Italia! (Venezia e' Milano)

Well, here is my third and final post about Italy...after our wonderful time in Tuscany, we headed to Venice. Now in all fairness, my review of Venice will mostly be biased by the weather we had. It was by far my least favorite part of the trip, but it was pouring rain and quite cold! The drainage in that city is not so great, so there were huge puddles that sometimes you just could not avoid! By the end of the day, our pants were soaked from the knees down as well as our shoes and socks (obviously!). We did get to take a tour of an amazing palace complete with dungeons, and we went to a couple of glass blowing demonstrations to see the world famous Venetian glass. Near the end of the day there, the rain subsided a little bit and we were able to grab a couple of pics - although we were looking pretty rough by that time!

Here is what the view from the boat was:

So, as you can see, pretty gray and dreary. Most of the time spent on the boat, we couldn't even see out the windows because it was so foggy. Jon captured my interest level in this picture:


but I was in good company, here are some of the others in our group...






It seems the only one having a good time on the boat was our guide Raffaella - she told us that she does not really like Venice and taught us a motion and saying in Italian that means something like, "You are rude, I don't like you, I will take my business elsewhere" which she is demonstrating (the motion) in the picture below and saying "tyeh, tyeh, tyeh" - she said this will come in handy in Venice because many of the shop owners are not so friendly.

I just have to pause here and say that Raffaella just made our trip so great! She was so much fun to be around and taught us so much of the culture that we would not have learned if we would not have seen Italy with an Italian! We all just fell in love with her and want to get her to come to America - at least to visit - although she said she would love to come live/work here - I don't know how anyone could ever leave Italy though! (I miss you Raffy!)

One of our better times in Venice was when we got in from the cold and rain and just hung out with our friends Seth & Donna and Mike & Dionne - the 6 of us had some good times on this trip and we hope to continue our friendship beyond our time together in Italy.


The second day in Venice, the team had a game and so Rafaella was kind enough to take Donna, Mike, Dionne and I to a little town for some more shopping (I can't remember the name of the town, but it was really pretty!). Here we stopped to take yet another cappuccino...




After our time in Venice was over, we headed to Milan. I loved this city - SO beautiful! The Duomo there was by far our favorite. It took over 500 years to build!



We also went to see "The Last Supper" by DaVinci - unfortunately, you cannot take any pictures of it (you also can only view it for 15 minutes in groups of no more than 25 people). I have to admit, I wasn't super interested or excited about seeing this famous work of art, but when I saw it I was blown away by its beauty - it was probably my favorite thing that I saw the whole time we were in Italy. I had no idea that it was painted as a mural on a huge wall, I always imagined it as a painting hanging in a museum. It was absolutely breathtaking!

Another highlight in Milan was taking a cooking class - La Scuola De La Cucina Italiana! It was so much fun and we got to eat everything we made!




On our final night in Milan, we had an amazing dinner with the Bettini family. Carlo Bettini is one of the basketball players and his parents are the ones who set up all of the plans for our amazing trip. It was a great ending to a wonderful trip!

Francesca e' Filippo Bettini