Milan: Midnight Rest

Yesterday evening we got to the hotel at 7:30pm. Then the people at the hotel came out and asked my dad to show everyone’s passport. My dad got really mad at them because he did not think that they needed to know all the stuff that was in them. He got out of it by ending up only showing them his passport. Then we moved in, and placed our huge pile of luggage in a corner of the room. After we were all in, my dad went out to get dinner for us. While he was out, Lindsay, Kaelan and I went into the pool. Then we came back, dried off and watched the news on TV. At that time, my dad came back with sandwiches for everybody.

We had to get up early the next day so as to arrive in time in Cavaillon, France, where we were going to meet my French family, so we turned in. My mom flew back into Milan Malpensa airport and arrived at the hotel while we were asleep.

I woke up this morning at 3:30am, exactly when my dad said we should, while everybody else was asleep. At the moment I did not know what time it was so I did not wake anybody else up. After a half hour I woke up my mom as I was a bit scared, and asked what time it was. The clock she had showed 3:00am (it was still on London time) so we waited for a bit, then woke everyone else up. Then we found out that is was already past 4:00am and had to rush to pack up and leave.

Rome Vatican City: Lindsay’s Flimsy

Today we visited the Vatican. My aunt Babette left really early that morning to get in line for the museum of the Vatican. The line was about 8 blocks long and it was very wide by the time we arrived. We thought you could get in at a quarter to nine, but when we got there we found out you could only go in at 10:30… Thankfully my aunt was about 50 people away from the front of the line. When the museum opened there was a gigantic crowd, and we got pushed all the way to the Sixtine Chapel. In the Sixtine Chapel, there were paintings all the way up the walls and the ceiling. My Dad showed me what everyone of Michelangelo’s pictures was and meant.

There is a guy in the painting with a story that goes with him. In the painting he has jackass ears and he is in hell. What happened was that he did not like that Michelangelo painted nude people. He went to the Pope and asked him if he could put a veil over the nude people and the Pope said yes. Then the Pope asked Michelangelo to finish the paintings, and when Michelangelo finished painting the painting we were looking at, he drew the guy with jackass ears in hell. Then the guy went back to the Pope and said:”Michelangelo drew me with jackass ears in hell. Could you make him change it?” Because the Pope did not really like him and he kept asking to Pope for favors, the Pope just said: “I am sorry, my powers don’t extend to hell, so I can’t help you.” So he is still in the painting in hell with jackass ears!!!

After the Sixtine Chapel we went to see a bunch of renaissance paintings. Then we went to the Courtyard for a bit. Then we went back into the antique museum, which had a bunch of Greek and Roman statues in it. That’s when Lindsay (my babysitter) got flimsy: she decided to go ahead of us and, when my Mom and I caught up with her, she was standing in a certain spot crying. She looked like she was having a heart attack. She kept saying she really needed to get out, so we took her outside, and figured she had got claustrophobic in the museum, a fear of being in enclosed spaces. She says that what got her feeling that way was that there were too many people and they weren’t moving fast.

After that we just decided to leave. First we went to the Piazza San Pietro, then we walked along the river Tiber for over a mile until we finally found a place to each lunch in the Trastevere, a district where there were lots of restaurants. That was the day when Lindsay got flimsy on us!

Rome: Gelato is our Motto

We arrived in Rome last Saturday and are staying here for a week. We live in an old apartment building from the 16th century, with a very nice apartment, and we are almost right next to the Roman Forum. We were across the piazza from the Tarpeian Rocks, where traitors got thrown off to their death by the Romans.

First we went to the Roman Forum. I saw the arc de triumph of Emperor Trajan, and the arc de triumph of Emperor Titus. On the arc de triumph of Titus, there is a sculpture of the menorah of the temple that was destroyed by the Romans. There was an enormous column of Emperor Trajan, where they sculpted all of the stories of his conquests. We saw the Cloaca Maxima, which is the main sewer system of the Romans, and is still used today: you can smell it! The whole forum is like a big park, where some of it is fenced off, and there are ruins in the fenced-off parts and everywhere. There are ruins of temples, and where people used to meet, and the Roman senate.

