Italy-Final Reflections

June 07, 2015

Italy-Final Reflections

Italy for us was indeed "La Dolce Vita", especially when we were in the smaller towns like Assisi, Sorrento, Vernazza, and Varenna; but it was all great. I'm glad I've now seen some iconic places like the Vatican, the Roman Forum, Pompeii, the canals of Venice, the David in Florence, etc, but it is easy to get "museumed out" in Italy since there is so much to see. If we ever return (and of course we would love to return, but so much of the world to see), we would stick to the countryside for the most part, a week in Cinque Terra, a week on the Amalfi coast, a week in a Tuscany village, a week in the Italian lake district, perhaps a week in Venice building the week around concerts....I guess I have an itinerary for a return trip.

Dining was certainly a highlight in Italy, the history was amazing, and the people were wonderful too...parts of Italy were less great like the ubiquitous graffiti and garbage in the big cities - hard to compare that with Ireland for example as we concentrated almost exclusively on the countryside there.

We had three major countries that we wanted to see first after retirement - New Zealand, Ireland, and Italy, and we have now been to all three, and done them justice with 3-4 weeks trips to each to really get a flavor for the countries. I would personally rank them in the order we saw them, but the gaps between the three are small - they were all wonderful and we thoroughly enjoyed all of them.

So on to the greater world (and some of our usual haunts of course).

A few favorite photos from the trip.