Day 7

What are we on now? Day 7?

Well, on day 7 we got up at 7:00 AM, got the rest of our stuff packed (Last minute things) and headed downstairs for breakfast. After double and triple checking our rooms we gathered in the lobby and waited for the bus.

After about 3 hours we stopped at one of the 6 catacombs located around Rome. These were built from around the 2nd year A.D. and 300 A.D when Christianity was still illegal in Rome. There are more than 500,000 tombs in the 20km of corridors. At one point this location housed the bodies of many popes, martyrs and saints. While many of the important bodies have been moved to churches, some still remain. When the catacombs were rediscovered in the 1800’s, many of the first tombs had been ransacked. Originally, tours were run with the tombs just as they had been, but many people were taking small bones and stones as souvenirs, so the monks moved all the bodies from opened tombs to the lower levels. It was very unsettling to be 20 or so meters below ground, standing not just above floors with intact tombs, but also on top of tombs laid into the floor below us (they wanted to be close to the popes and saints). A few times I would place my hand on an open ledge and realize that for hundreds of years someone’s body lay there and I would shiver a bit. While it was certainly an educational experience I was happy to return to the Tuscan heat and the fresh air.

After another few hours and a rest stop we arrived at the picturesque Tuscan medieval town of San Gimignano. Everything appears as it did in the medieval times (1200-1400), sans electricity/signs. The first thing I did was locate an ATM because my supply of money was running dangerously low (€6 after the rest stop). The next thing I did was stand in line for the world’s best gelato (official since 2007). I got a mixture of mint, vanilla and lemon for €2.50 and it was amazing. They don’t lie when they say the best gelato in the world, the flavours blend and softly melt over your taste buds. The true sensation was really beyond accurate description. For the next hour and a half we explored the walled, beautiful town, from the little pasta shops, to the amazing vantage point of the Tuscan countryside. The entire time I was beating myself up for leaving my camera on the bus, but I am sure I can steal some other people’s pictures at some point. At one time I was really hungry and there was a heavenly smell wafting out of a small pizzeria. I bought a simple, albeit huge, slice of pepperoni pizza. I don’t lie when I say that this was the best piece of pizza I have ever tasted. The sauce and cheese was infused with an amazing myriad of spices and herbs, the tastes all blended together perfectly. After that I admired the landscape for a bit until we loaded the bus again. When I say Tuscan countryside, it is not just my own opinion that it is beautiful. In part because of its perfection in proportional mountains and in part because it was the majority of their homes, most renaissance painters used the Tuscan mountainous landscape as a backdrop for their own paintings. No matter where the picture is in the world, the mountains are that of Tuscany. In one of the panels in the Sistine Chapel, our guide pointed out that the mountains in the depiction of Israel and the mountains depicted in another painting of ancient Greece were almost identical because the painters believed that the Tuscan mountains offered the perfect proportionality between land and sky.

I must admit, to my shame, that I was not at first enthralled with Florence. We arrived at our hotel on a small, somewhat cramped street. We walked up the gravel yard to a hotel totally different from what we were expecting. Our hotel in Rome was somewhat modern, if a bit outdated in construction. It had 10 floors, 2 elevators, key cards (in fact, you had to insert your card into the wall for the lights to turn on), room service and an extensive lobby and restaurant. Our Florentine hotel was once the residence of a wealthy citizen a couple hundred years ago. It holds about 100 residents, of which we are 42. The rooms are small, fitted with a small bathroom (no shower curtain for some reason) windows which we can’t open (they will turn the A/C off for the entire building) and a small writing desk (built in minibar of course, how would Italians survive without their alcohol?). Our liaison with the hotel is a man with an Italian/Austrian accent named Francisco. Some have described him as a Nazi. Along with the rules about windows, there are strict rules regarding noise, pool behavior and presence outside of rooms. All of these are understandable, but not conducive to 37 17 year olds. We walked about 15 minutes to our dinner for the evening, a nice Italian winery and restaurant. We were served amazing spaghetti, fries, chicken and tiramisu. After this a group of us decided to head back to the hotel for the last hour or so instead of going out, as we didn’t really know the lay of the land yet. The road back smelled of garbage, was crowded and had quite a lot of graffiti. Not exactly the breathtaking city I have heard so much about.  I read some more Dante and watched the first half of The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) before going to sleep.