Right behind the Roman forum is the Colosseum, a big amphitheater. The Colosseum was built so that you could put beasts in there, humans in there, and you could even flood it so you could have ships fighting each other in it. The Colosseum was not very interesting or amazing but it was still worth seeing. It got its name from the statue of emperor Nero that was next to it. Since the statue was colossal, they named the amphitheater colossal too.

Next we went to the Capitoline hill which was right by our apartment. It had a big windy street to go up to the top. It was the holiest hill in Rome. That is the hill where the geese were that gave the alarm to the Romans when the Gauls attacked Rome. On the Capitoline Hill there is the statue of the emperor Marcus Aurelius riding on a horse that is all made of bronze. In the museum next to it, there is a statue of a dying Gaul that was all made of marble.

We spent a whole day walking around town, from pizza to piazza, and that evening we went to the Piazza di Spagna and the fountain of Trevi. We had ice cream at the Piazza Navona. We also stopped to see the Pantheon. It is a huge circular roman building, with a dome and a hole at the top, and the coffin of Raphael.

The best museum in Rome is the National Museum. It was almost deserted. In it we saw lots of famous statues, like an old Greek boxer all made of bronze. We also saw a marble statue of a man throwing the discus at the Olympics. There were also lots of mosaics and paintings that looked like they were very hard to make, and we also went into a room that was completely painted on the walls with one garden.

In Rome we have been eating gelato at least once a day. Gelato is basically ice cream, except it is a lot better and not exactly the same: Italian gelato is the best ice cream in the world. Last night we ate crepes on an island on the Tiber, while we reclined on pillows on the ground, which I hear is more or less how Romans used to eat.

Florence

Today we went to Florence. During the Renaissance, Florence was a very rich city that had very good artists. The most powerful family was the Medici. The most powerful and famous of the Medici was Lorenzo the Magnificent who is called a prince of the Renaissance even though he is not a prince since Florence was a republic. In the times of Lorenzo, Florence had the best artists, like Michelangelo Buonarotti, Benvenuto Cellini, Leonardo da Vinci, and Botticelli.

In the main square, called the Piazza de la Signoria, there were many famous statues there. There was a replica of the David by Michelangelo (we also saw the real one in a museum in Florence), there was the Perseus by Benvenuto Cellini, a big Poseidon, and many other statues including antique roman statues.

We also saw the so-called Gates of Hell by Ghiberti. They are in front of the Duomo (the cathedral of Florence), they were very famous in the Renaissance, and it took 20 years to make them. They had very good ice cream by the Duomo. Then we walked around the city, then we went to a very good museum called the Uffizi that had lots of Renaissance paintings and also roman statues. There was also a room called the Botticelli room with paintings of the Birth of Venus and Spring, and my father said the room must be worth over a billion dollars!!!

Rigomagno, Tuscany: 1, 2, 3, 4, Tomato Sauce

On Saturday I met up with my aunt, two of my cousins, my grandma and her friend Jojo in a little village in Tuscany called Rigomagno. My friends Amy and Aaron were also there with me. There we played in the pool a lot and, and also played a lot of card games. On Sunday evening we went to another town called Lucignano for dinner, where my friend Aaron found a bee in his food. It was a fried, or maybe a baked, bee. By the way the bee was not supposed to be there! There was a sign for a zoo that my Mom tried to take my little brother to the next day, but we found out that the actual zoo was another 50 kilometers away. So my mom played with Kae at the park. Also my friend taught my brother to say “1, 2, 3, 4, tomato sauce” and from then on my brother said that every two minutes…

My parents went to Cortona, a pretty old town, but I stayed home to have a watergun fight with my cousins. Then we visited a bigger town called Sienna, which is exactly the way it used to be in the Renaissance. We spent the whole day there. It had a big square and lots of museums and another beautiful Duomo. We visited an old hospital with very old frescoes. Some of the frescoes had people getting surgery with animals around them, and also giving bread to the poor.

