"The south of Italy will never be the same"

Our benevolent, but bumbling USAC leaders recently took all us 'bambini,' as they like to call us, on a tour of southern Italy. Our first stop, after a six-hour drive through Italy's greening hills and olive trees, was Napoli ("Naples").

Pre-USAC trip, I was pretty excited to see Napoli. Sure, they've been having problems disposing of garbage. Sure, their major export--buffalo mozzarella--was recently recalled because of garbage contamination. Sure, the mafia runs everything in the dirty port city, including the non-disposal of garbage, but still! Naples is a tourist city. There has to be something there. At the very least, I hoped to see some Cosa Nostra activity.

I was disappointed. Napoli was filled with wild packs of family dogs and garbage. Mike, USAC's intern, and I discussed Napoli's similarities to bad parts of San Francisco and Oakland. Still, Aine, Natalie and I managed to have a pretty good, cheap lunch of pizza in the birthplace of pizza before our leaders took us on a tour of the palace. Napoli was, for the most part, ruled by viceroys, or stewards, not kings or doges, so this palace was slightly unimpressive. Comparatively speaking, that is.

The entry way, all in white (demonstrating the lack of money. Otherwise, it would have been guilded) was pretty majestic:

I never saw anything Mafia-related go down. Sadly.

Post-palace and some free time, we departed for Sorrento, our home base. For the rest of our trip, we stayed in a hotel surrounded by lemon trees, with a view of the coast (that's the Mediterranean, baby!):

My feet above our hotel's private lemon and orange grove:

Lonely Planet calls Sorrento "an unabashed resort town," which may be true, but it's also the slice of Italy everyone's looking for: White buildings, blue waters, sun, clean streets peppered with little trattorias and souvenir shops selling limoncello. Natalie and I opted out of climbing Vesuvius one afternoon and spent it walking around and sipping white wine on our hotel's rooftop solarium. In Amalfi, after another breathtaking tour of a cathedral, Aine, Natalie and I sunbathed on pebbly beaches and collected sea glass.

A shot of the Amalfi coast, including the beach we spent some hours on:

Natalie, Aine and I, cute as a Christmas-card, on the beach:

The cathedral in Amalfi:

The church, as Amalfi was a maritime republic in the days when spice trading with the Orient was like oil trading with the Husseins, has a lot of Moorish influences:

Sight-seeing wise, we also hiked around the nearly perfectly preserved city of Pompeii. I'd learned about Pompeii as a child and, after seeing tons of ruins while being led around by a tourguide, was still blown away. Pompeiians not only invented curbs, speed-bumps, fast-food, indoor plumbing and brothels, but were clever enough to get blasted by a volcanic eruption, so it could all be viewed by us later. The brothel (stone-beds and frescoes advertising specialities) was, of course, a high point for a Nevadan, but I personally enjoyed the plaster casts of bodies:

Our tourguide, Barbara, informed us they suffocated to death. I don't know how anyone could tell:

This is a picture of Pompeii's old boat dock. The blast moved the water outward several meters, as well as changing the shape of Vesuvius itself (which is the mountain in the background):

Also, on the tourist-y agenda was Caserta, a royal palace built in the countryside for hunting and based off Versailles in France (ironically, Marie Antoinette's ugly sister, Maria Carolina, built and lived in this palace). It's one of the biggest tourist attractions in Italy (for Italians.)

In WWII, the Allies used this as a base of operations. In addition to furniture looting, they cut the ornate doors, so they would open two ways (Italians like to point out Allied damage to Italy, while convieniently leaving out their own cooperation with the Nazis, but you know, whatever):

This entryway was also where George Lucas shot scenes of Queen Amidala's palace

Aine taking a picture of a throne at the end of a typical room inside the palace:

The palace had magnificent gardens, including Baroque fountains, statues and reflecting pools like in Washington D.C. that we got to walk around:

I spent the days in the sun senza sunscreen, working on my tan (and by tan, I mean "sunburn and freckles"). After saying, "People's feet never get sunburned," this is what I looked like back in Viterbo, city of rain and pigeons:

I'm not dead

Sorry I've become such a bad updater. A quick update.

