“ITALY” or “IF I SEE ONE MORE CHURCH, I’LL PUKE”

Welcome back!  My vacation to recover from my vacation has finally reached its end.  I’m back to a place I can write from without everything coming out half-hearted, dull, and trite.  Lucky for you all, it’s apparently a national holiday in Germany today, so all there is to do is sit inside and wish I were in a country that doesn’t completely shut down once a week, every week, and then some other times “just because.”  That’s right!  We’re right back to the playfully mean-spirited ribbing for which I am so respected and reviled.

For this leg of our virtual journey together, I’ve compiled the three Italian stops on our trip into one, gargantuan, picture-filled Blogstravaganza.  In this post, you’ll see 146 pictures of Rome (including the Vatican), Florence, and Venice.  There will be captions to inform you when you have moved on in the slideshow to a new city.  A notable exception to that rule being that I’m not telling you the difference between Vatican City and Rome.  They’re the same place.  I don’t care what you say.  Anyone who takes issue with my stance on the matter is welcome to forward all complaints to our reader satisfaction department, best reached by shouting directly into a toilet bowl on your own time.

If you manage to slog through the impossible depth and breadth of pictures without breaking down into a quivering, jellylike mass of hyper-stimulation, then please feel free to enjoy my stray thoughts on Europe’s Boot.

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Stray thoughts:

• All roads may lead to Rome, but no road in Rome leads to your apartment.  Hope you like getting lost.  You can walk on one street in one direction, reach the terminal end of that street, turn around, and somehow get lost on the way back to where you started.
• The Pope was set to speak when we were in the Vatican.  We had a beer, instead.  I’m not entirely certain we made the right choice.
• The Vatican is less a historical museum and more an immense testament to centuries of Catholic wealth.  Someone, somewhere, sprung a looooooot of souls from Purgatory.
• I was in the Vatican at a time when two Popes live there.  Pretty neat.
• The street to the Vatican is lined with pickpockets, street merchants, and crooks like any other Roman thoroughfare.  It’s good to see the entrepreneurial spirit takes on no more sense of ethics in the shadow of one of the holiest places on Earth.
• Across from the place where Julius Caesar was murdered, there’s a theatre named after the historical cite which, coincidentally, was also a theatre at the time of the assassination.  Neat, huh?  However, the current standing theatre was NOT performing Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, which is a tragedy of cosmic proportion.  The situation, that is.  The play itself is just a tragedy of theatrical proportion.
• If, at a certain juncture in your life, you find yourself considering ‘tour guide’ as a potential career path, allow me to proffer some advice:  Under no circumstance should, by the end of the tour, the group you’ve led know anything more about your family than they did at the start.  Especially if that’s ALL they now know about the city.  I can tell you an inordinate amount about the various ex-husbands of a certain Italian tour guide, but had to Wikipedia search for all the historical goodness I now know about the various cites we passed as she droned on about Marco 1, 2, and 3.  Gina, you were the worst tour guide of all time.  You’re bad at your job and you should feel bad.
• My advice to anyone considering an Italian vacation:  Fly into Rome.  See it.  Enjoy it briefly.  Then get the hell out of Rome as fast as possible.  It’s gorgeous and everyone should experience it, but it’s too much.  Catch the first train for Florence and Tuscany.  THAT’S something to see.  Florence was absolutely astounding.  I don’t have anything particularly scathing to say.  It’s a fantastic place.
• In the slideshow, you will notice a picture of a rather large steak.  The Florentine steak (called Bistecca alla Fiorentina or simply La Bistecca) is the single greatest thing I have consumed and will likely ever consume.  The people of Florence take this delicacy very seriously, and God bless them for it.  I do not generally condone sharing pictures of food on the internet, but it was every bit as miraculous as most of the art I saw on this trip and deserves to be catalogued.  The smallest available portion is 2.2lbs (1kg), and I regret not ordering something larger.  No bit of that steak survived.  Sometimes I find myself fantasizing about it.
• You ever want to stand out?  Wander around Florence in the evening as a lone man.  Watch as various gelato eating couples murmur to one another as you pass.
• I have previously expressed my rancor toward the Italian public transportation systems.  My fervent frustration has not waned.  I’ve been spoiled by my lovely German trains, where two or three minutes late is an egregious showing of incompetence.  This is opposed to Italy, where buses may or may not show up at all.  Yes, I’m still bitter.
• Venice, what can I say?  Absolutely unique.  One of a kind.  Too expensive to stay in longer than the handful of days we were there.

The pictures are doing most of the talking on this one, I’m afraid.  There’s only so much to say about Italy.  Especially when you see three cities in a matter of days.  I sprinted the length of it, I think.  That’s what it felt like when I finally sat down on the night train for Vienna, at least.

Speaking of Vienna, that magical last stop on my whirlwind tour of Central and Southern Europe, it’ll get its own blog post in coming days.  My writing juices are primarily being sapped by script editing and professional correspondence.  Gag me.

Also exciting:  the small German town I’ve been temporarily expatriated to is having a cowboy festival this weekend.  I’ll try and have some coverage on that, if it proves to be as bizarre and interesting as it sounds.  I’ve been promised quite a show.

Thanks for tuning in!