Italy

Ciao Bella!

If you follow my instagram you’ll know that I recently fulfilled one of my bucket list places to Italy. We spent 10 days in beautiful Italy. We visited Rome, Florence, and Venice.

We arrived late our first night and just went to our hotel and got settled in. The next morning was Brett’s 30th birthday and  our first full day in Rome. We started off with some breakfast across from the Colosseum. We had a tour guide for this and she filled us with so much history! It is really  incredible to see in person. We followed the next couple days in Rome with your typical touristy sight seeing. The Roman forum, the Pantheon, Trevi fountain, some museums and the jail that Paul was in. Of course, I can’t forget the Vatican and the Sistine Chapel! Lastly, St Peters Square was magnificent. It is HUGE and you really feel small being in there. Actually, most of the buildings are massive and grand.

The architecture is beautiful and is definitely a lost art.

Florence stole my heart. It was clean, and beautiful. If you ever find yourself in Florence, you have to see the statue of David. It is about 15 feet tall and you really could stare at it all day. You forget you are looking at a giant piece of marble. The attention to detail is breath taking.

The Cattedrale di Santa Maria is mesmerizing. It’s right in the middle and you cannot miss it. We bought tickets to climb the duomo. Its over 460 stairs to get to the top and was worth it. The view is like nothing else.

Piazzale Michelangelo was one of my favorite places. People will grab bottles of wine and sit up there and watch the sunset. The restaurant up there was some of the best Italian food we had.

One of our favorite things we did was take a cooking class. It was from 9am-3pm. We started off in a Florence market picking all the food for the day. We made bruschetta, pesto, pork loin ,roasted potatoes, ragu, pesto pasta and tiramisu. The views and the farmhouse at this place was perfect. I would do this all over again. They give you unlimited wine and all the recipes. You can  buy tickets on Viator . It is called 
“cooking class and lunch at a tuscan farmhouse with local market tour in Florence.”

Venice..When we first arrived It had a different feel than the other places we had visited. Its much more dirty than the other cities and didn’t seem like it was as well kept up. Although, I will say that after being there for 3 days I began to have more of an appreciation for the city. To see how people live in Venice with no cars dirivng their boats to their house was a really cool thing to watch. I began wondering what it would be like to live there, how it must have been years and years ago when the city first began. There is picturesque views almost every where you turn.

A gondola ride is a must. We thoroughly enjoyed it and is really romantic. St marks square is absolutely beautiful and Dodges palace was incredible as well. Dodges Palace is a museum of the supreme court.

Our favorite place to eat in Venice was a steak restaurant called Timon. Its delicious!

They also have the best gelato in Venice. A place called  Suso  Gelateria. Their strawberry cheesecake gelato was out of this world and we had it 3 or 4 times!