I've now seen the Colosseum by day,

by night, which, given its history, was an oddly romantic sight:
But my favorite was watching it turn sunset pink in warm, spring weather:
Also, in Rome, we saw the Pantheon, the Roman forum (a mall of ruins, including where Ceasar was cremated), the palace, the catacombs, the Vatican and the Pope:
We happened to catch his weekly address to the world and, because of a recent protest over him speaking/not speaking at a university, all of St. Peter's Square was filled with people supporting Il Papa. The next day, it was on the front page of all Rome's newspapers.

On a whim the following weekend, we decided to take a train up to Venice for the last weekend of Carnevale. Carnevale is where Mardi Gras in New Orleans came from, except Carnevale has been going on for centuries and it lasts a month before Lent, not just a week. Everyone wears masks, elaborate costumes and parties. I have never seen more tourists. Sadly, however, it was extremely cold and rainy and we had trouble on the trains getting back. But it was still amazing.

A picture of soggy Venice:
Below is (l to r), Natalie, me and Aine in front of The Grand Canal and the Rialto bridge in our Carnevale masks. We searched long and hard for the perfect masks and finally found them in a little upstairs store, where the artist was working. She shook our hands and thanked us over and over again for coming into her shop and loving her masks (which we did.)

Later, we would come back to Venice with USAC and that bridge behind us covered in tourists would be completely empty. That night, however, we had to walk single file, holding on to backpack handles because there were so many people. Here is a photo of the Rialto on that later trip. Every single one of the people in that photo is part of USAC (look for Natalie and Aine being silly):
At night, Carnevale really came alive. We watched acrobats, live music, thousands of people dressed up, drinking and dancing in the famous and historical St. Mark's Square. If you've ever seen pigeons flying up out of a giant piazza in Italy, that's probably St. Mark's, site of public hangings, people dangling in cages, Doges, Lord Byron in cafes and us.

Here are just a few of the costumes we saw. Carnevale costumes tend toward the historical, even children are dressed up as musketeers and princesses, not Spiderman and Barbie. These first two were my absolute favorite. Aine took the picture and, if you look closely, you can see me and Natalie (sans masks) peeking our faces over their shoulders.

This picture came out a little blurry, but there is a man (on the left) dressed as a woman and a woman (on the right) dressed as a man with dogs in a baby carriage. Very absurd and very Carnevale.

This cafe full of revelers was spotted just as we left the square to catch our train back home. Most people (as you can tell by their expressions in the earlier photos) were completely deadpan, gazing around calmly at all the people taking their pictures. It was as much performance art as it was about their costumes. In this last picture, the man on the left is grinning because I stuck my tongue out at them when I took the picture.This stage was set up on one end of the square and just sat there glistening all day.In the evening, we left the square to find a bathroom and came back to see everyone singing along wordlessly to a cover of the White Stripe's "Seven Nation Army" while lights flashed all over.

Some part of the crazy light show. The theme for Carnevale was the senses: each part of the city was supposed to represent one of the five, with the busiest center of party activity being the mind, hence the brain. These lights and images were projected on all the buildings around the square, as well as the famous clock tower and basilica.

These are the acrobats that later performed, leaping and somersaulting off a platform on the stage. They vaulted around on trampolines and all the while, crazy techno music played and lights flashed everywhere.

St. Mark's Basilica in the lights of Carnevale:

Below is St. Mark's lit up by sunlight, on our return to Venice. Below that is the square, stripped of its stage and filled with disgusting pigeons instead.






And finally (for today), some incredibly annoying and crappy videos of the Pope and the Carnevale performance from my digital camera. (Stephen's answer to my question during Carnevale, lost to dying batteries was, "Badass.")