged the gallery a bit, and I added a few photos to both of the sub galleries.

I want to write one more post about the other sites we saw while in Rome. Yes, the ancient center was amazing, and the Vatican full of incredible sites, but there are lots of other things to see in the Eternal City.

Fountains – You can’t walk 30 feet in Rome without stumbling on one fountain or another. Many are incredibly beautiful, and most are full of “potable” water. It’s not uncommon to see people drinking from these fountains. I only drank from the fountains with spigots that seemed to obviously be built for supplying drinking water. And I haven’t gotten sick yet!

I found these fountains very photogenic, and today I uploaded several shots of Bernini’s Fontana del Tritone, one of the fountain outside S. Maria d. Vittoria, and a few of The Fountain of the Naiads.

Churches – The fountains might be every 30ft, but it seems like the churches are closer together. I think Mark spent more time in church on this trip than he has in his entire life. :) The buildings were varied and beautiful, but here is a little about Mark and my three favorites in Rome.

Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini: We wandered up to this little church by accident. It was only mentioned in a few paragraphs in our guidebook, and not given stars or anything to note how, well, bizarre the place is. They don’t allow photographs in the place, but I bought postcards and intend to scan them in.

So, for over 200 years, the brothers of of the Capuchins would take the bones of the dead and arrange them into wall decorations, alters, shelves, even lamps and chandeliers hanging from the ceiling. In 3 or 4 rooms below the church, the bones of over 4,000 bodies have been glued and nailed together in the most elaborate and disturbing shrine to the dead that I have ever… well… heard of, let alone seen. There are a few full mummies, and the full skeleton of a little girl is nailed to the ceiling of the last room.

Here’s a shot from Wikipedia.org:

Santa Maria della Vittoria: We came upon this church looking for other interesting sites near the Concezione. Mark declared it to be his favorite church of the trip to Rome. The intensely baroque architecture was mostly designed and built in the 17th century, and houses two amazing sculptures by Bernini who has become one of my favorite artists.

Every square inch of this church was covered in some of the most beautiful frescos and carvings that we would see in our entire trip. Everything was in beautiful condition, and the church was small enough that there was no crowd, and you could really approach the art and spend time examining the amazing detail.

Santa Maria in Trastevere: This church is considered to be the first Christian church in Rome, and was originally built around 300 AD, when emperors were still pagan and Christianity a minority cult. The current building and many of the incredibly beautiful mosaics date from around the 12-13th centuries, or the end of the last crusade, though the church did contain many earlier carvings and works of art.

The detail and mysterious symbols in the mosaics were captivating. In the shot below, that is Jesus with a “queen” sitting beside him. Most people see that as his mother Mary, but those who have read The De Vinci Code might see a different Mary there. The six-winged angles in the top are Seraphim, ancient orders of Angels described in Judaic and Christian writings as being the highest order of Angels.

Well, I made it. I don’t know if I’ll be taking many pictures in Perugia. It’s hard enough trying to figure out how to get to the conference venues and how to get around town quickly. I ended up renting a car. Yep, that’s right, I’m driving a car around Italy! It’s actually not so bad. Everything is VERY well signed. Most Americans would be astonished by how well documented every intersection is. Plus, all of the cars are tiny. I don’t have to worry about being crushed by a giant Semi-truck or an F-350 here. And people don’t drive as fast as they have reputations for. Taxi drivers, ok. But the general public, not too bad. I haven’t gone above 80 kmph yet.

Why does traveling by yourself suck so much? I know some people really get into it, but I’ve never liked it. I don’t like sitting quietly among strangers having fun and chatting with each other. I don’t like sitting by myself in a restaurant when everybody else has somebody to enjoy their meal with.

I know some people feel that there is a strength of character found in being alone in a crowd. That the ability to sit quietly all day long is a skill of some sort, and that being able to eat a meal by themselves shows their true independence and self-confidence. I don’t feel that way. I am capable of doing all of these things, but I don’t like to.

I would rather have somebody with me occasionally than be by myself all of the time. I would rather share a view or a meal than revel in my independence. And I’d much rather have somebody there to back me up when things get sketchy or difficult, than have to face the world alone.

Just because I’m capable of traveling alone, doesn’t mean I have to like it.

Well, we made it to Venice (Venezia). But, I’ll save that trip write up for another day. Tonight, we’re taking a night off from walking and relaxing in our hotel room, playing with their internet (for 4 Euros an hour).

So now, I want to write about our time in the Vatican. We ended up visiting Vatican City (the smallest country on earth!) at least once in some form on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday.

On Sunday, it was to see St Peter’s Basilica. This was our first introduction to the conservative Catholic area, and it was interesting. The architecture was incredible, as you’ll see in our photos. The place was huge, and the detail was stunning. Wow. The church was quiet, even with thousands of people filling it, and sunlight filtered in from airy stained glassed windows through the humid air. We saw Michalangelo’s original Pieta, though none of my pictures turned out for all of the crowds in the way. The frescoed ceilings were awe-inspiring, and the sculptures and paintings gracing the walls were masterpieces, each and every one.

But, and I hate to say this, the signs of sexism in the Catholic faith are not so subtle. I was physically stopped before leaving the security gate (a hundred feet before the door to the building) until I put my shirt on covering my shoulders and upper arms. True, the rule is the same for both sexes, but it really seemed to be unevenly enforced on that hot July Sunday. While I saw plenty of men walking around in shirts with no sleeves, or shorts hitting at the knees, any woman with ruffles instead of sleeves was physically stopped or escorted from the premises. I saw one little girl (probably 9 years old) pulled away from her family because her knees were showing under her skirt!

