Italy and France 2007

It is late afternoon on the fourth of our five days in Paris.  As always, the time has flown by in this beautiful, enervating city.  It’s been 22 years since I was here, but my memories of that trip have stayed so vivid that it seems to be much more recent. 

We have been frequenting the usual tourist haunts: Tour Eiffel, Montmartre, Montparnasse, the towers of Notre Dame, and the Latin Quarter among others.  I had the opportunity to dust off my high school French when my 5 day Metro pass stopped working after the second use.  The ticket agent spoke no English so I was forced to describe my problem en Francais!  It worked.  I got a new ticket and didn’t fracture the grammar too much in the process.

Some of the highlights of the trip have been a couple of strolls through the Latin Quarter, at one time the intellectual center of Paris.  The Sorbonne is located nearby and the area is filled with bookstores and cafes.  The cobbled streets are narrow and reserved for pedestrians only.  At night, they are jam packed as hoards of tourists (and I suppose some locals too) frequent the inexpensive Greek and Middle Eastern restaurants that line the streets.  It’s the best spot for people watching I have ever encountered.  The photo below gives you some idea of the street scene, although it gets decidedly more lively when the sun goes down.

The Montparnasse Cemetery also made it on to the itinerary yesterday.  It is filled with massive concrete monuments to some of those who have passed on.  We walked around for a while and came across the graves of Charles Baudelaire, Camille Saint-Saens, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartres.  Sartre was a hero of mine in adolescence as his philosophy of existentialism resonated with me in those days and, to be honest, still does.

Tomorrow we are off to Monet’s country home at Giverny even though it means catching an 8:15 am train.  You may not be aware that Monet was not only a brilliant painter, but a master gardener as well.  It was at Giverny that he took inspiration for much of his work and the pond where he painted his water lilies is there.  The home fell into disrepair after Monet’s death, but has since been restored to it’s former bucolic state.

In some ways, Paris looks just like I’ve imagined – or to be more accurate, like the Paris I’ve always seen in books and movies. Charming old buildings with wrought-iron balconies, trees lining every street, sidewalk cafes…it’s pretty awesome. We flew in from Bologna on Friday morning and got to our apartment at around 2:00. We spent most of our first half-day relaxing, exploring, and getting into the groove, but we were able to explore the ground floor of Notre Dame, take a walk by the Seine, and climb to the top of the Arc de Triomphe in the early evening. We’ve already had a couple of language barrier adventures, the first occurring after our unfortunate discovery that the washing machine in our flat does not work. We were at a café for lunch and my dad was trying to ask the waiter, in English, where we could find the nearest laundromat. The waiter, of course, didn’t have a clue what my dad was talking about, so I brought out my best French and said that “We are in need of a place to do our laundry.” Somehow he thought we were trying to purchase a washing machine, and it took a second waiter to help us straighten things out! The second occurred during dinner. My sister had ordered a cider, but she took one sip and said that it “tasted weird.” My mom looked at the bottle, sampled it, and proclaimed, “It’s hard cider!” Leave it to the French to serve alcohol to my thirteen-year-old sister without even asking how old she was.

            Our second day involved some much needed sleeping in, followed by a trip to Musee d’Orsay with Joy, Melody, and Mackenzie Miller. We saw many of the classic impressionist pieces, including some very famous Renoirs and Van Gogh’s “Portrait of the Artist,” but I think I was the most blown away when I walked into the Monet room and saw his painting of the water lilies and two more of the bridge at Giverny. After hearing and reading so much, it was amazing to finally see that. I could stare at the impressionist paintings for hours; so many details! Later that day we tried to visit the Eiffel Tower but postponed our trip to the top because of the ridiculously long line. Instead, we opted to stretch out on the lawn of a nearby park, enjoying the breeze in the shadow of one of the world’s greatest landmarks. That evening, we had Turkish food on the Left Bank and went for a nighttime walk along the Seine.

            Today’s been busy, too, but I’ll let one of my parents describe it in detail once we’ve finished it. Au revoir for now!

After Firenze (Florence), we stayed in Parma with our friends the Dorigo Family.  This town north of Florence offered another local Italian food cuisine, much of it using the Parmesan cheese that originated in this town.  While I don’t eat Italian food at every meal at home, checking out the local cuisine as we traveled was a big part of our Italian adventure.  The pizzas appeared to always be cooked in wood-fired ovens, and they generally had very thin crusts.  We found many variations in their taste, and they are something that I will always savor about Italy.