Today we visited a small town called San Gimignano. In San Gimignano there are lots of towers that were built by rich families in the Renaissance. The town is also completely the same as it used to be then. There is a beautiful Duomo and good food. I also tried ice cream from the 2006 gelato world champion, but I did not like it. I went to a torture museum where I almost threw up and I wish I had not gone there. Tomorrow we are going to Florence and Saturday we are leaving for Rome.

Milan: Pizza Pizza

We’ve been here for almost four weeks. These are some of the things I have found out. People here eat a lot of pizza, and a lot of ice cream, and the weather is really, really hot. There are four different parts of a meal: antipasti (appetizers), primi piatti (first plate, it’s always pasta or risotto), secundi piatti (second plate), and dolci (dessert). My little brother learned the word antipasti. Whenever we say it a bit wrong, he always says: “No, it is AntiPASti”!

My babysitter always goes to places called Internet cafes where you can go on the internet, which were very very boring for Kaelan and me, because all we would be would be sit there and wait for about an hour. She took us with our Dad to the Duomo, which is the cathedral for Milan, which, by the way, is really called Milano. We also went to a castle called the Castello Sforzesco. By the way, the way it got its name was that the duke of Milan, named Visconti, asked a mercenary called Sforza to become the general of his army. Then when the duke died, instead of his son becoming the new duke, Sforza had the son killed and became duke himself. That is pretty mean!

Another day we went to the Da Vinci Museum. It showed all the machines that Leonardo Da Vinci invented. That same day, we saw the painting “The Last Supper”. It shows Jesus and the disciples having the Passover dinner, which may have been the last one they were together, I am not sure. In the last supper, Jesus has just said “one of you will betray me”, so everybody and asking people questions and looking at each other trying to figure out who is going to do it. I did not like the painting very much. This may be because the painting is very damaged, because he used the wrong pigments.

I read a lot during this trip, because, a lot of the time, we were just sitting around at the house. Tomorrow we are leaving for good for Tuscany.

Venice: Canal Mania

We just spent the last 4 days in Venice. We had a skinny 4 story town house from the 17th century, in a narrow alleyway almost next to the piazza Santa Maria Formosa. To get there we took the train from Milan, then we took a vaporetto from the train station to the Rialto bridge, then we walked to the house. Vaporetto is the Italian name for water taxi to get across the canals in the city, and that is what you use to get around. In Venice every day we always walked to the Piazza San Marco, which has towers with golden lions with wings, and horses with wings, and horses without wings, then we took the vaporetto to wherever we went. Venice is in a very big lagoon, and we also went to many islands in the lagoon with the vaporettos too.

Venice has a very big castle, called the Palazzo Ducale, which we visited. The Palazzo Ducale is really kind of a city hall, since Venice used to be a republic: it was called la Serenissima. The Doge was elected a bit like the President, and could never leave the Palazzo Ducale. In the Palazzo Ducale there were beautiful paintings in almost every room .We also saw secret passageways, and went over the bridge of sighs which was the bridge from the Palazzo Ducale to the prisons. We also visited the prisons and the dungeons: the prisons were very cool and cold, and the doors to lead the people in were all different sizes. The people who were managing the place had lion mouths on the outside of the walls of their offices, and the citizens could place accusations against others in the lion mouths.

We also went into the Basilica San Marco, which is the main church of Venice on the Piazza San Marco. We went up a set of stairs that led to four very famous statues of horses. The Venetians stole them from Byzantium when they invaded the city in the 4th crusade.

We also tried to get the tour of the Jewish ghetto. The first time we made a mistake and the second time it was full, so in the end we gave up. The word “ghetto” comes from Venice, and it was the name of the places where the Jews were told to stay, and then they called by that name the places where the Jews were told to stay in other cities.

Venice is a very pretty city. One of the things that make it very pretty is the canal streets. Also all the houses look really old on the outside.