At noon, we spilled out into the square with the other two thousand people in the area to wait for the Pope to emerge and bless the crowd. Right on time, he stepped to the window, and went through a quick blessing in Latin. The calls and responses were shown on the jumbo-tron TVs around the square, and everybody cheered and screamed and chanted like they were at a Purdue football game.

After the blessing, the Pope said a little something in several languages. “And to the pilgrims here today who speak English!” Followed by hysterical cheering by the English speakers. I think for us he said that regardless of our sects, as Christians we should all work together for peace. He also said a message in Spanish, French, Italian and German. And he sounded as though he spoke all of the languages fluently and familiarly.

The Vatican Museum (and Sistine Chapel) were closed that day, so Mark and I headed off to other adventures. We showed up at around 11am on Monday to see the museums, but the line was, actually, over a mile long. It wrapped around two full sides of the country! We waited for about 45 minutes and then gave up and headed back to Rome.

Tuesday we got up early, and when we arrived at around 8:30a, the line was quite a bit shorter. It only took 2 hours to get us into the museum. I haven’t posted the shots from that day yet, but there weren’t a lot. Flashes were strictly banned in many areas of the museum, and the one time I tried to get out my tripod, I got yelled at in Italian.

The museum had an incredible collection of ancient Egyptian, Roman, Greek and Etrusian artifacts. I really enjoyed these sculptures. Of course, the museum is known for it’s huge amounts of renaissance art, and we saw tons of it. We saw graphic depictions of the martyrdoms of most major saints: crucifixion, upside-down crucifixion, burned at the stake, drawn and quartered, shot full of arrows (St. Michael seems to be a favorite far and away), bitten by poisonous snakes, tied to an anchor and dropped in the ocean, beaten with sticks and tied to a brick and thrown in the ocean, and Mark thinks he saw somebody eaten by dogs.

The Sistine Chapel was amazing, but as I stared at it, I started to get angry. There are 4 women represented among the hundreds of male figures. One is, of course, the Madonna. Another is the pagan prophetess Sybil, whom Michalangelo painted with a very masculine body, several times on the walls. The others are Eve in the garden of Eden, and the snake giving her the apple. Yes, the snake has the tail wrapped around the tree and the body, head, arms and breasts of a nude woman, handing the apple out to her sister Eve.

It’s not pointed out in any books or by many tour guides, but the differences in the representation of women between ancient ‘pagan’ art and the classic Christian scenes is, well, day and night.

One more quick post from Rome. We are hopping a train to Venice tomorrow, so this might be my last night with internet access for a little while.

I’ve managed to resize and upload all of the photos from our first day in the city. They are up in the gallery now. That’s a lot of shots from one day’s wanderings, but they are probably the bulk of my picture-taking so far, as well. Many of the museums here don’t allow any photography at all, and my giant camera is not something I can sneak out for a shot or two. Too bad, but it makes me remember to look at the world around me as well. I’ve spent so much time “framing”, sometimes I forget to just look.

The ancient city center in Rome is really fantastic, and I hope you enjoy all of the shots of old stuff. This was all from Saturday. We left the apartment at around 11am, and managed to loose track of our two other travel companions within 10 minutes. That seems to be the way it is around here. If you’re not physically tied to a person, expect to loose them every time you walk into a new building. It wasn’t a big deal, as we had a plan for the day, and could all meet up at the apartment in the evening.

We probably walked 20 miles that day. I learned that the city was supposedly founded around 700 BC (relatively recent compared to ancient Greece and Egypt), and that architecture for the first 700 years or so was mostly concrete faced with brick. Thus the oldest buildings and ruins are not marble, but stacks of very well-laid bricks. We saw the Trajan Markets, the Palatine Hill, and the Colosseum that afternoon, all of which are large brick buildings.

The Romans did not face buildings with granite or marble very much until the first century BC, which is the time of the republic, and in 44 BC (when Caesar declared himself emperor and dissolved the senate) became the age of the Empire. So, we also saw plenty of columns and marble ruins about in the “Forums” area. Beautiful carvings, worn away statues, and delicate reliefs littered the grass of the area. It’s weird walking through there. There’s no fence or gate, or any designation that this area is any different than the city government offices that are built next door. Just a lot of old columns sticking out of the ground, and the occasional tablet with Greek letters chopped into it peaking out of a clump of grass. People were sitting in the grass around the ruins, and plenty of them were sitting on the old statuary. There’s so much old stuff around in Rome, it just doesn’t seem to phase anybody any more.

The shot below is probably my favorite from the day. We found this cave behind an iron gate below the hill which holds the houses of various Caesars and famous ancient Romans. The trickle of water from the top made a lovely echo in the quiet chamber. The built up minerals on the walls looked like the insides of many of the old caverns we have in the US. I’ve never seen stalactites hanging from stone carvings before this. It was beautiful.

Well, it’s been a busy first three days! I’ve finally gotten the internet to work, so I was able to upload just a few pictures to the gallery. Enjoy!

So far, Mark and I have had a ton of adventures. We’ve seen amazing (and some disturbing) things. We’ve been lost on the subway, confused about busses, and probably walked over 20 miles. We’ve been blessed by the Pope, and through ancient pagan ruins. I’m learning Italian. I’ve used a bidet. And Mark’s favorite part so far: the macaroni and cheese (and bacon) dinner at the fancy restaurant next to the Pantheon.

More later!

Getting everything together for the trip to Italy right now. There’s so much to do before you leave the country! But I’m really excited now!

Here’s a shot from another great sunset we had this week. Keep an eye on the blog in the next few days, I’m hoping to be able to post an occasional shot from the trip while we’re abroad.