Parma is off the beaten track for most tourists, but it has numerous medieval and historical buildings and a friendly populace.  Being home to opera composer Verdi and orchestral conductor Toscanini, the town also has a rich musical heritage.

We took the train from Parma to Venice on Wednesday morning.  The train station is right at the edge of the water, with one of the Venetian islands just across a busy waterway.  Our next mode of transportation was a water taxi that took us down part of the Grand Canal and along some other waterways to within a two-minute walk from our hotel.

We have seen narrow, winding pedestrian-only cobblestone streets in the old sections of many other European towns, but Venice’s streets are nearly all either this way or they consist of water.  This setting, and the total lack of automobiles, is why Venice lives up to its reputation as a unique destination.  We had heard that the most popular areas in town can be shoulder-to-shoulder, particularly if a cruise ship has just docked.  However, we were blessed with low crowds, clear skies and cool breezes.

Whatever crowds we did find were easy to escape amongst the hundreds of paths through the various districts of the city.  Except for following the signs to the famous Rialto Bridge from Piazza San Marco (the large St. Mark’s Square (Piazza San Marco) you always see in photographs), constant reference to a map was a necessity except when you wanted to get lost in this romantic town.  Here are Elizabeth, Natalie and me at the Piazza.

I found one of Venice’s most interesting aspects to be the eastern influences evident in its architecture.  This was a result of its being at the crossroads of the east and west during its heyday as a busy trading port five centuries ago.  I also found it amazing that paintings of the town from that era looked virtually identical to what we saw.

Our stay in Venice was capped by a gondola ride that included a tenor accompanied by an accordionist.  He serenaded us with traditional operatic arias and the like as we cruised the Grand Canal and some tiny waterways.  Call it schmalizy if you like, but I wouldn’t trade a family experience like this for the world.

There is not a Starbucks in site anywhere in Italy.  In fact, there are people in Italy who have never heard of Starbucks.  For some reason I find this information comforting.  Last year while traveling in the UK, Starbucks was nearly as ubiquitous as in the US, at least in the larger cities.  The coffee in the cafes here is delicious, almost always served as a shot of espresso or cappuccino.   You won’t find any 1100 calorie frappucinos.

We spent a couple of days in Florence, home of the Medici family.  The Medici’s were fabulously wealthy and powerful.  The Renaissance was a time when social status and appearances were extremely important (some things don’t change).  One of the ways to display wealth was to build and decorate churches and this had the added advantage of currying favor with the Vatican. It also explains the preponderance of religious themed art during this time.

Not only did the Medici’s commission artwork for the city on a scale well beyond that of any other family, they also acquired an enormous personal collection.  This collection was donated to the city of Florence in the 1700s and is now housed in the Uffizi Gallery. The Uffizi Gallery is full of paintings by Renaissance artists including Raphael, Caravaggio, Rubens, Titian, Michelangelo and a roomful of works by Botticelli, including The Birth of Venus.

Florence is not only home to the largest collection of Renaissance art, but it the art itself includes many of the iconic pieces of the Renaissance.  One such example is Michelangelo’s David.  The original David is housed in a museum called the Accademia. He is 18 feet tall and weighs over 11000 pounds.  We have all studied this statue in school, so I don’t need to offer a description.  What is astonishing about the statue is its realism starting from the musculature to the veins in the hands.  Quite simply, one has the feeling he is alive.  We probably saw close to a hundred statues during our stay and none of the others had this quality.  I got goose bumps.

There are lots of good options if, by chance, you need to eat in Italy. You can order pasta, pizza, paninis… lots of good stuff. Now as wonderful as this all is, none of it compares to the faaaaabulous desserts! If you’re looking for gelato, it’s not hard to find. There is gelato on almost every street, and they don’t exactly have a limited supply. You can order three different flavors in one little cup, and often times they top it off with whipped cream. They have every flavor imaginable, you can order your standard chocolate, mint, strawberry… but they also have the most random flavors! They have rice, peach, and Tartuffo (I have no idea what it is but it’s really good) But you can get gelato anywhere. You have to be in Parma to have rose-shaped ice cream! They use these special scoops that make mini bits of ice cream that they put them into a circle and shape it into a rose. It’s pretty awesome. Basically- food in Italy = good.