A few Photos From Italy

What a difference 12 hours of sleep makes. I feel well rested and full of energy. I had clock problems last night. I woke up at midnight and thought it was 7 AM because my clock radio was wrong, as was my atomic clock. The power had gone out sometime during the week and it was a bad idea for me to attempt to set clocks when I was so tired last night. The photo above was taken inside the Pantheon in Rome. This site was free and was included in the Rick Steves audio tours of Italy.

As I mentioned above, we had downloaded several free audio tours by Rick Steves. It was because of these free downloads that all four of us bought iPods, which were anything but free. However, it was well worth it. Most of the time when you visit a site like The Forum, you wander around and take photos and are done in 30 minutes. There is always the option to read from a book that explains what you are looking at, but that can be a distraction. The audio tours allows you to view the major attractions within a ruin or museum while listening to a description that includes the history and significance of each site. Rick Steve's presentation was easy to listen to, but sometimes he got a little "silly", which wasn't necessary, cracking corny jokes. The picture above was taken outside The Forum, with old and newer buildings in the background.

During the trip we climbed lots of stairs. There were about 300 steps to reach the top of St. Peter's Basilica. But from above there was a great view of the Vatican and surrounding Rome city. It was a very hazy and smoggy day, but the hike up the narrow stairway was still worth it.

We had been thinking of making a day trip to Pompeii, but instead made a day trip to Pisa during our overnight trip to Florence. The hour long train trip there was worth it. They weather was sunny and cold, but with all the walking from the train station to the tower and up to the top of the tower, I never got too cold.

The final stop on our trip was Florence. We spent the day walking all over the historic downtown area, taking in as many sites as we could. The most famous site was saw was Michelangelo's David, which was in the Accademia Museum, where no photos were allowed.